January 30, 2008

The Bad News: Edwards Is Out. The Good News: Davis Is Out.

The reason John Edwards dropped out seems clear to anyone who’s been following the 2008 presidential race closely. The NYT summarizes the official reason so:

It was a decision rooted simply in the political reality of the challenges he faced in the 22 states holding contests on Feb. 5, according to people familiar with the decision, and had nothing to do with the health of his wife, Elizabeth Edwards, who has been battling cancer.

More telling is this short paragraph:

Throughout the campaign season, Mr. Edwards had not been able to break through the dueling high-profile candidacies of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama, and he had not been able to raise the kind of money that his two chief rivals had early on.

True. And the reason for that is the mainstream media itself: Just as the MSM is responsible for creating a great part of the myth that is Obama the Risen Messiah, there’s been a practical news blackout on Edwards.

Why that is… Well, nothing happens by accident in politics, and timing is never coincidental. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to guess that the big guys working the Democratic Machine decided it was time for Edwards to pull out — before Super-Duper-Whoop-De-Doo Tuesday. So he did.

It’s a shame, really; had Edwards any sort of chance to win the Democratic nomination, no doubt a significant number of us Kucinich supporters (and Richardson supporters, and Gravel supporters, and even Biden supporters) would have thrown our support behind him.

But that’s that, and now we’re presented with just two candidates, just as it was planned from the beginning. You were told more than a year ago that you would be choosing between Clinton and Obama, and now you are.

There is some good news on the “So long, and thanks for all the fish” front: Yet another Republican congresscritter has announced his decision to retire at the end of his term this year: Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia. Why? He’s “just very tired,” he says.

Davis’ exit brings the total number of Republicans leaving the House (either through retirement or by running for higher office) this year up to 28.

Last week, Repubs Jim Walsh of New York and Dave Weldon of Florida announced their plans to retire this year; their departures leave two vacancies on the House Appropriations Committee.

With the continuing exodus of Republicans from the U.S. House, and the generally-accepted calculations of “vulnerable” Republican seats come November (Raising Kane offers an excellent breakdown), it’s as close to a sure thing as a sure thing can be that come swearing-in day, 2009, we will have a heavily Democratic — and filibuster-proof — House. And with a Democratic president (after eight years of the BFEE, a houseplant could take the White House as long as it had a D after its name)…

I’d like to say “the country will be ours again,” but the truth is, the new president and Congress are going to be spending the bulk of their time cleaning up Bush’s messes both overseas and domestically. Maybe, just maybe, sometime during the 112th or 113th session of Congress might we see some actual progress on other issues.

That’s assuming the president we get doesn’t screw up so badly (*coughObamacough*) as to lose re-election and sour voters on the Democrats.

But for now, we can be content in the almost-sure knowledge that the White House and the House of Representatives will be delivered back into the hands of the grown-ups come November.

Posted by: Sapphocrat

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