I'm writing this diary in response to the common criticism in the netroots, leveled today by Todd Beeton and Big Tent Democrat, that Barack Obama is attempting to triangulate in a manner similar to Bill Clinton during his Presidential campaigns and Administration.
Todd somewhat disingenuously compares an Edwards response to a question about the Democratic Party with today's Obama speech about urban poverty, and cites it as evidence that Obama doesn't stand up for the Democratic Party/our issues. Wouldn't it have been better to actually compare Obama's speech with the corresponding Edwards speech given about rural poverty? Well I did, and guess what I found? I found two great speeches on poverty by two great champions of the Democratic Party, delivered without a single mention of the word "Democrat."
Edwards called for a "movement" to begin to address the issue of poverty in America. He said such a movement was necessary to bring an end to both poverty and the Iraq war. He assailed lobbyists and wealthy businessmen looking to exploit American workers, and reiterated his prior call for ending poverty in America. It wasn't a policy speech as much as it was a passionate call to action, asking people to begin a movement against poverty comparable to those which brought an end to Jim Crow and Vietnam. In the entire speech, he did not utter the word "Democrat" a single time.
You can see video of the entire speech on YouTube.
I don't bring up Edwards' failure to mention "Democrat" as a way to attack him. Indeed, I don't consider it a failure at all, as the speech was coming at the end of his "One America" tour and was intended to be focused on poverty, just like Obama's Washington, DC, speech was intended to focus on urban poverty. Both speeches were great. Obama's focused more heavily on policy, but it was not without the injections of "coming together" rhetoric thematic to his campaign.
I know a lot of people on this site and elsewhere in the netroots knock Obama for such talk of bringing the country together. I think it's important to understand a few things about Obama, and about the way elections work.
1. Obama is running his campaign the way he is because he truly believes in what he's saying. His entire life, he has succeeded by bringing people together, not by demonizing people opposed to him (examples: his work as an organizer, getting elected President of the Harvard Law Review, his legislative successes in the Illinois and US Senate)
2. Obama, unlike Bill Clinton, has always fought hard for progressive principles. Out of the three "top tier" candidates, he has the most liberal Senate voting record, and has demonstrated the kind of direct, lifelong commitment to progressive issues absent in the other candidates. When he talks about the way the traditional right-left divide has failed the American people, he's not saying things like "the left is soft on crime, but I'm tough" the way Bill Clinton would. He's genuinely lamenting the lack of progress we've in the last several years on issues that he (and we, and the rest of America) truly cares about.
3. You don't win elections by calling everyone you don't like a damn dirty motherfucker. We can keep getting the same amount of votes we've been getting in Presidential elections, or we can broaden our appeal and actually win. To do so, we're going to need to win over thousands of people who have been voting for Republicans in Presidential elections more often than not for the past several decades. Maybe we can do so by diluting our beliefs, as the DLC has argued for years. I don't know if this would work, but I do know this isn't what Barack Obama wants to do. As I've said above, he cares about the issues he's spent his life fighting for too much to sell out in such a manner. He does recognize the need to broaden our appeal, and I think he's one of the best positioned candidates we've had in years to do just that. Obama is excellent at taking progressive positions and speaking about them in a way that makes them appeal to people outside the movement, people whose votes are essential to enacting such policies. Think about it: who would you rather have making the case for the Democratic Party on TV the night before the election? Who can better explain what we believe in and why we believe it to the people whose votes we need to enact our vision for the country?
Edwards gets this, too. That's why he was calling on us as Americans to fight a war on poverty. He knows we're right on the issues, and we need to present ourselves in a way that appeals to more Americans. That's the entire basis of his electability argument. And it's the reason why he eschewed partisan labels in his speech in Parkersburg.
I like Obama better than Edwards. Todd, it's okay that you like Edwards better than Obama, but I would at least ask that you hold them to the same standards, and not twist the facts to make one candidate look "bad."
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