That fall, as a vote loomed on the resolution giving Bush authority to go to war, Edwards convened a circle of advisers in his family room in Washington to discuss his decision. He was skeptical, even exercised about the idea of voting yes. Elizabeth was a forceful no. She didn't trust anything the Bush administration was saying. But the consensus view from both the foreign policy experts and the political operatives was that even though Edwards was on the Intelligence Committee, he was too junior in the Senate; he didn't have the credibility to vote against the resolution. To my continuing regret, I said he had to be for it. As I listened to this, I watched Edwards's face; he didn't like where he was being pushed to go. The process violated a principle I'd learned long before--candidates have to trust their own deeply felt instincts. It's the best way to live with defeat if it comes, and probably the best way to win.It is hard to know how much of this is accurate, and how much of it is Shrum trying to intuit the thoughts of others. However, leaving aside what these two paragraphs say about John Edwards for a moment, this passage seems to perfectly sum up a certain type of loser beltway mentality that has been infecting Democrats for too long. On the one hand, there was Elizabeth Edwards, who was rightly skeptical of anything the Bush administration was trying to sell. On the other hand there was a cadre of foreign policy "experts" and professional political operatives who conceptualized the decision to go to war in Iraq not in terms of whether or not it was a good foreign policy decision, but rather in whether or not opposing the war would make someone look too left-wing, and whether or not someone was in Congress long enough to have the credibility to combat that charge. This is truly a view through the looking glass, where the Democratic political establishment is playing by its own set of made up rules that bear no resemblance to the way the public actually makes political decisions. A generally disengaged, non-ideological electorate does not vote with a crude, linear, ideological spectrum in mind, nor does it consider how long someone has served in the Senate as in anyway relevant to what that person thinks about war in Iraq. And yet, these are the insane rules we have constructed for ourselves.
The meeting we held in the Edwardses' family room did him a disservice; of course, he was the candidate and if he really was against the war, it was up to him to stand his ground. He didn't. If he had, it almost certainly would have been Edwards and not Dean who emerged early on as the antiwar candidate. But Edwards didn't want to look "liberal" and out of the mainstream; he was, after all, the southern candidate and thought of himself as Clintonesque. He valued the advice and prized the support of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. I had my own concerns: If he took the antiwar route, I knew I would have been characterized as a malign force moving him to the left--which wasn't true, although I wish it had been given that I now regard the Iraq invasion as one of the great mistakes in the history of U.S. foreign policy.
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