Edwards, Running Already

While I've heard John Kerry's lame, cowardly concession speech one too many times, I hadn't heard John Edwards' concession speech yet, and I have to agree with Matthew Rotschild: Big John should've let Little John have more power in the campaign.

Unlike Kerry, who urged capitulation, Edwards egged on the partisans.

"You can be disappointed, but you cannot walk away," he said. "This fight has just begun."

He said, "The battle rages for the factory worker and the mill worker . . . and the mother who sits in the emergency room with her daughter and wonders how she is going to pay the bill.

"The battle rages for the young person who's worked hard and wants to go to college but doesn't have the money to pay for it.

"It goes on for the young child who doesn't understand why they are treated differently just because of the color of their skin.

"And it rages on for the mother who wants to know why her son was sent over there and will not come home."

Everyone knows where "over there" is, and it was a relief to hear Edwards criticize Bush's war on Iraq, even obliquely.

He dusted off his line about "one America" and vowed that "we're not going to stop until we get there."

And he wrapped up with a perfect pitch: "At the end of our heartache today resides an eternal hope for the country we're going to fight for and the country we're going to build together."

Rotschild concludes that Edwards has the "inside pole for 2008." I'm hesitant to embrace Edwards (or the Democratic Party, period, at least for now) for a number of reasons I won't get into now, but it's obvious Edwards is already positioning himself and he's doing at least two things right.

1) He knows Kerry's lame concession is upsetting Democrats. Looking at Edwards' election night speech and this one, plus the reports that there were divisions within the Kerry campaign and that Edwards was leading the "don't concede yet" camp, Edwards realizes that this is his chance to cement his image as the Democrat who didn't give up. If anything does come of all the voter fraud investigations going on now, expect Edwards, not Kerry, to be the one out-front on this.

2) As Democrats seem to be acknowledging (finally): they've got a real problem with how they talk about issues. The Republicans are winnning by envoking class conflict...only they're doing so without any trace of economics: it's all "cultural values." (I don't mean to keep citing Thomas Frank, but damn, could his book be any more relevant?) Edwards' has economic populism and talk of values based on economic justice down and for this alone you have to wonder if a Edwards-Kerry or Edwards-Clark ticket would've had a breakthrough here. Would we now be hearing all the talking heads talking about how the Democrats "reclaimed values" this election? Who knows.