Why I Support Edwards over Obama

I really want to support Barack Obama for a lot of reasons. He would be a first in American politics in so many healthy ways. He would be so good for our foreign policy. If he gets the nomination, I will of course vote for him with ease. But I have to support John Edwards. Kos sums up my feelings about the problem with Obama.

Clinton isn't horrible on this front, but Obama has made a cottage industry out of attacking the dirty fucking hippies on the left, from labor unions, to Paul Krugman, to Gore and Kerry, to social security, and so on. People think I was being ticky tack with the Gore thing, and in isolation it would've been but a minor non-event. But it was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back for me, yet another in a pattern of attacks against Democrats and their constituencies. He is the return of Bill Clinton-style triangulating personified. Now I'm willing to consider that this is all a front, and that he'd govern as progressively as Bush governed conservatively after his 2000 bullshit about being a "uniter" and "compassionate". He can even pull a Bush, I suppose, and claim a "mandate" on policies he blurred or ignored on the campaign. But we've seen how a lack of true mandate has crushed Bush's presidency and made him the most unpopular and least effective president in history. I'd rather have our candidate elected promising progressive reform, especially in a year where the American people seem to crave such solutions.

Yes. Obama repeatedly has taken up positions to the right and followed the worst style of Clintonesque Democratic politics. I do think that Obama doesn't actually believe a lot of this. But in a field of remarkably qualified Democratic candidates, issues like this make the difference between support and opposition.