Senators Clinton/Edwards Attempting To Cut Rivals?

Following a debate during Thursday's Democratic candidates forum at the NAACP convention, news agency microphones picked up comments by Sens. Hillary Clinton and John Edwards as they discussed limiting future debates to only "serious" candidates.

"We should try to have a more serious and smaller group," Edwards, a former U.S. senator from North Carolina, was heard saying as his comments were picked up by a Fox News microphone.

Agreeing, Clinton, D-N.Y., responded, "We've got to cut the number . . . They're not serious." Source

So, first off, these two are supposed to still be rivals, even though they're both working for their "political cause" that happens to be the DNC candidacy. This just goes to show how crooked things already are, and how much worse they are going to get in this election. Who the heck do these people think they are do deny a voice to anyone else that they feel is "unworthy?"



[edit on 7/13/07 by niteboy82]

great find niteboy!

Doesn't sound very Democratic of them does it?

Seriously though, I think they are pretty much right. All these candidates on both sides (many of whom really have no chance) make the debates confusing and more like a gameshow than a serious discussion.

Still, it's early in the game and I don't think it's Hillary's or Edwards' place to determine who's serious and who isn't.



[edit on 7/13/2007 by djohnsto77]

What makes John (Breck Girl) Edwards a serious candidate?

Every poll I see has him lagging way behind Mrs. Bill Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama.

When it comes down to Democrats, there are 2 Americas, Clinton and Obama are member of 1 America, and everyone else is in the 2nd.


www.rushlimbaugh.com...

[edit on 13-7-2007 by RRconservative]

It's quite a double edged sword. Getting rid of underdog candidates can safeguard honesty and realism in campaigns, but it can also protect unpopular partisan structures from the will of the people.

On the one hand, it removes popular but unrealistic voices from the campaign. On the other hand, it removes popular but unrealistic voices from the campaign.


One historical experience we can draw upon is the election of 1912- the first election in which some states used primaries to select delegates to the national conventions. This example seems to speak in favor of keeping popular candidates even if they are politically hopeless.

Taft, like Bush, was a Republican (although that doesn't mean the same thing anymore) who had alienated the left-leaning portion of his party by his lack of political savvy. Taft himself was running for a second term in 1912, but the candidacy of Fred Thompson or Rudy Guilliani could be considered nearly as good a catalyst.

Roosevelt killed Taft in the primaries, but most were non-binding, and Taft carried the convention by virtue of good political manuevering with career-conscious appointed politicians and political bosses (conventions were notoriously corrupt, even more so than today, before the primary system was fully implaced). Roosevelt responded by splitting from the party in a bid to steal enough votes from both parties to win the election.

The Democratic Convention was unable to nominate its front runner because of this, and instead the more progressive-minded Woodrow Wilson was nominated to counter Roosevelt.

Roosevelt's chances were never that great. He was more popular than Taft, at an insurmountable political disadvantage. He started out too late to have any real hope of outmanuevering Taft for the nomination, and Wilson's nomination was the end of hope for a 3rd party win. Even his running mate stayed Republican, and his son-in-law supported Taft.

Roosevelt and Wilson were extremely important, although neither was exactly the will of the party or the obvious political choice at first. Roosevelt's jump to the left in his second term briefly interrupted the then-new status of the Republican party as the party of big business, and his return to politics when his successor, Taft, went back to the right got Wilson in against the odds. Wilson won the general election with only 41% of the vote.

The fact that Republican dominance wavered when Taft was seen as not being progressive enough seemed to get through to Wilson. Once elected decided to go back a bit on his "New Freedom" platform and compromise with moderate concessions to Roosevelt's ideology, including the creation of the Federal Trade Commission and Clayton Anti-trust Act to replace the huge lawsuits of the trust-busting era. This ended the Progressive Party, and eventually sent the remnants of that party to the New Deal Democrats when FDR came along.

To make a story that is getting rather long a bit shorter, a candidate who had popular ideas but who politically speaking "wasn't serious" was important in creating a serious change in American politics which culminated in everything good and bad that we owe to FDR and possibly Lyndon Johnson as well.

The same thing could theoretically happen if Democratic primary candidates who "aren't serious" are not excluded. Kucinich was an obvious target of Clinton's comments (and let's face it, Kucinich is neither serious nor politically savvy- the man should be consolidating power in his home state of Ohio, not making token bids for the presidency), and truth be told, the only candidates who appear to have any hope at the convention at all so far based on polling data are Clinton, Obama, and Edwards, and truth be told Edwards is barely serious himself- he's probably working on earning himself the number 2 spot for Clinton or at least a cabinet position, but he's up against stiff competition for that, as Tom Vilsack seems to have realized early on that he'd rather be on the bus and not in its path, some are insisting that Bill Clinton is an elligible running mate because of a technicality in constitutional verbage- and he is vetting his own history extensively despite polling data saying that he's not a significant albatross as a potential First Gentleman.

Back on topic, what could but won't happen here that reflects the 1912 argument I outlined is for someone like Kucinich or Gore to force Hillary Clinton even further left than she wants to be (keeping in mind that although she is a liberal, no doubt, the Republicans actually inflated the liberal image of the Clintons to a certain degree, and that perception won't be enough to win Liberal Democrat votes) and that this will create a percieved opportunity for Mitt Romney to move a bit further to the left in the general if he won the Republican primary, who would then finally be able to show his true colors after years of flip flopping, and if he turned out to be a successful liberal Republican president, could change the face of the Republican party just as Wilson provided a catalyst for with the Democrat party.


The other side of the coin, which I will keep brief, is represented by Ross Perot, who by losing on economic and domestic issues and letting in a liberal who succeeded on those same issues seems to have so far banished the issue from the Republican party (which seems to feel more kinship with him than Democrats do, even though he wasn't one of them). It could also be represented, perhaps more accurately in this case, by Nader, who was minimally important in all likelihood but an unwelcome nuissance and distraction.


Underdog candidates who don't know when to refuse to get off of the front runner's back have a mixed history. One should consider the issue very carefully before assuming that Clinton is either being undemocratic or is dead right. Depending on which aspects of past instances are to be seen in this instance, the answer could change considerably.

There is a balance to be struck between, on the one side, the freedom which at its extreme begets anarchy, which begets thuggery and, on the other side, the order which at its extreme begets plutocracy, which in turn begets revolution and as a result sometimes anarchy as well.