Photo from official Edwards campaign Web site.
Dear Senator Edwards:
I thought long and hard about whether even to bother posting this letter, in light of the news that you’re dropping out of the presidential race. Sadly, Ralph Nader has made up my mind for me, and so I’m going to post it anyway.
Over the past few days, I have posted similar letters to your remaining opponents for the Democratic presidential nomination - with one fundamental difference: My letters to Senators Clinton and Obama explained why, to my great disappointment, I could not vote for either of them in our state caucus. In your case, I did cast my vote for you - and am now faced with the prospect that doing so was as much a wasted vote as it would have been had I cast it for Bill Richardson or for "Uncommitted."
I awoke yesterday morning to the news that your last-minute detour to New Orleans today to give a speech on poverty would in fact be the speech in which you announced your withdrawal from the race. A part of me is extremely sympathetic to such a decision: Thanks in large part to our corrupt media and Beltway establishment’s insistent Dean-ing of your entire campaign, it has seemed clear for the last couple of weeks that it would be impossible for you to catch up with the anointed "frontrunners." I say "seemed," because our establishment’s conventional wisdom is only accurate when that establishment manages to shove it down the collective throat of a reluctant electorate until it chokes, gives in, and gives the Villagers what they demand.
However, it’s clear that making up the delegate deficit, to say nothing of the money chase, would have been difficult, to say the least. And I’m very sympathetic to your family’s personal situation: Facing the prospect of losing your wife to an incurable form of cancer, and likely sooner rather than later, no one can fault you on a purely personal level for wishing to spend as much time with her and your children as possible for the foreseeable future. Admittedly, if my husband had received such a diagnosis, I would have made the decision to withdraw immediately; I can’t imagine making any choice but to spend my time with him under such circumstances. But I can also understand Elizabeth’s desire to have you continue, and thus, your desire to comply with her wishes.
But although I cast my vote for you, it was not without grave reservations. I will freely admit that, when you first ran for the presidency in 2004, I did not care for you or for your candidacy. I was disappointed when John Kerry chose you as his running mate; of the likely choices for that spot, I thought you were the weakest candidate. And when you announced your decision to run again this year, the prospect didn’t exactly thrill me. (I harbored similar feelings about you, Senator Clinton, and Senator Obama, and frankly still do: that each of you might well make an outstanding president, but that for each of you, your time was not yet.)
Of course, my own biases in this race have been obvious from the beginning: I enthusiastically backed Bill Richardson, and I still believe that, in our country’s current circumstances, he would have made the best president of all of the initial pool of candidates. Possibly the only [unfortunately, non-] candidate who could have persuaded me otherwise would have been Russ Feingold. But there’s never been a question that I would back the eventual Democratic nominee, and I certainly believed that every one of the Democratic candidates (yes, including Mike Gravel) would have been a vast improvement over any of the Republican candidates, to say nothing of the current squatter in the Oval Office.
This leads me to the following point: I understand well why so many people have distrusted your candidacy. And I’ve found your inability to understand it as well to be amazingly tin-eared. It was obvious, early on, that among the top three candidates, you were the media establishment’s chosen target for the Dean Treatment. Why, then, would you provide these contemptibly shallow talking heads with the sort of high-fat, low-nutrition fodder on which they daily make gluttons of themselves? The haircut. The house. The slick plaintiff’s-lawyer approach to speeches. Yes, I realize that none of these attacks is particularly legitimate, or fair, but have the last sixteen years taught you (and our other candidates) nothing about the rules of the game with regard to our chattering classes? The rules only apply to Democrats; Republicans get a pass (or, as in the case of Bush, and now McCain, an actual rewriting of history).
Moreover, I’ve been gravely disappointed in your campaign’s focus. Yes, there most certainly are "two Americas." Yes, poverty is one of the signature moral issues of our time. Yes, the working class is getting royally screwed, every day, in every possible context. But those are not the only - not even the worst - issues this nation faces in the macro- context. This nation faces nothing less than its complete destruction - from within, by the very people who tout themselves as our "public officials" and who are nothing more nor less than traitors. Our reputation is a shambles. The Constitution, our one truly sacred text, no longer exists, at least for all practical purposes. And the chasms separating our "two Americas," riven by poverty, widens daily from the erosion of the rule of law and any notion of equality before it. For my vote for you to have been enthusiastic, I would have needed to see you make ending our illegal "war" in Iraq, the repeal of the Orwellian U.S.A. Patriot Act, and restoration of the Constitution and the rule of law your top priorities. Instead, your relentless focus on economic issues came across as utter pandering - and in many ways, pandering to our basest us-against-them instincts.
Don’t get me wrong; I appreciate the fact that your message has improved in recent months. I also appreciate your "anger," as the media love to call it: Today, anger is a selling point, not a fault. After the last eight years, anyone who is not angry - indeed, who has not long ago crossed the Rubicon of outrage - either has not been paying attention or is morally bankrupt, neither of which is acceptable in a public official.
There has been one aspect of your anger that has troubled me, however. Your fury at our corrupt and corrupting system is admirable; your fury at your fellow candidates is not. I understand that much of your rage is undoubtedly born of frustration: at a media that has deliberately worked to torpedo your candidacy, purely to ensure the identity-politics smackdown it preferred; at your opponents for taking such a safe and shallow approach and still apparently benefiting from the lack of substance. But your anger toward them - particularly toward Senator Clinton - has manifested in petty attacks that are beneath you. The obvious example is your unfortunate response to reports that Senator Clinton had "cried" (which, of course, was not what happened); they appeared not merely ungracious, but overtly sexist. Your increasingly personal attacks on her during the debates had a similar effect: It was clear to anyone watching that you loathed her and her husband and would oppose her candidacy with every fiber of your being. Perhaps that has now changed, but I doubt it; that sort of distaste and disrespect is difficult to put aside at this late date.
I was also disheartened that, after coming this far, and with Super Tuesday less than a week away, you were quitting. Yes, I know that it’s incredibly expensive, and that the odds are incredibly long. But with six days - six days! - to go, and access to a private fortune, I believe that your owed your supporters at least one more week. I held out hope that you would persevere, if only to secure as many delegates as possible to use as leverage at the convention.
Of course, as usual, the media are failing in their reporting of your withdrawal. I learned this morning from The New York Observer that you’re not actually "dropping out," but "suspending" your campaign. The distinction matters greatly, since it means that you will retain control of your existing delegates, plus any additional delegates you may earn between now and the convention. And I wish you had gone to some lengths to ensure that your supporters understood that.
I hope that, from this point forward, you will do the right thing. I hope that you will continue to retain those delegates. I hope that you will refrain from making any endorsement. And come the convention, I hope that you will use your delegates, and your considerable persuasive powers, like a bludgeon, to ensure that whichever candidate is the nominee addresses the issues about which you have spoken so eloquently. Then my vote - and those of hundreds of thousands of others - will not have been in vain.
Sincerely,
Lilith Devlin
[Ed. note: Links to follow added.]
