There are some interesting conversations around the nets about the Edwards campaign. I’d love to hear what folks here at the pond think about some of this, so let me summarize the line of thinking that has me most intrigued.
First of all, here’s something from Mickeleh’s Take:
Here’s the brilliant innovation of the Edwards campaign: he’s conducting an open, public, empirical test of his own leadership abilities. He’s giving us a demo. That’s a high wire act. No net.
The operational definition of a leader is someone with followers. So here’s Edwards saying, hey let’s get busy and start getting things done now instead of waiting until the election. If people get busy, Edwards is a leader. Kennedy famously challenged the country to, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” But that was in the inaugural address, not the campaign.
Edwards isn’t asking for the order on election day. He’s asking for it today. And the ask isn’t just, “send me money.” It’s take action on issues. If people respond, Edwards will have delivered an irrefutable demonstration of his leadership.
Then Nancy Scola at MyDD started an interesting discussion with her diary titled Nominee, Movement Leader or Both.
As we know, Edwards’ announced his candidacy from the site of a building project in the yard of Orelia Tyler’s house in the 9th Ward of New Orleans, the city still struggling to recover from Hurricane Katrina. Really, the last two years for Edwards have been an extended effort to show rather than tell what sort of leader he can be.
Edwards seems to want to set himself as the choice of the results-oriented, competence-driven voter. Perhaps once, an Ivy League-degree was the sort of thing that reassured voters that a candidate was on the ball. Then came George Bush, Yale ’68 and Harvard ’75. In making his announcement, Edwards focused on getting things done.
In the comment thread on that diary, Paul Rosenberg weighs in with this:
But Edwards, OTOH, simply strikes me as someone who realizes what it will take to govern effectively, which is an energized base to help counter the other pressures he will face. There will be no time to organize such a base once he’s in office. Clinton thought he didn’t need it, since he was going to cut deals that would be win-win for everyone. He didn’t figure on folks who’d rather see everyone else lose. And he came up with bupkis.
It just seems to me that Edwards knows better. Which shouldn’t really be that hard to figure out.
Just compare: Reagan was a B-movie actor with a movement behind him who sold arms for hostages to turn around and finance terrorists, and he had to publicly apologize for about a milisecond. Clinton was a flat-out genius with an endlessly network, but no movement at all, and he got impeached for a blowjob.
I think we should be turning this around: what’s any Democrat doing running for President who isn’t also trying to build a movement? Because they’re damn sure going to need one once they get elected.
And Joe Trippi, again at MyDD, has an interesting take: Transformational Politics
All modern campaigns and transactional campaigns are built around a candidate who proclaims to the nation “Look at me — aren’t I amazing?”.
The Dean campaign (and any transformational campaign successful or not) was built around a candidate who proclaimed “Look at you — aren’t you amazing?”
This strikes me as essential. More than ideology, or any other factor — true transformational leadership can only come from a candidate who fundamentaly gets that it isn’t about him/her — its about us.
I agree that all of this is incredibly important for us right now. But I actually think its more simple than all of these folks are making it. I think what Edwards is doing is helping us learn all over again what DEMOCRACY is all about. Unless we engage and get involved, there is no such thing.
I’ll end with my favorite quote from the Edwards campaign:
We have to ask the American people to be patriotic about something other than war.
