Andrew Sullivan says it all:
"At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war--not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a momentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade--but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war--and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama--and Obama alone--offers the possibility of a truce."
Wasn't ending that war John Edwards' goal for so long?
It still is, but it sometimes seems as if Edwards has only seen from the outside what Obama was involved with in Chicago for over a decade, and he only seeks to end the conflict through his politics of ending poverty and strengthening middle class families.
There are reasons to admire Edwards, but Obama is running a more complete campaign now. Not only is the junior Senator in his 40's inspiring a generation of young political activists, but he's establishing credibility for himself by showing that a wide set of reforms (energy independence, education, health care, Social Security reform, etc.) can add up to fixing the economic and social problems in this country.
Is Obama the best out there? Who knows. But is John Edwards increasingly irrelevant? Yes. Sadly.
(photo credit: 2007 by Luke N. Vargas. All Rights Reserved.)
No comments:
Post a Comment