John Edwards Out?

Several media outlets are reporting that John Edwards is going to drop out of the race for the Democratic nomination today. I think it is a tragedy that Edward's progressive voice won't be with us at least through Super Tuesday. The media has gotten what it wanted. Big business and the politics as usual crowd was/are very afraid of John's message of changing the way things work in Washington. The big money in the country did not and do not want the small guy to have a voice or a place at the table.
If in fact John leaves the race I am hard pressed to be enthusiastic about either Hillary or Obama. Hillary is really just Republican light I'm afraid.

Matt Taibbi on Hillary Clinton:

What people forget about Clinton is that she is basically a Republican at heart. She campaigned for Barry Goldwater once upon a time and even canvassed poor neighborhoods in Chicago looking for “vote fraud” by Democrats. She was president of the College Republicans at Wellesley. In 1968, at the height of America’s most intense cultural debate in a century, she only abandoned the Republican Party because it backed Dick Nixon instead of her favorite, Nelson Rockefeller.

Which is ironic, because as a presidential candidate herself, Hillary has basically run exactly Nixon’s 1968 campaign. Her stump speech from the get-go was all about the “invisible Americans,” a nearly word-for-word echo of Nixon’s revolutionary “forgotten Americans” strategy of that year. Like Nixon, she was targeting a slice of the electorate that had chosen to stay on the sidelines during a cultural war and secretly yearned for someone in the political center to restore order; it’s no accident that Hillary was on the opposite side of every issue that sent lefties to the streets in the Bush years, from the war to free trade to the Patriot Act.

Her much-reported line about Martin Luther King needing LBJ to complete his “dream” was just another salvo in that effort, a subtle message to the public that the “change” she talks about so incessantly is only legitimate when it comes from the inside. Lest anyone think this is a fanciful analysis, listen to what Hillary wrote back in the day, in her senior thesis at Wellesley, which looked at the work of a Chicago community organizer named Saul Alinsky, who had offered her a job. “I agreed with some of Alinsky’s ideas,” she wrote, “but we had a fundamental disagreement. He believed you could change the system only from the outside. I didn’t.”

Obama's "let's reach across the table" message seems naive and from the evidence of the last 10 or 12 years...the GOP is not going to do the "bipartisan" thing. I am convinced that we are in need of revolutionary change if we are going to turn the country around. I don't see that change coming from Clinton or Obama and am afraid it will be the same old politics again. Big business and the wealthy will win and the little guys will lose. I'll vote Democratic in November but I don't have to be excited about it.