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Wednesday, September 19, 2007

No Edwards for Me

posted by on September 19 at 16:33 PM

As you can see from my earlier post, I had assumed the Edwards fundraiser at the Westin tonight would be open to the press. Turns out it’s not, so no reports from the Edwards event from me. If you’re going, and you see anything interesting, send me an email and let me know what happened.

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1

I went. There were about 300 people in the Westin's 5th Ave room. There was some diversity but mostly it looked like a crowd who could afford $100 to see the stump speech in person.
Edwards covered all of his bases. Universal Healthcare (including mental health), confronting Global Warming by cutting carbon emmissions by 80% by 2040 and asking Americans to be patriotic about something other than war. On the War in Iraq, he said Congress should stop funding it and respond to every veto with another budget that does not fund the War in Iraq. He also said he would close Gitmo on his first day in office and was amazed that presidential candidates actually had to declare they were against torture. (The point being it should never have become the norm.
All and all it was a good speech. More people should take a closer look at him. He is the only Democratic candidate that can really bring the South into play. All the polls show him winning against any Republican.

Jenny Durkan introduced Edwards with some insightful commentary of her own. She said Jeb would be here next week to raise money for Romney. But, this is actually cover for testing the waters for himself. "They say he is more like his Dad..."

Posted by Zander | September 19, 2007 7:47 PM
2

I checked it out and was pleasantly surprised. I didn't think he was as "smarmy" as he appears in the debates and stump speeches on tv.

At this point Edwards seems our best shot to challenge some aspects of the corporate/establishment machine. He's a fighter and he's been burned once by the bad guys and he won't underestimate them again.

But unfortunately I'm not sure he can catch Hillary. Actually, it will be more about Hillary tripping, or being tripped, that would allow Edwards to have a shot.

Another 8 years of Clintons might stop the backward trajectory but it probably won't be a big step forward. She has a closed-circle team that wants to "control" the Democratic interests and "negotiate" with the elite. Neither approach is a winner.

As Edwards said tonight, if you could negotiate with the powerful interests we would already have universal healtcare. I agree, you can't negotiate with greed. Edwards learned this lesson as a trial lawyer and the Dems should have learned that over the past 20-30 years. But the DLC is always there to help mediate/confuse the situation. Edwards also said tonight we need to build a movement to take on these interests. He's right but we'll see if can win the nomination and then align himself with true movement strategies.

Posted by Merkle | September 19, 2007 10:08 PM
3

The above comments capture the words and themes of the evening very well. Seeing Edwards in person completely eliminated any concerns on my part regarding the "smarmy" factor. While referring to the cost of the war, his best line of the night was: we don't need a surge in Baghdad, we need a surge in New Orleans.

Posted by jfred | September 19, 2007 11:40 PM

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