“The Politics of Parsing”

While I don’t have a candidate I am supporting this presidential race, I will admit that I am biased against Hillary Clinton. I think she’s done a generally good job representing my home state (New York) in the Senate, but I have reservations about her policy beliefs, along with the fact that her campaign reeks of the failed Democratic establishment of the late 1990s and early 2000s. That being said, I do think she got a raw deal at the debate this past Tuesday - it was clear that the media was setting it up as a chance for her main rivals (Barack Obama and John Edwards) to take aim at her. The first two questions from moderators Brian Williams and Tim Russert were directly set up for them to take on Clinton, and it continued throughout the night.

However, Clinton didn’t help herself by playing right into the narrative that was being set up - namely, that she would not give straight answers to what seem like fairly simple questions. As a good frontrunner does, she deflected attention away from getting into specifics and to attacking George W. Bush and the current administration (it may do her well to be reminded that Bush will not be on next year’s ballot, even though his failed legacy will loom large). It became painstakingly obvious as the night went on, though, that Clinton was simply refusing to answer anything in a substantive manner. Today, the Edwards campaign released the following ad on YouTube entitled “The Politics of Parsing”. The description from Edwards’ website:

After seven years of George Bush, the American people deserve better. They deserve a leader who will be straight with them—not someone who will take one position one minute, and another the next.

If you want a candidate who triangulates, calculates and double-talks, then John is not your candidate.

But if you want someone who will be honest with you all of the time—who knows where they stand, who will fight to end the corrupt system in Washington and bring about the big change we need—then John is your candidate.

Edwards’ fundraising troubles and his weakening poll numbers in Iowa are forcing him to commit to the kind of frontal attack on Clinton that Obama refuses to engage in. It’s a double-edged sword, to say the least - on the upside, his public, forceful denunciation of Clinton could have him supplant Obama as the main alternative. On the other hand, when the presumed front-runners in Iowa duked it out in Iowa in 2004 - Howard Dean and Dick Gephardt - it allowed John Kerry and Edwards to move up in the rankings as a result.

It’s hard to say what the effect will be, but the Iowa caucuses are exactly two months from tomorrow. I suspect we’ll begin to see the campaigns begin to unfold their endgames in the upcoming weeks, and this is merely the first of many salvos to come.