Heh Heh

your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams

“Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze - a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many.”

- Barack Obama

Yesterday, Barack Obama gave one of the most important speeches in recent American political history. In a different climate, with a different media and surrounded by a different presidential race, Obama’s speech would be seen as what it was: a paradigm-shifting argument about the nature of America, her many ills and their possible solutions. Instead, like a Beatles song used to sell sneakers, his words have been analyzed, cut and repackaged as nothing more than a response to an immediate threat to his position in the electoral horse-race. It was, after all, a response to yet another in a series of campaign-associate-says-something-stupid “scandals”.

Of course, there was a lot of beauty, art and thoughtfulness in yesterday’s watershed speech. His personal reflections and honesty about his family were incredibly touching. Even though few can directly relate to being a person of color who has to grapple with racist comments from their white family members (such a joy), Obama’s characteristic rhetorical genius was to tell such stories in such a way that it felt universal. His willingness to be nuanced and brazenly intellectual was amazing. His analysis of racial discourse, taking the media to task for their dumbing down of all talk of racism in America was masterful. I was especially energized to hear him call out conservative iterators’ cynical entries into the conversation. That was all great. But the big news is that Obama finally made an argument about what his movement really is.

As I’ve said before, the Reverend Wright-inspired attacks on Obama will continue to plague him should he win the Democratic nomination. White America has discovered, almost at once, that Obama is, indeed, a black person, and like most black folks, has been in rooms full of other black people who will articulate an embittered account of racial injustice in America. For many, many white voters, that’s scary and off-putting. White people, we all know, tend to be somewhat touchy on the subject, which is why the national memory has cleansed even hard-fought struggles like the Civil Rights movement of anything remotely threatening.

And so, as a response, Obama could have taken the easy way out. Say what you will about the mean-spirited will behind Geraldine Ferraro’s comments, but she’s not wrong that loads of white folks were willing (and some excited) to vote for Obama because he seemed to absolve them of having to face the reality of black anger. Obama could have tried to sprint back into that cozy space, thrown his Pastor under the bus and moved on. He could have tried to stiff-arm a part of his constituency in that patently Democratic way that Party leaders have done to labor, African Americans and others for decades. He could have taken a cue from Colin Powell. He could have continued to quote Martin Luther King, Jr. as if King were a religious Bill Cosby. His speech could have called upon America to simply “transcend” race, as many of the headlines today misreport.

Instead, Barack Obama did something remarkable. He explained black anger. Then he did something even more remarkable. He explained white anger. And then he did something I haven’t heard him do in a long time. Instead of simply stating that anger is bad and unity is good, he explained why such anger, while understandable, is a mistake. He did that by talking about class.

Why shouldn’t black people pull away from the political process and be cynical about working together with whites? Because to do so is both pessimistic and unrealistic. Progress comes from coalition-building and struggle. Why shouldn’t white working-class people believe the racist scapegoating of the Right? Because it isn’t poor communities of color who deny their health care, destroy their schools and ship their jobs away. In a way, with this speech, Barack Obama wholly adopted the John Edwards narrative, and then radically improved on it. Finally, he named an enemy, however carefully: a “corporate culture” of greed and inequality, backed by a political opposition that deliberately sows disunity in order to protect that culture. He named this enemy, however, in the context of directly addressing the salient and tangible realities of race. It was a class appeal, albeit a very American one. And that’s a good thing. Nothing else would make any sense

This is a shift in Obama’s narrative. He has always called for, and certainly embodied a notion of reconciliation along racial lines, and, at his most distressing, he has spoken much about coming together across party lines to “deal” with challenges and problems facing the nation. That has always disturbed me, as I find such attempts to depoliticize politics to be dangerous and demobilizing. I must confess that while many of my friends swooned over his entreaties to “come together” and “move beyond the divisions of the past”, it has sounded to me like a song about triangulation sung to the tune of kumbaya. He’s always said that we are our “sister’s keeper”, but now he’s translated that familiar Christian notion into a political argument. We should come together because there are opponents whose pursuit of their own narrow interests poses a real and common threat. That’s an important caveat to the call for unity. In religious terms, it’s the difference between the Opus Dei and Liberation Theology, between throwing charity at people and throwing the money changers out of the temple.

This shift may not be enough to push through to beating John McCain. However, it was more than enough to make me very glad indeed that I voted for Barack Obama. I pray that Senator Clinton will be smart enough not to take any of this as bait.

Notes on the Primary Process

Very quickly, I'd like to answer questions I've gotten about my opinion of the Primary process in the context of the likely scenario of a contested Democratic Convention.

As all my regular readers know, I am not a huge fan of primary elections in general, especially with the added antidemocratic practice of opening them to non-Democrats. The primary election process, promoted by liberal and reformist Democrats as a way of destroying the cartels and machines of old-school Democratic politics has, as these things tend to do, completely backfired. Instead of tightly controlled regional and urban machines, the power in the Democratic Party, as in all of American politics, flows in the form of campaign dollars. Our primary elections have degenerated along with the rest of our political process into battles based on spending power and charisma.

All of that being said, the Party has led millions of voters to believe that the primary elections and caucuses are meaningful. That's why they've turned out in droves, doubling, tripling even raising by an order of magnitude voter turnout in States across the country. We are going to need that energy in the coming general election, no matter who our Nominee is.

The worst possible thing that our party could do would be to allow Superdelegates to flip the outcome of the nomination process away from the results of the state-level caucuses and primaries. It may be legal, it may be exactly why Superdelegates were created, but it would be a horrible mistake.

And let me be clear: I think this is true no matter who comes into the convention with more delegates. There will be no way to untangle or disprove large scale feelings of sexist or racist power-brokering if party officials are seen to be responsible for blocking the first black or first female President from advancing. Let's not do that.

Likewise, I completely support efforts to find an equitable way of including delegates from Florida and Michigan, but only with some method that allows voters or caucus-goers in those states to chose from among all the candidates still contesting the election. The Clinton campaign's cynical claim that the delegations should be seated as-is is honestly laughable. However, she and others in the party are completely right that going into the general election having burned two state's worth of Democrats (one of them ever-crucial Florida) would be foolish.

Jeremiah and Geraldine

Barack Obama is a black man. Hillary Clinton is a white woman. I'm sorry to break this news, but it's true. Ask them.
In recent weeks, two figures affiliated with the rivals have engendered passionate denunciations for essentially stating the above uncontested truths. True, some of what has come out of Geraldine Ferraro's mouth has been appallingly insensitive to the realities of racism in the United States, and Pastor Jeremiah Wright's now infamous sermon about Obama and Clinton made it seem as if gender simply didn't exist. However, the controversial kernels of both of their controversial statements are unimpeachable.

First, let's take Ferraro's bitter complaints on behalf of Senator Clinton. There is a truckload of sexism at the core of the current election season, and no serious proponent of Obama's campaign could or should deny that his racial identity is crucial to his appeal, his experience, his soul and, yes, his success. I mean, come on. Duh. What's galling and blinkered about Ferraro's statements is that she implies that this is a bad thing, and that, somehow, Clinton's race and gender aren't also shaping her life in important ways. Clinton, in Ferraro's assessment, is primarily a victim of sexism, and isn't also a beneficiary of racial privilege. One strikingly honest thing that Ferraro did say, about herself and about Clinton, is that their gender played a huge role in their advancement to the top (or possible top) of the Democratic ticket. Clumsily, and with a blindness toward race that is sadly typical, Ferraro has said what a lot of people won't say. Hillary Clinton is a woman, and that accounts both for a measure of her success, but also for the particular and vicious attacks on her personal worth and character that have plagued her since she entered the race.

In many respects, Pastor Wright has done the same thing. Speaking in the language of black Christianity, Wright has worked to remind black congregants, and black voters in general of the simple truth that Barack Obama is also black, and that he has shared many of the experiences of other black people in America. The fact that this simple reminder has shocked and awed so many white pundits (and, anecdotally, potential voters) is distressing but predictable. Just as Clinton has had to be very careful in walking a line between being "too" or "insufficiently" feminine, Obama's got the same problem with his blackness. Wright's comments are a reminder that just because there is a mainstream black candidate for president does not mean that black people have forgotten about the realities of racism in the United States.

Of course, a lot of what Wright has said in his sermons sounds extreme to many Americans. "God Damn America" is not something I'd want ringing around my campaign. No doubt, it's a PR problem for Obama, and is part and parcel of the fact that as a liberal politician in Chicago, he's rubbed shoulders with parts of the left that have been effectively shuttered out of the mainstream. We can all look forward to more of such attacks based on Obama's "associations", something that Clinton doesn't have to worry about because she didn't have to move up from the grassroots of big city politics. Incidentally, there's nothing about Wright's sermons that is any more "radical" than what comes out of the Evangelical movement churches that Republican candidates frequent, but Obama's not going to be able to fix the ideological and discursive double standard in national American politics in the course of one campaign.

I don't envy either Obama or Clinton for having to walk these treacherous lines. At the same time, I'm pretty fed up with watching both of their campaigns pounce whenever there appears to be the potential of point-scoring.

We live today in the shadow of the reductive and destructive “debate” over “political correctness” that emerged in the 1990’s. That framework helped to reduce the realities of racialized and gendered inequalities to sparring over word choices and speech. The problem of racism, sexism or homophobia became one of hurtful, offensive statements, as the popular imagination merged concepts of bigotry and plain old rudeness together into a useless mishmash. In the end, simply mentioning the existence of race or gender, or class or sexuality as real factors in the real world experience of real people becomes a lightning rod. We can't talk about any of it in a serious way because the only way that people know how to talk about oppression is by denouncing someone's speech.

This is not to say that discourse isn’t important, or that words do not have power. However, actions by both the right and left during the “culture wars” over political correctness helped create an environment in which the stupid rantings of a comedian on stage was nearly as big a story as the horrific crimes of New Orleans.

Perhaps it is utopian folly to wish that mainstream public discourse around race, gender and class would be anything other than superficial in the United States. But in this election season, faced as we are with the most sociologically complicated set of choices imaginable, the superficiality of our discussion is as stark as it is dangerous. The campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are doing themselves, their party and their natural constituencies no favors by choosing to score points amid the maelstrom instead of concentrating on issue differences and together denouncing racism and sexism.

The Republicans are taking notes.

a letter (or, how I almost learned to stop worrying and love obama)

In lieu of a nice analytical essay, below is an email I sen to a somewhat random list of people who were having the Obama vs. Clinton debate:

Hey everyone,

This has certainly been an interesting conversation to eavesdrop on, and an interesting campaign season overall.

I just wanted to say that I really, really hope that everyone on this list who is excited about the prospect of an Obama nomination is ready and willing to put in the work that it will take to elect him president. This is no less true of Clinton supporters, of course, but, my experience is that Obama supporters seem to underestimate the amount of work it’s going to take to beat John McCain in November. History is full of candidates who excited generally demobilized parts of the Democratic base (especially young people) who rode a wave of excitement to the nomination but were defeated in the general election. So, Micah and Erik I hope to see your names first on the list for trips to Nevada or Colorado or wherever the polls say is the front line.

I was a strong supporter of John Edwards, both because he is the first serious Democratic candidate in my lifetime to articulate the need for a different kind of economy and because I think he was the strongest candidate for the general election. This is for reasons both good (a populist appeal to Reagan Democrats) and bad (racism, sexism). A central demographic challenge for creating and maintaining a Democratic (and progressive) majority in the United States is winning back white working class men (this is what’s “wrong with Kansas”). We’re not going to do that this year, and so I expect that our majority (Insha'Allah that we have one) will be slim.

With Edwards gone, and after a whole lot of hand-wringing, I’ve decided to vote for Obama. It has been a hard decision. We know that a Clinton presidency will be filled with unnecessary concessions and triangulation. However, I find Obama’s anti-partisan rhetoric extremely dangerous even if it is effective in the short run. Also, I agree with others who have pointed out that policy-wise, Obama is not clearly more progressive than Clinton, and on health care is actually worse. There’s also nuclear power and social security, two issues on which Obama has said strangely conservative things. I also think that there is no small bit of sexism in the fact that so much of this race has been about “likability” and charisma, two aspects that socio-semiotically favor male candidates. It’s hard to imagine a female candidate inspiring the kind of savior-worship that surrounds Obama. A lot of the Hillary-bashing I hear makes my stomach turn, even though her policies and those of her coterie are well worth withering critique.

But make no mistake: it will be hard to win in November. We haven’t seen Obama’s negatives. We all know what the Republicans will do to Clinton. But the same is coming for Obama, and all of the post-partisan rhetoric in the world is not going to inoculate voters against the onslaught. This will be especially true versus McCain, who also rides on a wave of maverick non-partisanship. There is a reason that many voters in New Hampshire were torn between McCain and Obama: they are running very similar campaigns. Don’t get me wrong, I like Obama a lot. I met him as a College student and walked precincts for him when I lived in his State Senate district. He is an impeccably moral and serious person, perhaps the most intelligent individual to seek the office, and would make an amazing president. I just don’t think that he is the messiah. Remember that the brother, talented as he is, has never really run for office against a Republican.

I’ve decided to vote for Obama for one reason- all you folks who seem excited and energized by his campaign. I hope that he wins the nomination so that you and everyone like you across the country will hit the streets and the phonebanks this year and turn people out to beat the Republican. I also hope that those of us who do this all the time will be able to convince a few of you to stick around after November and continue in the struggle for a more just and sustainable future. It’s not going to be over in November. Obama is right- yes, we can. But we have to do it.

The stupidest day

I’m inclined to believe that New Hampshire was at least somewhat about race. It’s true that white people simply do lie to pollsters. We know for sure that it was in large part about gender. Watching the boys gang up on Clinton in the debate, watching John Edwards play the masculinity card, watching Obama play the arrogance card and, finally, seeing Clinton pilloried by the chatterboxes for doing what the same pundits said she was incapable of: women were clearly moved by all of this. I was as well. The result is that the horserace between Obama and Clinton continues. I have no predictions as to how it will shake out in the end.

I’ve not experienced a stupider 48 hours in American politics than the one that preceded the New Hampshire primary. Let’s review:

A pack of Ron Paul supporters chased Sean Hannity through a parking lot.

We had a national discussion about Hillary Clinton almost crying.

John Edwards entered this discussion by attacking her for it.

The Edwards blogger who once endangered his race by saying ridiculous things about Catholics stormed off to the Obama camp.

Barack Obama compared himself to MLK and JFK.

Hillary Clinton compared herself to LBJ.

John McCain won the New Hampshire Republican primary again.

I feel you, Hillary. I’m pretty fucking choked up myself.

the people have spoken (goddamn them)

Well, I'll save you the spin-doctoring or the sour grapes. Barack Obama won a decisive victory last night, aided in large part by record turn-out and a strong showing among independents and young, first-time caucus goers. These were the constituencies that were supposed to help Howard Dean in 2004. It seems that Team Obama got it right this time. Good for them.

This historic win by an African American candidate in an almost completely white state is reason to celebrate, even though I am not looking forward to the struggle of explaining to my students that Obama's rise does not signify the end of racism in America. Nonetheless, the Iowa Caucus victory should eliminate all of the grumbling about Obama not being a "serious" or "viable" candidate. He could win. The Presidency.

While all hope is not lost for John Edwards (union-heavy Nevada is just weeks away), things are exceedingly grim for his campaign. The media, as predicted, have almost completely written him off. A win in Iowa, the focus of his strategy for more than a calendar year, was seen as a make-or-break for his Presidential aspirations. As the only major candidate accepting public financing for his campaign, he's limited to spending less than 50 million dollars throughout the Primary campaign. Obama and Clinton have each raised more than 100 million. New Hampshire will be a Clinton-Obama slugfest, and after that the pundits and media will officially declare Edwards over and done with.

While my friends in the Obama camp, good progressives all, savor this big win, I'd advise them to think soberly about what an Edwards exit will mean. Barack Obama is charting a new "third way": this time not just between conservatism and American social liberalism, but between conservatism and the old 1990's Clinton/Blair third way. He's shrewd and creative enough to use that narrow space in important and beneficial ways, but at the end of the day that's a dangerous geography. The major talking points by mainstream pundits is that Obama did well by bucking the party line, being independent of "traditional" Democratic constituencies (particularly labor) and attracting independent minded young voters who fetishize the "new". He'll have to deliver on that promise, and I predict it will come in ways that anyone interested in the redistribution of political and economic power will find incredibly painful. You'll miss Edwards sooner rather than later.

That's why I don't take huge pleasure in the third place finish by Clinton. She's not going anywhere, and anything but a win by Edwards meant a winnowing down to Clinton and Obama, who has been as likely to attack her from the right as from the left. "Anti-establishment" is not enough to excite me.

But, as Howard Dean put it, it's on to New Hampshire, and Nevada, and South Carolina, and California and Kentucky and New York and Texas, and Alabama and Michigan (oh, wait, not Michigan). Come what may, I look forward to bringing the fight to the other team.

John Edwards for President

What’s At Stake

Democrats have three distinct opportunities to make history this year. Unfortunately, we have to choose between them. We could make history by electing the first woman President. We could elect the first black President. Or, we win the election by securing a mandate for truly progressive politics. Any of these would be phenomenal achievements, and they are each worth every ounce of sweat we can muster. It’s the third one, though, that is the most necessary and the most urgent. For this reason, my hopes and prayers are for John Edwards to win the Iowa caucuses tonight and continue his campaign for the nomination.

Breaking the white male monopoly on the world’s most powerful political position is not superficial. The social-psychological impact of redefining the Presidency to be more expansive and inclusive would have a measurable if not immediate effect on real access to real power by real people. This is on top of the material gains of beating any of the Republican hopefuls. A victory by either Clinton or (especially) Obama would help slow the backward march that threatens the very survival of this country. Either new Administration would usher in crucial policy improvements that would be benefit millions of people worldwide.

But neither of the front-running candidates is seeking a mandate for a progressive vision of what the United States has become in the post-Reagan era, or what it could become if there were a decisive shift in power and privilege. That’s not a subjective critique on my part. Clinton is quite clear that her strength is in cutting deals, in “getting things done” through compromise and strategic calculation. She is the hard-nosed pragmatist, unshackled by ideology. Similarly, Obama’s call is to “transcend” the divisive politics of Washington, to put the simplistic conflicts of both the 1960’s and the 1990’s behind us, and to end unruly partisanship, “re-uniting” a falsely divided country. Both of these are compelling narratives which resonate with many people. However, they aren’t progressive, at least not in the same way that the Republicans’ narrative is conservative.

When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, he championed a movement conservative story of national moral decline, government intrusiveness and Communist encirclement. That narrative shaped his policies as well as the national agenda. The Reagan revolution was an assertion about the way the world works, a coherent explanation of the reasons for a damaged economy, a global political stalemate and cultural shifts which left many feeling threatened and uncomfortable. Thus, even though his initial victory was only moderate, the resulting era was seen as a broad mandate for his overarching narrative. It was so effective that the majority of Democratic leaders, the Clintonistas chief among them, accepted most of it’s basic assertions.

We need a counter-narrative, one that fundamentally explains the world and the situation in this country in a clear and understandable way. From the 1930’s to the 1970’s, the era of greatest strength for American liberalism, Northern Democrats and Western populists actively broadcast just such an explanation, and their policies and priorities reinforced it at all levels. The concentration of economic power in the hands of a few must be actively and aggressively challenged, from below and from above. Every citizen has the right to a share of the wealth their work produces. The tools to achieve this vision are social movement mobilization, public investment, social provision, macroeconomic policy and democratic participation.

The Reagan era was a direct assault on this basic foundational creed. It replaced it with cultural nationalism and atomized individualism. Of the mainstream candidates for the Democratic nomination, only John Edwards is framing his campaign as a direct and straight-forward counter-attack. Not everyone who supports Edwards does so because they agree with him, just as Reagan benefited from Carter-era foreign policy disasters and an uncanny personal charisma. In the end, however, because Reagan was clear and honest about what he was about, he was able to claim a mandate for his worldview.

Contesting The Terrain

John Edwards is the anti-Ronald Reagan.

And that, more than anything else, is what this country needs right now. We don’t need a truce. We don’t need to reach across the aisle to find what we have in common. The Reagan revolution built a coalition that re-entrenched corporate power by convincing people that it was in their own interests. Edwards is out to convince people that it is in their interests to confront, and, at least partially dismantle it. By running on that narrative, he sets himself up to actually accomplish this difficult task. Like Reagan (or Roosevelt) this mandate will shift the terrain for years to come. That’s huge. It’s worth supporting.

Does this mean that, on some larger theoretical level, I believe that class trumps race or gender? Not on your life. Politically, however, I believe strongly that it is on questions of how our economy should be structured that we have lost the most ground over the past generation. It is in the field of economic power that world-wide the Left has sacrificed most fundamentally. I don’t think I need to remind any reader of how these sacrifices have impacted the prospects of freedom for women and people of color. It was not under the rhetorical mantle of white supremacy that the people of New Orleans were sacrificed. It was on the altar of small government.

It is on this point that the Edwards campaign is so amazingly exciting. There are those, particularly in the traditional bastions of the labor movement, who believe that progressive politics is a zero-sum game. They lament the increased commitment by the Democratic Party to protect a woman’s right to chose, or to defend Affirmative Action or advance LGBT rights as the necessary corollary to the party’s retreat on economic justice. Edwards is as staunchly pro-choice, more vocally anti-racist and at least as strong on gay rights as his major opponents. We do not need to sacrifice one part of the coalition to bolster another. Indeed, our destinies are intertwined. Obama has gorgeous things to say about these connections, but Edwards’ campaign crystallizes it into a political program. Program matters, which is why Jesse Jackson (an Obama endorser) infamously stated that Edwards was the only candidate who isn’t ignoring the plight of black America.

Why Not Obama?

I would challenge anyone to find a person in the United States with more of a personal stake in Barack Obama’s political success than I have. Growing up, despite pop culture propaganda to the contrary, I never believed that anyone like me could run for and win the Presidency. And yet, here’s another bi-racial, well-educated guy with a white Midwestern mother and a black immigrant father, born after the baby boom, who is out there doing it for real. I don’t mean to flatter myself with the comparison: from the moment I first met Obama, in college, I have been in awe of his character, demeanor and skill. He is on a short list of my heroes. My point is simply that I would never have imagined that anyone I could actually relate to on a personal level would be in the running for President. People like us just don’t make it that far. So, it’s gut-wrenchingly uncomfortable to find myself supporting someone else. It’s just not in my nature to vote for the man. I vote for the campaign.

Obama is running to win the Presidency by appealing to a deeply held belief that there are “better angels” in all of us, and that the right kind of leadership can unlock them. If Edwards is the anti-Reagan, Obama is the black Kennedy. Don’t believe anyone who argues that Obama is in any way naïve in his approach. He knows exactly what he is doing.

In an interesting and thoughtful piece for the American Prospect, Mark Schmitt made the most compelling case for Obama’s transcendental politics I have read to date. He concedes that Edwards is right that politics is an adversarial art, but asserts that

“…perhaps we are being too literal in believing that "hope" and bipartisanship are things that Obama naively believes are present and possible, when in fact they are a tactic, a method of subverting and breaking the unified conservative power structure. Claiming the mantle of bipartisanship and national unity, and defining the problem to be solved (e.g. universal health care) puts one in a position of strength, and Republicans would defect from that position at their own risk.”

All of that is profoundly true. The Obama feint is an artful dodge that takes the moral high ground and is winning the hearts and minds of millions across the country, even without the Oprah bonus. Others, of course, are worried that Obama is another Bill Clinton, using a “pox on both houses” argument about the hard Right and the “hard” Left to steer a path that wins some battles but forfeits the war. Markos Moulitsas has had nary a kind word to say about “Obama (who) has made a cottage industry out of attacking the dirty fucking hippies on the left, from labor unions, to Paul Krugman, to Gore and Kerry, to social security, and so on.”

There is reason for such a worry. Obama’s recent attack on Edwards for enjoying the support of “special interests” because of an SEIU-led independent campaign focusing on health care was patently disgusting. He has made privatization noises regarding social security and other public benefits, and has cast some bad votes in favor of corporate interests (but Edwards isn’t perfect here, either). Most problematic, however, is Obama’s arguments that the Left goes “too far” on a range of issues, and that the fights of the 1960’s and their re-emergence in the 1990’s are stale or outdated. That plays well with middle class voters and people too young to remember politics before Ronald Reagan, but it’s hardly transformational.

The most important thing for me, therefore, is that Obama’s master narrative is just weak and uncompelling in comparison with Edwards’. Kennedy’s new frontier was exciting because it existed in the context of a muscular New Dealism. Public provision, union rights and an interventionist macro economic policy were givens. They aren’t anymore. Before we can talk about going to the moon or uniting around common purpose or moving beyond partisan gridlock, we need to move the debate away from the anti-government, market-dominated war of all against all that currently holds sway. Obama may want that in his heart of hearts, but Edwards is running on it.

What sort of mandate will President Obama have? It will be one that emphasizes innovation even where the old answers are the right ones. It will be one that assuages but does not challenge. It will be one that closes books instead of rewriting scripts. It will not be one that corrects the right-wing triumph of the post-New Deal era. It will not be held as an ideological shift in our favor. And that’s what we need. A groundswell. A paradigm shift. A mandate. We need John Edwards.