MANCHESTER, N.H. — What was John Edwards doing in New Hampshire
on Wednesday? For Edwards, everything depends on the Iowa caucuses
next week, where the polls show him in a tight three-way race with
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. But a surprise win in Iowa won’t
matter much for Edwards if he can’t build momentum into later
races, and there are only five days between the caucuses and the
New Hampshire primary. Edwards therefore swung through the state
for a day to stay in the Granite State game, holding town hall
events in Conway and Laconia and rallying volunteers at his local
campaign headquarters in Manchester and Salem.
Or, to put it as he might, he was there to fight. “Fight” is the
byword of his campaign. On the stump, Edwards talks about fighting
constantly. He claims to have grown up in “a neighborhood where you
had to fight to survive,” and talks about returning home as a small
child “a little bit bloodied up” and hearing his father telling him
“you don’t ever walk away from a fight.”
Edwards characterizes his career as a trial lawyer as a string
of fights, too. And who does he want to fight now? There’s the
“insurance companies” and “drug company lobbyists” who aren’t
giving you the free pills that are your birthright, the “oil
companies, gas companies, [and] power companies” who are destroying
the planet, the “mercenaries” who are daring to make money off of
defense contracts — he vows to “take their power away from them.”
How’s he going to do that? By fighting!
“We have a fight on our hands — not with politicians; people
misunderstand me sometimes, the last thing I’m interested in is a
fight with a bunch of politicians — but I am talking about a fight
with these moneyed, entrenched interests that are keeping you from
getting the country that you deserve,” he says. One wonders what to
make of this. How exactly does one fight against the entrenched
interests but not fight with politicians? Edwards was notorious for
his absenteeism in the Senate; apparently he wasn’t there enough to
learn that the political process involves elected officials.
What he’s really saying when he says he doesn’t want to fight
with politicians is that he doesn’t want to criticize his opponents
by name, presumably because of the conventional wisdom that
negative campaigning backfires in Iowa. But the whole point of his
fighting theme is to draw a contrast with his opponents. He does
this obliquely, which leads to some odd moments on the trail.
Political junkies know that when he says “I am not one who believes
you can take money from these people, sit at a table and negotiate
with them, and get a result,” he’s talking about Clinton, and when
he says that “anybody who thinks we can nice them to death, or nice
words are gonna change anything, is living in a fantasy world,”
he’s talking about Obama. But this often flies over the heads of
normal people, like the middle-aged woman who asked him to compare
himself to Clinton and Obama at the Laconia town hall. “I made
reference to it without naming anybody,” he answered. “I don’t
believe that you can take money from these corporate interests and
sit at a table and make a deal with ‘em … I also think, you know
I think that hope is a wonderful thing, but I don’t believe that
these people are gonna move or give up their power without a
fight.” He still hadn’t actually named his opponents.
Clinton and Obama weren’t the only targets to conspicuously
escape the wrath of the fighterly fighting fightiness of Edwards
(which his campaign even manages to bring up when explaining why Edwards always runs late).
Edwards almost never mentions terrorism, which makes it
particularly ironic that he managed to get Pervez Musharraf on the phone
yesterday. Benazir Bhutto presumably wasn’t killed by “moneyed,
entrenched interests.”
MITT ROMNEY KNOWS WHY Bhutto is dead; as he campaigned in New
Hampshire yesterday, he stopped several times to talk about the
events in Pakistan and the threat of Islamic radicalism. He would
have done this anyway — it’s a standard part of his stump speech
— but the news from Pakistan made the topic front-and-center all
day. “We understand that Madame Bhutto has been assassinated, and
many, many other people have been killed, underscoring again the
extraordinary reality of the violent radical jihadism that is
spreading in various parts of the world,” he said at the beginning
of a speech in Manchester. “It is not limited to Iraq and
Afghanistan, as some would have you believe, it is instead a
global, radical, violent extremist movement around the world.”
When Romney talks about Islamic radicalism, there isn’t much
talk of killing the bad guys per se. Rather, he frames the issue as
a problem to be fixed through collaborative action:
We’re going to have to take extraordinary efforts to
bring civilized nations together from all over the world to help
support moderate Islamic people and moderate Islamic governments,
because in the final analysis, only Muslims will be able to reject
the violent and the extreme. Our effort is going to have to involve
not just our military resources, which need to be strengthened, but
also our non-military resources. We need to bring together all of
our capabilities — health care, financial capabilities, education,
understanding of the rule of law, and together with other nations
[we must] support nations that are struggling to throw off the
threat of radical violent jihad.
One gets the sense that Romney sees Islamic radicalism — like
health care and economic policy — as a problem that can be
addressed with the same managerial skill that he showed as a
businessman and as the Winter Olympics Organizing Committee
president.
The contrast between Edwards and Romney — the Best Hair
champions of their respective parties — is striking. Edwards wants
to fight, fight, fight, and never negotiate. Romney wants to bring
smart people of good will together and fix things. If you didn’t
know that Edwards was the Democrat and Romney the Republican, you
might be surprised to learn that it’s the technocrat, not the
pugilist, who is talking about America’s most dangerous
enemies.
