The Democratic Field in a Nutshell

[Tigermike 3,054]

JOHN BRUMMETT: More thoughts on Democrats' presidential front-runners

John Edwards wants to be Howard Dean with a Carolina drawl -- and without the meltdown.

Hillary Clinton wants to be the anti-John Kerry. (I don't blame her!)

Barack Obama wants to be himself, which is to say something new in hopes that we've reached one of those rare generational points when a presidential election is not about the last one.

There, in a nutshell, is your race for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008.

Last time, Edwards was Johnny One-Note, wearing out a speech about two Americas and how he'd champion the one inhabited by poor people. It got him to second place, thanks to Dean's scream and Southern primaries, and onto the ticket.

But it didn't help him measure up in a debate with Dick Cheney. And he delivered nothing of discernible electoral benefit to Kerry in the general election.

Now Edwards runs again, aware that anti-war zealots will dominate many state primaries and remembering that Dean appeared to have the nomination won pre-emptively three years ago by being the most fervently and decidedly anti-war candidate in the field.

So now he's Johnny Two-Note. He still sees those two Americas, and now updates the standard speech to explain that New Orleans, the Ninth Ward of which was the announced site of his new candidacy, laid bare what he'd been talking about.

But now he also is thoroughly and unequivocally anti-war, propounding that Democrats shouldn't merely complain and pass nonbinding resolutions about Iraq, but actually vote down the money for this "surge."

Never mind that the troop escalation is already starting under the authority Congress specifically ceded President Bush. Never mind that the supplemental appropriation won't come through for weeks, at which time Edwards would have Democrats taking money from troops on the ground.

Edwards is not in the Senate anymore, an advantage he's playing for all it's worth. There's a reason presidents tend not to come out of the Senate. It's that senators have to cast votes in the real world. Outsiders can get in front of the grandstand and pontificate on what senators ought to do.

By the way, Edwards, when a senator, voted to authorize the war in Iraq.

So did Hillary. Now she is banking that money and celebrity can win her the compressed Democratic race as a centrist and pragmatist not pulled so far to the left by her party's base that she is rendered susceptible to fatal attack as a liberal in the general election.

And the last thing she wants is to find herself where Dean forced Kerry to be -- explaining that she was for it before she was against it.

What Hillary did last week was return from Iraq to say that Bush's escalation was a mistake and that Congress needs to put a cap on troop deployment in Iraq while voting to send more troops to Afghanistan -- tough, but strategic, you see. She said we need to lay down the law to the Iraqis and begin to withdraw.

Her gamble is that she can weather the Democratic left's disdain and limp to the nomination, then sprint through the general election having inoculated herself against those familiar charges of namby-pamby liberalism.

That takes us to the new-age Obama, who -- get this -- was an Illinois state senator when Congress authorized the war.

That presents a whole other issue, one to which Hillary alluded the other day when she talked about experience. She can rightfully assert a lot more of that than Barack even without counting all that first ladyship.

John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@ arkansasnews.com.

http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/200...n/12039155.html

[CCTAU 3,346]

Nuts do need nutshells............

[otterinbham 0]

I think the correct term would be "basketcase." None of those have a shot, even after eight years of a disastrous Bush presidency.

[DKW 86 7,441]

The best one, Obama, will be drilled mercilessly by the Clinton girnder until he will be as unelectable as her.