Is John Edwards dead? Not politically -- physically. Because reading and watching political coverage of the Democratic primaries gives the impression we might have missed an obituary for the guy following some unreported car accident while he was driving home from New Hampshire.
I used to lament that politics is covered like horse racing. But now it seems important horsy-set events like the Triple Crown get more intelligent coverage, with more analyses and better universal attention to all the competitors.
You see, at least if a horse finishes second and third respectively in say the Kentucky Derby and Preakness, it would still get plenty of ink and attention as a potential threat in the Belmont, the third leg of what is referred to as racing's Triple Crown. Its chances might be qualified by several ifs, such as breeding, durability, speed figures, and questions like can it go the distance? But all chief competitors would be subject to comparable ongoing scrutiny and evaluation, along with any reasonable long shot.
Not so with political coverage of what could be the most important presidential race of the past four decades. With apologies to the GOP, the Democratic primary race demonstrates the point most clearly.
After watching the debates, one could argue that in Edwards you see a vital, engaging candidate who offers a very real and well thought out option to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Obama tells us he has vision for change. Hillary says she's been all about change for the past 35 years. Edwards says, you can envision change all you like, but you have to be willing to fight for it too. He emphasizes that change requires more than a dream or a vision, it requires a struggle, sometimes against powerful, unrelenting opposition that does not have the common good in mind. As for the kind of change Clinton has been part of, Edwards tells us that kind of change is not a solution; it's part of the problem.
Which brings us back to this horse race analogy. With a horse race, or series of races, the coverage might affect the betting odds, but it would have no measurable effect on the outcome of the race. That's because, in the end, all the horses get out on the same track and run the full distance against each other. Sure some get weeded out of the competition between the individual races, but no one is projecting the winner of fall races based on the first and second race of the winter or spring.
Now the question becomes, why do horse races get better coverage than important political races. Not more attention. There's plenty of pundit manure out there to shovel through. We're talking better quality.
Here we are heading into South Carolina and the media have buried Edwards in some ditch outside Manchester. There's plenty of talk. But it generally ignores the full field and what the field has to offer.
Pundits are so busy trying to show us how smart they are about predicting outcomes of events 10 months from now, that they don't give us the important information about picking the winners in the primaries.
Take just one issue. Can most potential voters out there quickly say, based on recent discussion, the basic differences between the major candidate's proposed health care fixes? What their strategies would be for getting them established; what it would cost each of us to pay for health insurance for ourselves or our family; and how much health care bang we'd get for our bucks.
Probably not.
Less than two weeks after South Carolina we have Super Tuesday, which will likely render most other primaries irrelevant.
Makes you want to jump on the collective backs of all those savvy political pundits and shout: Giddy-the hell-up."
