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Wednesday, February 14, 2007

I'm Still Supporting Edwards for Now

Like everybody else I was appalled to read this little news-item last week, via Salon:
The right-wing blogosphere has gotten its scalps -- John Edwards has fired the two controversial bloggers he recently hired to do liberal blogger outreach, Salon has learned.

The bloggers, Amanda Marcotte, formerly of Pandagon, and Melissa McEwan, of Shakespeare's Sister, had come under fire from right-wing bloggers for statements they had previously made on their respective blogs. A statement by the Catholic League's Bill Donohue, which called Marcotte and McEwan "anti-Catholic vulgar trash-talking bigots," and an accompanying article on the controversy in the New York Times this morning, put extra pressure on the campaign.

Since then, there has been quite a blogospheric firestorm, pointing especially to disgusting double standards in play through all this. For a sense of what I mean, a very good place to go is Media Matters for America which documents the extraordinary credibility problems (to put the point generously) attaching to Donohue and most of the primary players in this wingnut outrage-a-palooza, conspicuous credibility problems that never seem to find their way into the corporate media stories that simply megaphone right-wing talking points. It's like the flabbergasting media idiocy of "Monica" all over again.

Jill over at Feministe, surveys the madness quite incisively when she points out that, according to the hairball of conventional wisdom coughed up by the prevailing media narratives:
Amanda is a bigot and an extremist because she uses coarse language to criticize the Catholic Church’s stance on abortion, birth control and condom use -— a stance which kills and injures hundreds of thousands of women every year. [Meanwhile,] Glenn Reynolds, the most popular conservative blogger on the internets, promotes assassinating scientists and religious leaders, and he’s backed up by other popular right-wingers. And there’s nary a peep from the religious right about the religious bigotry of assassinating religious leaders.

And there you have it. Now, there are many bloggers who are endlessly more incisive and generally up to speed on all of this than I am, but I am weighing in nonetheless at this late date because P.Z. Myers, voice of the ever-fabulous blog Pharyngula, claimed that if it really is true that the Edwards campaign has caved to pressure from the right wing in this way, then, in Myers' words: "he has lost my vote." Or, more specifically, I am weighing in because my friend and all around right-on-with-your-right-on individual Robin has sympathetically linked to Myers' statement and agreed that this stumble on the part of the Edwards campaign is a deal-breaker, and even, possibly, a prompt to give up on voting altogether (which I don't really believe -- I just think that's frustration talking).

I hope it is clear to everybody that I am just as incensed by the injustice and stupidity of the Edwards campaign on this issue as they are, but I just want to say that we all need to stop pretending we have the luxury of repudiating a candidate or withdrawing from our incomparably precarious democratic processes every time a campaign stumbles like this. I'm still pining in my heart of hearts for a Gore run, but until then Edwards is the candidate I'm supporting. The Marcotte thing is like a punch in the stomach, but it seems to me that disdaining Edwards for his mistaken decision is to risk confusing symbols and symptoms for substantive policy.

There is no question, critics of the Edwards campaign decisions are definitely right that this business was wrongheaded from the perspective of proper feminist commitments, proper secularist commitments, proper technoprogressive commitments, proper democratic commitments -- but it seems to me that we need to take a look at the actual policies Edwards advocates in all four of these areas to get a sense of where he stands rather than substitute for all that policy what is in fact a symbol thrown up in a fraught skirmish on the campaign trail, articulated through mass-mediated energies many of which are more hostile by far to these very commitments than Edwards would appear to be.

You always have to try to distinguish the theater from the actual indications of administrative commitment in campaigns, that is to say, you have to understand the difference between the stupid decisions that happen in a run for office from the stupid decisions that happen once one is in office. A funhouse mirror relation often obtains between the two, for all sorts of screwed up reasons, pertaining to the catastrophically anti-democratic circumstances of campaign finance, unregulated corporate mediation, cynical and elitist machine politics across the partisan terrain, and deep structural problems like the electoral college.

The terrible Marcotte decision certainly symptomizes that the Edwards campaign is not yet quite up to speed when it comes to some questions of the cultural machineries of the blogosphere vis-a-vis the corporate media and the right-wing noise machine. But it is not clear to me at all that this foolish and unfair decision and the needless scandal it has veiled the Edwards campaign in so early on in his run symptomizes some kind of catastrophic politics of religiosity, anti-feminism, or the like. I have to assume that it is the fear of the latter rather than the former that would inspire intemperate repudiations of Edwards altogether at this point in the race. The better thing to do, it seems to me, is to send a little note to explain to Edwards where he went wrong here, and assume that people-powered-pushback will educate his campaign into a more sensible perspective sooner rather than later.

While we might see this as a missed opportunity on Edwards' part to signal his uncompromising opposition to the noisy, mean, catastrophically empowered, but in fact minute subculture of the Taliban-wing of the Republican Party, it doesn't appear that Edwards saw things this way, on the ground, and the reasons for this mistake look to me like they say more about his read (and probably misreading) of the media landscape than a lack of courage or commitment to secularism. Certainly, this edpisode should make us more vigilant on that score, but it seems weird to render a verdict based on the shaky signal of this theatrical skirmish rather than one that includes a fuller registration of Edwards' policies and so on.

So, you know, don't let the best be the enemy of the good, or however that bumper sticker goes. It seems to me we desperately need a pendulum swing back toward the politics of the New Deal, else the world may well perish from profit-taking in its most short-sighted dumbass imaginable mode. Edwards' economic populism and support of universal healthcare and organized labor looks to me to represent the best practical Presidential intervention in this vein available to us after decades of neoliberal market fundamentalist global cheerleading, from both parties. At least that's how it's looking to me this early on.

More oafish stumbles like this and my frustration level is sure to rise as it usually does in the Presidential silly season. But I'm still supporting Edward for now.

1 comment:

Robin said...

You're totally right that any claims of not voting on my part are idle threats. Like I said, I won't give up my right to bitch about policy that easily!

And normally, I'm 100% with you on the fact that we need to look at policy instead of theater (in fact, the very day before this incident I had an argument with my sister who claimed she couldn't get on board with Edwards because his house was too big and he flashed his wealth too much. I said to her just one day prior to this that Edwards was still on top and still had the best policy). It's funny how I'm completely immune to my own common sense and reasoning when something gets me that incensed.

I'm still bitter, but I'm also realistic.