[Republished from 2008Central.net]

The Edwards campaign latest justification for remaining in the race is that John Edwards is the ONLY electable Democratic candidate (as opposed to a similar but very different argument that Edwards is more electable than the other candidates). The campaign started making this argument after Iowa and has expanded on it ever since.  Recently, Edwards has been arguing that he's the candidate that can take on John McCain, saying:

"I think it's important for us to have somebody run against McCain who can beat him..And national polls show that I'm the one who beats John McCain in the general election."

Rural Adviser to John Edwards, Mudcat Saunders echoed the campaign's assertion-fest with a post on Huffington Post.  Saunders states, but doesn't really substantiate this contention:

It should be clear to anybody with over a 50 IQ that my boy John Edwards, with his combination of red state electoral experience and toughness, is the only candidate who can beat John McCain. Whether you believe polls or not, polls from CNN to Rasmussen say just that.

And it should be equally as clear to anybody with over a 25 IQ that Obama and Clinton are going to render each other totally unelectable against any Republican, especially John McCain, by the time we get to the convention.

All the Republicans have to be loving this. Because the Democrat they don't want to face, John Edwards, is getting sandwiched between the coverage of this murderous cat fight between two so-called "historical" candidates who, when all is said and done, will be just that. HISTORY.

To begin, it's just flat out silly to predicate an argument for electability solely on poll numbers.  Polls, as recently demonstrated, are not definitive.  Moreover, polls 10-11 months ahead of an election are even more insignificant.  Finally, the numbers for Obama v. McCain and Hillary Clinton v. McCain are not so unbelievably one sided as to suggest that it would be impossible for either Clinton or Obama to beat McCain should he be the Republican nominee.

Additionally, there's inherent flaw within Edwards' argument.  He contends that based upon the current polls, only he can beat McCain.  This, of course, requires the assumption that the numbers are inflexible, relatively static and thus unlikely to change come November.  That said, if polls are legitimate indicators of support (as the campaign seems to suggest), then why should trends in the Democratic primary be any different?  In other words, Edwards is arguing that you should vote for him, despite his very low poll numbers in the Democratic primary, because some polls show Hillary and Obama losing in a match up against McCain.  Let me be clear, I'm not suggesting that the numbers aren't flexible, I'm just demonstrating how silly the logic of Edwards' argument is when analyzed.

The Edwards campaign also criticizes both Obama and Clinton for attacking each other and suggests that its the battled between Obama and Clinton that is undermining the Democratic Party's chance for victory in '08.  I'm unclear as to why Edwards has the authority to criticize either candidate for negative attacks, when his campaign has levied some pretty scathing attacks when they believed it would suit them, such as Elizabeth Edwards questioning Hillary Clinton's record on women's issues or Edwards suggestion that his rivals are corporate Democrats (just a few the past); and more recently, with Edwards adding to the Obama-Rezko narrative by recounting a private discussion with Hillary on the subject (isn't this a very similar tactic that Joe Trippi attacked Mark Penn for?).  It's worth noting that I'm not necessarily criticizing Edwards for the aforementioned criticisms of his opponents.  What I am criticizing, as I have in the past, is Edwards doing one thing and then later taking the high ground on the same issue.  You simply cannot argue that your opponents attacks on each other are bad for the party, when you participated in tough attacks yourself.  That's really all I'm saying.

Moving on to the core of Edwards' electability, I offer the following considerations...

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One of the minor points of my June 12 diary on Mudcat Saunders and Regional Stereotyping was to mention that Chris Bowers and Daily Kos had argued that the Democrats were doing well despite the "hand-wringing of conservatives like Saunders, Mickey Kaus, and Dan Gerstein." When I opened my e-mail the next day, I was very surprised to get a reply from Dan Gerstein disagreeing with my characterization of him as a conservative and also inviting me to read his blog and ask him questions about politics and policy.

Having taken him up on those invitations, I defended my characterization of Gerstein as a conservative and posed four questions for him which he answered today at some length.

I'm reprinting the whole exchange below.  The only significant editorial change I made was to place my questions immediately before his answers so people could better keep the questions in mind as Gerstein replied.  

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Butchering of language bothers me intensely.  Let's take David Saunders and his 'apology'.  Many of you know him as 'Mudcat', but I'm going to call him David as if he is a fully functional adult male.  Here's what he wrote in his initial post insulting vague left-wing bloggers.

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WHITE ON WHITE REGIONAL STEREOTYPING. One of the big stereotyes of Democratic reformers is that they are "liberal elites" who look down their long effete noses at rural America. For consultant Dave "Mudcat" Saunders, bloggers are only the most prominent current example of those liberal elites, what he calls the "Metropolitan Opera Wing" of the Democratic Party. For Mudcat, it's liberal elites who have been losing elections for the Democrats in the South because of their "intolerance,""arrogance," pseudo-intellectual pretentions, and relentless stereotyping of rural Americans and the working class.

MY BACKGROUND. Because I've lived mostly in rural areas in both the North and the South but have spent time in Philly and developed contacts in other cities, I have a lot of experience with rural/urban boundaries. There is a sense in which Mudcat Saunders is right. Urban liberals I've known do stereotype rural and Southern people. Here's a couple of examples. When I attended a college program as a high school student from upstate New York, my peers from New York City used to ridicule my rural jockishness by humming the theme song to Captain America when I went by. More seriously, when my first wife started school at the University of Michigan, someone asked her how she could sleep at night when she came from a state as racist as North Carolina. This was particularly tough for her because she had dated a black guy in high school.

URBAN LIBERALS AND STEREOTYPING. It is important to emphasize, however, that urban stereotyping of rural people is very weak compared to the animosity that rural areas have for the major cities. Places like NY, Philly, and DC are self-contained worlds in which people generally have little awareness of the adjacent rural areas. People I know in Philadelphia have no more idea of Pennsylvania outside their suburbs than they have of Kansas, Idaho, or Kentucky. There is more stereotyping of the South in places like Ohio and Michigan where large numbers of Appalachian whites have settled, but still not that much. To the contrary, one of the first things that strikes Northerners who move South is the intense awareness Southerners have of the North, Yankees and the Civil War. Whereas Northerners give little thought to the South, hostility to "Yankees" is one of the guiding stars of my North Carolinian brother-in-law's life. Another is his racism. Likewise, my own brother had so many arguments about the Civil War thrown at him by his new Southern friends when he started college in North Carolina that he felt obligated to read Shelby Foote's three volume history of the Civil War. Southerners have a lot of regional pride and much of that regional pride is focused on hostility to the North.

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If you make a living off arguing why Democrats lose national elections, 2007 is a banner year for you. After all, as I said in the past:

The Democratic Party is in the midst of a severe electoral crisis. Right now, we only control the US House, the US Senate, the majority of Governorships, the majority of state legislatures, and we lead in only seven out of the eight top-tier matchups in the 2008 general election. Our future prospects look equally dim, as those leads in the 2008 general election are only coming from trendlines showing us down by double digits. Further, we hold slender, barely double-digit lead in generic congressional ballots, and we have to defend fully twelve of the thirty-three Senate seats up for re-election in 2008. (That's nearly 40%!) Also, Democrats only hold a net 25-30% edge on Republicans in the favorable / unfavorable ratio, and have only increased their partisan self-identification advantage by a rate of only three points a year for the last five years. While we now hold a fundraising advantage on Republicans for the first time in decades, we, um, uh... ok, I'll just stop there.

Now that we have started winning elections, so it has become more difficult for certain Democratic consultants to play concern troll and make arguments that Democrats must cater to your consultant specialty in order to increase your client base and media presence win elections. Yet, that is exactly what "Mudcat" Saunders does in his latest foray into public dialogue at Time:

If you want a perfect example of how this "intolerance" is helping the Democrats lose national elections, check out the responses to Joe Klein's post on Paris and Libby.

Did someone freeze Mudcat in carbonite in mid-2006, and only thaw him out last week? There is more, too, as the entire post is actually filled with insane quotes like this. For example, I have to wonder exactly how defending Joe Klein fits in with attacking what Mudcat calls:

the elitist wing of the Democratic Party, or what I refer to as the "Metropolitan Opera Wing". These are the people who talk of tolerance but the only true tolerance they ever exhibit is for their own pseudo-intellectual arrogance.

Ummm... ok. I guess a northeastern, beltway pundit like Klein somehow avoids this distinction himself. Then there is this gem on the need for open an honest dialogue:

So to those bloggers who believe in a straight-forward dialogue and exchange of ideas, God bless you and thank you. Together, you're coming up with a lot of good stuff, and frankly, much of it has been helpful to me. At the same time, those Democratic bloggers, who have appointed themselves as intellectually superior and believe the only way to win an argument is to shot the loudest with personal attacks, you can go to Hell.

I see that by telling an anonymous and unidentified group of people to "go to Hell," Mudcat is facilitating a straight-forward exchange of ideas already. His hypocrisy is a bit odd, considering that earlier in his piece he decried the hypocrisy of the blogosphere:

To be clear, I have no problem with incivility. After all, I'm in the political business. However, as a pilgrim in the blogosphere, I thought blogging was for exchange of ideas, not personal attacks.

Maybe it is just because I am an irony-loving Gen X type, but there is so much of this type of bizarre, self-contradictory language in Mudcat's post that I think it should be considered a work of true paranoid genius. Start an exchange of ideas by telling people to go to hell. Attack the metropolitan, pseudo-intellectual wing of the Democratic Party by defending Joe Klein. Dismiss John Edwards's biggest area of activist support in the name of rural southern whites. Decry intolerance by stating "I don't care what the "Metropolitan Wing" of my party thinks." Call others pseudo-intellectual without ever sourcing a single stereotype you use. Say you have no problem with incivility in politics, and then lash out against the political blogosphere for being incivil. Claim others are being hypocritical while doing everything I already listed here. Somehow, manage to do all of this in 600 words while maintaining a straight face.

Remarkable stuff. I haven't seen a Democratic consultant be more open with their paranoia concerning, prejudices toward, and general ignorance of, the political blogosphere in some time. This is a post for the ages.