Originally posted by: loki8481
Originally posted by: Craig234
Originally posted by: loki8481
Edwards is a joke. He'll say whatever you want to hear to get elected... where was all this populist speak when he was running for VP? guess he was too busy being a drag on Kerry's ticket.
Edwards killed any chance he ever had with me when he got completely owned and schooled by Cheney in the 2004 VP debates.
if you can't stand up to a crotchety old man with a bad heart, what good are you?
As much as I resent Edwards' not destroying Cheney in that debate as he should have, I look at the more important issue - the policy agenda, and on that, Edwards looks good IMO.
but if he can't beat Cheney, how's he going to beat whoever the Republicans nominate?
policies aren't worth the paper they're printed on if you're just a moderately rich nobody.
First, one debate is not a campaign.
Second, Cheney is not easy to beat - on the one hand, he is a great target, but on the other, he's very experienced at winning political battles.
There's a reason why he was in senior white house management as a kid, and was able to beat people like *Henry Kissinger*, who was the most visible appointed person in politics at the time; and was able to keep power long after, winning battle after battle, was set up eventually to make himself virtually the shadow president - insinuations of 'shadow' intentional - as he led George W. Bush's search for a VP and picked himself, and set things up to be the most powerful VP in history. He's not easy to beat, just important to.
While a book can make a great case against Cheney and his agenda, I thought about what it would take to hurt him a lot in a debate, and realized it's not that easy. The issues need a lot of space to flesh out and explain why he's evil, and it needs taking on a whole ideology. There are the low hanging fruit here and there like his certainty of WMD, but those are easily mitigated in a debate (e.g., the many others who said the same things, the CIA info claiming the same conclusion, etc.)
I've watched great opinion leaders like Paul Krugman fail to do that great against what should be big easy to hit targets on the right, in live debate formats.
Who has been such an amazing debater that would wipe the floor with the Republican in 2008? That's not clear. Edwards seems to hold his own in the debates currently.
I'm not going to reject the candidate I think has the right platform because of the Cheney debate. I understand you can try to make the argument that the problem is so severe that the 2008 election will be lost over it, but I don't that the evidence supports that conclusion at this time, and I'm going with the right platform. I think it's very important to get a progressive democrat, not a corporatist democrat, elected in 2008.
That gives us a chance to reverse some of the wrong turns the nation took following the FDR-LBJ era, largely beginning with Reagan and then 12 years of the Bushes. It's important to note that the 24 bad years of Reagan Bush are not so much originating with those presidents, as that those presidents being elected reflects the problems our nation has with its 'powers that be', its agendas that choose candidates who will do those things. We need to rebalance some things back in the favor of the national interest and the public.
Those include reigning in corporate power to keep its profitability and efficient production of goods and services, but limit its exploitive practices of things such as having such excessive donations that it can write laws against the public interest. They include a return to when the nation gains from economic growth, not only the top, as the bottom 80% of Amricans have made zero beyond inflation in the last 25 years while the top 0.01% have gone up hundreds of percent.
:thumbsup:
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