Not one word about how well Edwards did, nor any consideration of how he might do in the future having come in so unexpectedly well ahead of the well-oiled Clinton money machine.
The reason seems obvious to me: Obama hasn't had an anti-corporate message and thus, the corporation-king-makers are thrilled if Obama wins. Conversely, the ‘corpies’ hope Edwards won’t even make it out of January, and with the heavy media silence surrounding Edwards, he may not. He doesn't have Obama or Clinton's $100 million campaign war chests with which to wage a national campaign. And if the media uses its clout to 'shut out' candidates it doesn't like, such as Kucinich, Edwards and Ron Paul (cf ABC shutting Kucinich out of the Democratic debate) then that can severely distort the public's knowledge of the candidates and limit public debate of important issues. The candidacy for the presidency has turned into a private club for only the richest and most well-heeled and the news media trivializes the real issues by converting the election process into a pseudo-sporting event, making the candidates' appearances conform to a personality-celebrity cult rather than a free exchange of needed ideas on how to fix the problems of the country.
What Edwards does have is a message of much-needed populism: stopping the excessive influence of corporate business in government decision making, returning the power of decision to the American people and taking it away from the corrupt crony-power-brokers.
He wants to protect American jobs, give the lower classes back a more levelled playing field and a decent quality of life and supporting progressive growth and employment strategies and removing roadblocks to long-need but delayed reforms such as a living wage and universal health care and rebuilding of the country's infrastructure.
Edwards may not score top in the polls, but he has
framed the fight that the American people will HAVE to wage if they are to wrest control of their lives and their country from reactionary oligarchs. He's the only one of the top percentage point candidates who asks this. And his helping Obama in the latest debate shows that he means what he says about his dislike of the old guard, status-quo represented by Hillary Clinton.
We haven't heard populism in American campaigns in a long, long time, and after George W. Bush, America NEEDS a heavy dose of 'power to the people."
Make no mistake: the mega-greed-oligarchy and their job-stealing corporations have anointed themselves to be slave-masters; and in so doing, have arrogated to themselves the role of ‘king-makers’. Hillary Clinton has a sense of 'entitlement' about her supposed accession to the presidency based on her having been a part of the status quo. She gets mad when she's called on it.
Obama is a quick thinker, and, I believe he wants reform too. But he does take more lobbyist money than Edwards does. The corporate media so far has treated Obama like their golden rock star. They want to do business with an Obama candidacy. He has an appealing image, he's young, he's a good orator; but so far, not much concrete substance on the issues.
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