May 10, 2008 at 12:50:15 The Calculus of Confrontation by James Brett     Page 1 of 1 page(s) http://www.opednews.com

I have been wondering about John Edwards and his endorsement. A leak yesterday on Morning Joe, MSNBC's thriving morning show featuring one-time Republican Congressman, Joe Scarborough, suggests that John Edwards voted last week in North Carolina for Barack Obama, but that his wife Elizabeth voted for Hillary Clinton. The problem of calculating the effect of this split is not the problem though. When John commits his 19 delegates to Obama, Elizabeth will agree and, with the Clintons progressively nasty racism mounting, it will be easy for her. The immediate question is "when?"

The calculus of confrontation is this: Democrats are getting multi-millions of dollars of exposure for their candidates by prolonging the effort. The limits of the exposure are, of course, that the candidates keep it civil and that they challenge one another on issues, thus explicating the Democratic positions without commiting the Party to anything except accepting ultimately the leadership of one or the other. In other words, as Senator Biden said some weeks ago on the Capitol steps, (paraphrase) "it's okay, we are getting invaluable time in the media and they are not really hurting one another."

http://americanliberalism.org

James R. Brett, Ph.D. taught Russian History in several universities before becoming an academic administrator in curriculum and faculty research administration.  His academic interests have been in the history of science and the history of ideas, particularly Marxism and classical liberalism, but also psychology and consciousness studies.   He is a frequent contributor to liberal and progressive blogs and is the founder and publisher of The American Liberalism Project.

	Contact Author
	Contact Editor
	View Other Articles by Author

Bookmark this page: (what's this?)

                                                 (More...)