Are there limits to our greed?
This year the Democratic Party is faced with an embarrassment of riches in our Presidential field. At no time that I can remember have we had a choice between three leading Democrats who both jointly and severally have represented the best of what the Democratic Party is about.
But at a time when we should all be grateful for what we have, too many people are not satisfied. Like the wealthy miser who only sees the imperfection and not the jewel they look on what they have and think only about having more -- more candidates, more perfection, more control.
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Let's quickly review the biographies of the three leading Democratic candidates in the order they're generally reported in national polls.
Senator Hillary Clinton started life as a Republican but, largely as the result of the civil rights struggle, become a Democrat while in college. While she was still in law school she started working child abuse cases and in a legal clinic. After law school she worked for the Children's Defense Fund and for the House Impeachment Committee looking into Watergate.
After moving to Arkansas she became the second woman faculty member at the U of A law school. She also had a successful career as a private lawyer, while doing pro-bono work on children's issues on behalf of her firm. She served on the board of the Legal Services Corporation (appointed by Jimmy Carter) as well as numerous public interest positions in Arkansas.
After Bill Clinton's election as President, Clinton was appointed to lead an audacious attempt to develop universal health care. That began her long war with the Right. For the rest of her career in public service she has been constantly attacked with misleading, false, and malicious smears. Unlike many Democrats so assaulted, she's still standing.
After her husband left office she moved to New York and ran for Senator in what was supposed to be a difficult election [Ed Correction: As pointed out in the comments, Clinton was elected Senator in the last year of her husband's Presidential term and actually served for a number of days while he was still President]. In fact she won a decisive victory (with surprising support from upstate areas) due to tireless and disciplined campaigning. While in the Senate she has maintained an excellent liberal voting record (with one exception -- the AUMF vote) while surprising many people on both sides by keeping a relatively low profile and exhibiting an ability to work with people on both sides of the aisle.
Barack Obama is a phenomenon is politics. A black man, son of a foreigner (and an African to boot) with a distinctly foreign-sounding polysyllabic name raised in part in a third-world country who has a real possibility of becoming President.
After a fairly peripatetic childhood, Obama majored in political science and international relations at Columbia. He went on to Harvard Law School were he graduated with honors and was named the first black president of the Law Review.
In Chicago Obama has worked on a church-sponsored job training program, voter registration drives and, as a lawyer, on behalf of community organizers and on voting rights cases. He also taught constitutional law (among others, to our own Adam B). Before entering public life he also wrote a memoir about his family heritage.
Obama served eight years in the Illinois State Senate where he wrote or sponsored long list of worthwhile bills. After crashing onto the national scene with his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention he won election to the US Senate with 70% of the vote. As senator he has sponsored a large number of worthwhile bills and has been named one of the most admired politicians in America by Time Magazine. In the Senate he has also developed a reputation of working well with others, including people across the aisle.
John Edwards is a self-made man, like Clinton and Obama a lawyer. He has famously said that his reason for going into politics was that while as a personal injury lawyer he was able to help one person at a time, as a politician he could help lots of people at the same time. As a result of his best known case -- a large verdict against a manufacturer that continued to sell a product despite numerous previous injuries -- he received an award for national public service from ATLA.
Edwards won a come-from-behind upset victory over Republican Lauch Faircloth. While his voting record in his single Senate term was not generally as liberal as Clinton's and Obama's he did represent North Carolina rather than New York or Illinois. For a North Carolinian his record was quite liberal.
During his Presidential and Vice-Presidential campaigns in 2004 Edwards gained a reputation for addressing economic issues of the sort earlier pushed by Howard Dean, issues with broad appeal across party lines. After his defeat, rather than returning to commercial life, he chose to head an anti-poverty think tank at the University of North Carolina.
For heaven's sakes people -- how can anyone fail to be anything other than thrilled with this field of candidates?
Now, I believe in keeping candidates honest. I tend to see them as people -- not paragons (excepting, of course, Howard Dean). They have imperfections and, of course, I never expect to see eye to eye with anybody all the time. But all this miserable sniping in the blogosphere intended to tear down these outstanding people? Sure, it makes for fun fighting. Sure, it probably ups the traffic and the stats. Sure it makes us feel important and empowered.
But it sucks. It's wrong. It's destructive. It's smearing good people. There are plenty of bad people around, can't we concentrate on them?
It also displays an awful double standard. None of us operate the way we seem to expect the candidates to operate -- allowing our every word and thought to be dictated by public vote or angry complaints. In the end, this kind of behavior will make us look petty and confused and is going to reduce the influence of the grass roots. Who's going to listen to people who are never satisfied? Who's going to give total control of their thought processes to unpredictable nasty people?
Some people simply can't appreciate what they have. But that's okay -- you'll like these folks a hell of a lot better if Giuliani becomes President.