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Trippi Signs on With Edwards
 Joe Trippi, Howard Dean’s 2004 initial campaign manager – the guy who made him Howard Dean – has signed on with the Edwards campaign. He gets a little more mileage out of the whole cancer thing in a sly way…not that there’s anything wrong with that. Elizabeth Edwards will define her husband’s campaign in a way she wouldn’t have before.
Trippi used to work for Bob Shrum, who (according to Shrummie himself) was the genius who counseled Edwards to vote for the war. What’s this got to do with anything? I don’t know – I’m just suspect of anyone dumb enough to give his imprimatur to George Bush’s nefarious ambitions. But Trippi has anti-war bona fides and Edwards can’t surround himself with enough of that mojo. So this is a very good development for the Edwards camp.
And he needs it. Edwards made his war vote with Washington blinders on and he was barely a third of the way into his first and only term. A newby. Did he vote Yea as a political calculation, as Shrum alleges, or was he just plain taken in by a load of shit that so many others could see through? He says now that it was a “mistake,” which is rather obvious – whether he means it from a national security or a political perspective, it was totally bone-headed. And while conceding the error is far better than Hillary’s state of denial, there are a hundred more reasons not to vote for her. Who needs another?
Edwards, on the other hand, has a lot of progressive potential. He addresses the issues of social and economic justice that no one else touches – willing to say that the rich have never been richer, the poor never poorer, the gaps between them never wider, the oligarchy never so close to becoming a plutocracy. He connects the populist dots between economic disparity and democratic decline and, aside from the war, that’s the issue of the day.
If not for his war vote, Edwards would be the choice of many more progressives. For this reason he should resist the temptation to run from his most glaring shortcoming and tackle it head-on instead – not just get it out of the way, but relentlessly. Economic populism appeals to lefties – and his campaign manger David Bonior has that angle covered – but get-out-of-Iraq has the majority’s ear.
Edwards would like to be the anti-war candidate. Let’s hope Trippi gets out front and makes that happen. If he can gin up the anti-war constituency (which is much larger now than it was four years ago), it could edge Edwards into first place.
~Jack McEnany
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