For What It's Worth

There's something happening here
What it is ain't exactly clear

As the winner was quick to point out last night, something very like a revolution--the clean, mostly bloodless small-d democratic kind--may have begun at last. "Years from now, you'll look back and you'll say that this was the moment, this was the place where America remembered what it means to hope," Senator Obama said last night. Wouldn't it be great if that were true? If it were actually true?

John Edwards, who came in second in the Iowa caucuses, pointed out that by a two-thirds majority, the people of a staid, mostly-white, conservative state have voted for "a change candidate," by which he of course included himself. The same can be said on the Republican side, where Mike Huckabee (whose name, I just can't help it, always makes me think of Python's "Eric the Half-a-Bee" song) posted a win that the Wall Street Journal snarked was a victory for the evangelical left. And if the very idea of an evangelical left makes your head spin a little, then that could be taken as yet another endorsement of this notion that there's a groundswell for change, beginning right there in little ol' boring ol' Iowa.

It's the sort of thing that a lot of us dared to hope, just a little bit, after Obama's now-legendary keynote speech at the Democratic convention in 2004. His rise was so meteoric that, even as a former Chicagoan (I moved away in 2002), I really wasn't aware of him till that keynote moment. But I sure was aware of him after it, and I was delighted when he was elected to the Senate--but found his actual career in the Senate a little disappointing. I was hoping for fireworks, but he seemed to settle into the career Washington path a little too easily.

So when he announced for President, I was, initially, a supporter. Then came the Jefferson-Jackson event on November 10th last year. Purely by chance, I was home that night doing nothing, just switching channels at random, which I really don't do much since the advent of TiVo (I've got 20-plus movies stored on it right now, waiting for me to get to them). Even less often do I check in on C-Span, but that night I did, just in time for the Jefferson-Jackson speeches. Where I was surprised to find that Obama's speech, while excellent (right from the git-go, with the Chicago Bulls-style loudspeaker announcement), was only the second-best of the night.

The best? For me, it was John Edwards. (You can catch the whole thing here.) Now this, this was a man breathing fire. And given how bad things have gotten over the past eight years, fire was and is my minimum requirement for taking office. (For the record, my mom is a Ron Paul supporter, who is also most definitely a fire-breather--but I just can't quite bring myself around to the whole libertarian thing.)

As I've said any number of times here, I am now firmly of the belief that poverty is, worldwide, the key problem that sits underneath every other problem--and all along, for years now, Edwards has been talking about poverty in much the same way that Al Gore talked about the environment. He has credibility on this issue because it's not just something he tossed into a stump speech while running for office, it's something he's been actively working on for years. And yes, I know there have been presidents who've tried to tackle poverty before--most notably Lyndon Johnson's failed "War on Poverty" forty years ago. But past failure doesn't at all mean that the fight should be abandoned, and even a good effort that doesn't accomplish what it seeks is vastly superior to no effort at all--which is what we've had for way too long now.

So I already knew this about Edwards, and every once in a while I would think to myself that I really should take a closer look at him. But the Jefferson-Jackson event was the moment that did what the 12,000 debates didn't--it allowed every candidate to speak for several minutes at a time, not several seconds at a time, but the evening was still compact enough that everyone could get a turn without wearing out the audience. So that where the debates did nothing to change my thinking about any of the candidates, this event did. Because although Obama's speech was good (and so was Hillary's), Edwards was fired up and saying things I believe desperately need sayng. For example: "...we do not believe in allowing lobbyists to write the laws of the United States of America...."

This was part of a rhetorical run in which Edwards attempted to define what progressives like himself stand for, in a speech I've wished for years that a Democrat would make. It's a truism that he who defines an argument wins the argument, and for too long now, conservatives have been brilliant at defining the argument. "If you don't support the war in Iraq, you're not a patriot" is only one absurd example. By making that argument stick, they made every reasoned objection to the war into an emotionally-packed declaration of anti-Americanism, so that reason went out the window and people only heard what they had already been emotionally primed to hear. In such an environment, for years now I've been desperate for a progressive to make a positive affirmation of what we're for, and why we're for it. Edwards finally did that.

So I came away from that C-Span session with a new candidate to back. And although he only came in second last night, I think he's right that he and Obama represent the "change candidates." And that although Obama was speaking specifically of his candidacy, this night may in fact represent that broader change that could signify a real revolution in what this nation is about--a change to something that might actually represent the promise of America, the fulfilled promise rather than the promise betrayed over the last eight years.

"Hope," Obama said last night, "is the bedrock of this nation. The belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be." Every single commentator last night seemed awestruck by this speech, and while it's still much too early to declare that a revolution is really underway, still, I feel just enough cautious optimism to dare to set it forth in print.

Edwards or Obama, in the end I will enthusiastically vote for either one. And if in the end they could maybe pair up somehow, well, that would be pretty great too.