Levees Not War

‘You know, my husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.’

—Hillary Clinton, Sioux Falls, S.D., 23 May 08

‘We have seen an X-ray of a very dark soul. One consumed by raw ambition to where the possible assassination of an opponent is something to ponder in a strategic way.’

—Michael Goodwin, New York Daily News

Samantha Power was right.

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“I feel change in the air. . . . It is time again for a new generation of leadership.”

Senator Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama on Jan. 28 in an appearance with Caroline Kennedy and Rep. Patrick Kennedy at American University, Washington, D.C. Photograph by Brendan Smialowski/New York Times.

It was reported Tuesday that Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, who was hospitalized on Saturday after a seizure, has been diagnosed with malignant glioma, a brain tumor for which the prognosis is rarely favorable. First elected to the Senate in 1962 when his older brother John was president, Ted Kennedy has long been the Democratic party’s most stalwart promoter and prolific legislator for civil rights, education, labor, housing and social security—a one-man holder-together of the social safety net.

We’re praying for his recovery and for his family at this painful, uncertain time, and we hope the nation will pause to recognize the many good causes he has worked for all his life. He was born into privilege but has devoted his career to passing laws that make life a little easier for the general public—for mothers and children, for factory workers and immigrants, and especially on behalf of the less (and least) fortunate. May God send us more senators like him!—a hundred more!

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“If George Bush and John McCain want to have a debate about protecting the United States of America, that is a debate I am happy to have any time, any place, and that is a debate that I will win, because George Bush and John McCain have a lot to answer for.”

“You charge ‘appeasement’ and I’ll say ‘unfit for command.’ Works every time.”

Election 2008 is shaping up to be a contest between those who want America’s wars to go on indefinitely, and those who want to scale down the violence, restore a more cooperative international order, and focus on urgent, long-ignored domestic needs. The man they are vying to succeed, while addressing members of the Knesset in Jerusalem on the 60th anniversary of Israel’s founding, took a moment to violate a long-standing custom of not engaging in domestic politics while on foreign soil. Making no distinction between dialogue and appeasement, Bush said to the Israeli parliament:

Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is—the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history. [Applause.]

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‘The Democratic voters in America have made their choice, and so have I.’

John Edwards and Barack Obama in Grand Rapids, Mich., May 14.

We were wondering if we would ever have the pleasure of seeing John Edwards’s endorsement of Barack Obama. And yes, we were grumbling impatiently and muttering ‘What’s taking him so damn long?’ But now we think maybe he has a good sense of timing after all. This endorsement feels well worth the wait. After Hillary’s big win in West Virginia, supported by that important demographic where Obama’s been falling short, John Edwards’s support is welcome indeed.

We’ll never know how Edwards’s endorsement might have helped had he chosen Obama earlier. The withholding of support was creating a kind of suspense, a vacuum of doubt. There was something missing from the ‘Obamomentum.’ As long as Edwards had not definitely stood up for Obama, it left open the possibility that he did not have confidence in Obama as a winner, or that he knew something the rest of us didn’t know, and that he might in the end go for Hillary. (The hesitation also made us wonder about John Edwards’s priorities. Were he and Elizabeth truly getting hung up (as reports suggested) on which candidate had the better health care plan? Did the entire endorsement really depend upon that single criterion?)

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