Levees Not War

“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.]

(more…)

‘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?)

(more…)

We are voting for Senator Barack Obama in the primaries—as many times as possible. The more we see of him, the more we like. But first, we want to take a parting glance at the contributions our First Favorite, John Edwards, made to the presidential campaign of 2008.

We pushed hard for Edwards, and it’s hard to let go, but we’re grateful to him for returning the Democratic party to its populist roots. Our strongest gratitude is for the attention he brought to New Orleans and for the bold ideas he proposed, which, to the public’s benefit, Obama and Clinton have incorporated to some extent into their own campaigns.

(more…)