John Edwards for President
My post last week got a big response, mostly positive. In emails and comments, hundreds of people said they agreed that bloggers should endorse a candidate in the presidential race. So today I'm endorsing Edwards and offering a forum for others to do the same.
First, a little about me. I post at MyDD and at Daily Kos, and I recently started my own blog, Insidious Beast. I'm a 38-year-old novelist. My father, a Holocaust survivor, died from kidney cancer in 1998, and my mother lives in Waterville, Maine, where I grew up. I'm married to Miri Navasky, a documentary filmmaker, and we have a nine-month old son, Milo. We live in Manhattan. I'm lucky, so damn lucky, a son of privilege, a white American man with money. I'm a Jewish agnostic, a pragmatic idealist, a believer in people, an often-sad-yet-hopeful non-dogmatic leftist Democrat who wants John Edwards to be the next president of the United States.
I'm under no illusion that my endorsement means anything in itself, but I have hope that my explicit support for Edwards combined with that of others in the netroots will mean something. My hope, then, is in collective action, in the power and beauty of a chorus, in democracy.
Why Edwards? Because he rejects neoliberalism. Because he preaches enlightened populism. Because he's running to the left. Because he would fight the amorality of the Market with the morality of progressivism. Because he opposes the Global War on Terror. Because he's getting better and bolder. Because he's capable of outrage. Because he's proud to be a progressive. Because he would win.
But one reason rises above all others: the stated and demonstrated rationale of his campaign is to fight inequality. The monstrous power held by the few at the expense of the many causes unnecessary hardship and agony. It hurts, it maims, it kills. It threatens what Thomas Frank calls the Middle Class Republic. It threatens our democracy and our freedom. And because power corrupts, because economic insecurity breeds fear and fear breeds militarism, because corporations have a vested interest in war and place profits above all else, the disproportionate power of the few threatens humankind.
Call it what you will--our class war, our bleeding wound, our dirty open secret--it's the problem of our time, and John Edwards has chosen to spend his political life addressing it.
And if everyone from Hillary Clinton to Mike Huckabee now talks about our class divisions, it's in part because Edwards began to do so at the national level in 2003, when it was a deeply unfashionable thing to do. It was on the advice of no consultant, at the suggestion of no poll that Edwards took it on himself in 2003 to speak out against inequality. His policy prescriptions have evolved in the last four years but the wound targeted by those prescriptions has stayed the same.
John Edwards is this century's most prominent progressive populist, the candidate most likely to give more power to more people. This alone makes him worthy of the presidency.
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Fellow bloggers and/or netroots activists, if you support John Edwards, please say so in comments and provide links to your blogs, blog pages, and/or endorsement statements.
Here, to get the ball rolling, is the endorsement statement by an excellent Texas blogger and Democratic Party activist, Vince Liebowitz.
And a collection of powerful endorsement statements by Boston-based bloggers.
UPDATE: here are some endorsement statements and/or blogs of endorsers: Jordan Klein/ Asa Hopkins/ RDean's blog/ Cathawave's Journal|
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