I still haven’t decided who I’m going to vote for in the New York primary next month.
I watched both the Republican and the Democratic debates last night. I watched the former for entertainment and the latter for information. I thought Obama and Clinton both acquitted themselves well. Edwards doesn’t seem to have much of a message other than “powerful people stand in your way,” and I’m sorry, but anger isn’t a plan.
One thing to keep in mind is that unlike in the general election in November, most Democratic presidential primaries are not winner-take-all; delegates are assigned somewhat proportionally to the vote the candidates receive. Therefore, if your favorite candidate isn’t polling among the top two candidates, you shouldn’t worry that you’d be throwing away your vote on that candidate or casting a spoiler vote.
Still – I honestly don’t know who I support.
Edwards doesn’t seem to have much of a message other than “powerful people stand in your way,†and I’m sorry, but anger isn’t a plan.
Jeff, I’m sorry that I’m already backpedaling on my comments about having to watch my temper…but are you fucking paying attention? Edwards has the most detailed and realistic proposals on most issues.
And anger is a plan if it translates into a willingness to actually play hardball. Much of the trouble with Congress as it stands is that its members are not angry enough–they don’t actually care whether their jobs get done or not. Edwards cares, genuinely. Clinton cares (if only because gridlock would reflect poorly on her). Don’t know whether Obama does or not; I’m just hopeful that he’d get a big enough majority that the effort to get things done won’t be quite so Herculean.
Point taken. It’s just that during the debate, he pretty much said the same thing over and over. Maybe I’m just not used to seeing someone that passionate about the issues, or maybe his passion is so strong and he’s such a smooth speaker that it seems unreal. But I’ll take a second (er, third, fourth, fifth) look at him.
I usually do not post such long responses, but since I could not link to this from The Economist (July 2007) I add the following for why Edwards might still be considered when you vote. And since you seem open to still thinking about the race in full I hope you will read the following in the spirit it is offered.
He offers plenty of standard populist cant: lots of talk about “fairnessâ€; rants against oil firms for price gouging and drug companies for rocketing health costs; and—this year’s favourite villain—anger at mortgage lenders for ripping off poor home-owners. (He calls it the “wild west of the credit industry, where…abusive and predatory lenders are robbing families blind.â€) A recent speech decried an economy that rewarded “wealth not workâ€, a tax system that favoured the rich and a government that served only special interests. Yet for all that Mr Edwards is less a redistributionist firebrand than a big-government do-gooder. He is intent on helping the poor more than soaking the rich; his inspiration is Robert Kennedy, not Huey Long.
Look beyond the unsubtle imagery, however, and Mr Edwards’s anti-poverty plan is an intriguing mix. His goals are bold—to cut America’s poverty rate of 12.6% by a third within a decade—but the means are mainstream. His policy arsenal includes expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, a kind of negative income tax that tops up the earnings of poorer Americans; giving poor people “work bonds†to boost their saving; and providing 1m housing vouchers to help poor families move to better neighbourhoods. Policy wonks argue about whether these ideas, particularly housing vouchers, will work, but they could all have come from a centrist Democratic think-tank.
The combination of bold goals and mainstream means is evident in two other Edwards plans: health care and energy reform. And it is why his campaign, regardless of its electoral fortunes, is shaping the Democratic race. Unable to dismiss his proposals as crazy radicalism, the other candidates have to be both bolder and more detailed than they would like.
Consider health. Mr Edwards released his ideas for universal insurance in February, almost two years before election day. He steered clear of the approach favoured by the party’s left—a single-payer system, like Canada’s or Britain’s. Instead his plan has ingredients that were introduced in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney, now a Republican presidential candidate: an overhaul of insurance markets, subsidies to help poorer people pay their premiums, taxes on firms that do not provide health-care coverage for their workers, and a requirement that everyone should buy health insurance.
His proposal does nod to the left: a government health scheme, akin to Medicare, would compete with private insurers, potentially opening the door to a single-payer system if everyone chose to join the public scheme. But it does not seem threateningly radical. As a result, it has become the standard against which other Democratic candidates are judged. Mr Obama, who recently released a paler version of the Edwards ideas, was criticised for not requiring people to buy health insurance.
As a Republican, I hope Obama is the nominee. Does that help you decide whom to support? :-)