Exit Edwards, Stage Left

There was brutal irony in the live coverage of John Edwards's exit from the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Perhaps the story would have been different if the media--which in January gave Edwards only a quarter of the coverage accorded Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton--had paid more attention to what the former North Carolina senator was saying and doing. In its closing days, his campaign achieved rare moments of connection in a political year that has already seen too much division. In his native South Carolina, Edwards climbed atop makeshift stages with actor Danny Glover and bluegrass star Ralph Stanley for events that featured muscular anticorporate appeals for economic justice but invariably finished on the sweetest of notes: with African-American and white Democrats joining hands to sing "Amazing Grace." There was a raw beauty to these moments--a beauty that merited more than the cursory coverage and "who's he hurting" speculation that was the lot of the man who spoke for "the grown-up wing of the Democratic Party."

After his third-place finish in South Carolina, Edwards knew he would not be the Democratic nominee. Within the Edwards camp, strategy sessions turned toward discussions of whether he could be a kingmaker in the race between Obama and Clinton. With the 300 delegates he might have won by soldiering on through Super Tuesday, Edwards could conceivably have held the balance of power at a closely divided Democratic National Convention. Presumably he would have aided Obama, whose candidacy holds more promise of healing the divisions between the "two Americas" Edwards sees as pulling the country apart. But even as Edwards spoiled Clinton's math in key states--in South Carolina, he won among white men--he had little taste for the petty politics of positioning and power plays. That was evident in what turned out to be the last debate of his campaign, when he was supposed to be a spectator but instead emerged on top. As Obama tied Clinton to Wal-Mart and Clinton linked Obama to a slumlord, Edwards asked, "This kind of squabbling--how many children is this going to get healthcare? How many people are going to get an education from this?"

That was a sharp line. But Edwards followed up with a deeper message, which will be needed throughout a Democratic campaign that runs the constant risk of being more about image than substance: "We have got to understand that this is not about us personally. It is about what we are trying to do for this country and what we believe in." Those words rang true because the steadiness of the speaker's focus during this campaign had led even cynical Democrats to the conclusion reached by Martin Luther King III, who told Edwards, "You have almost single-handedly made poverty an issue in this election." Despite all the talk of $400 haircuts and disappointing past positions, in the end there was a sense that Edwards had earned the right to talk about his vision for his party and his country.

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