Bonier and Nader on Edwards, and post-Edwards
This morning I clicked on this to listen to Bonior's postmortem -- I wanted to hear how Nevada came unglued after all the effort Edwards made over the past two-plus years for labor. It was the HERE half of UNITE HERE!, the hotel, restaurant and casino half, that refused to make an endorsement until after Iowa. The textile workers at UNITE wanted to endorse Edwards but the hospitality workers didn't.
The third segment of the show was Ralph Nader, who announced an exploratory the day John Edwards announced the suspension of his campaign.
I'm not ready to turn my face to the wall or do whatever it takes to become blissfully numb, and we've already been down the Gotta-Unite-Behind-the-Indian-in-High-Office road -- it has no peyote, no roadmen and no soul, and it's called Ben Nighthorse Campbell.
Al Gore is not running. Chris Dodd is not running. Dennis Kucinich is not running. John Edwards is not currently running.
Freedom is choice. Here's a link.
Comments
Oh no, no no no no no. Not again. I heard this all before and all it got us was eight years of sheer unmitigated disaster. There is no set of circumstances, no formula, no equation under which this preening narcissist has any hope in hell of winning. The one and ONLY thing he can do is throw the election to a Republican. And there is NO Democrat who is worse than any of the Republicans running. No, sorry. Forget it. Encouraging another vanity run by this egomaniac is the single most anti-progressive thing anyone can do in 2008.
Posted by: The Local Crank | February 3, 2008 06:51 PM
Dear Crank,
In the last cycle Maine ranked 12th in competitive campaign spending, picking up 0.91% of the general election spending by the major parties, for 1.4% of the electorate, and in the present cycle, my guess is that the percentage will be much lower.
Which is a fancy way of saying that Maine is now blue.
I'm sorry to inform you that Texas ranked 51st in competitive campaign spending in the last cycle, picking up 0.0% of the general election spending by the major parties despite having 7.66% of the total electorate.
Which is a fancy way of saying that Texas too is ... not in play.
Now that we've taken care of that, would you like to restate the issue?
Posted by: ebw | February 3, 2008 07:35 PM
"Now that we've taken care of that, would you like to restate the issue?"
Sure. How about, What's the point in running if you can't possibly win? Not that I'm the convinced in the least that we would want Nader to win. And Nader made the deliberate choice last time to run in swing states instead of noncompetitive states like many people urged. And Texas COULD have been competitive as recently as 1996, but Clinton made the conscious decision not to spend a dime here, which is part of the reason we're so infrared now. Dallas went entirely Democratic last cycle; Houston may do the same this cycle, especially with a hispanic candidate running against Box Turtle Cornyn. So, it's not entirely certain that Texas is completely irrelevant, if I can hedge enough.
Posted by: The Local Crank | February 3, 2008 08:58 PM