From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The New York Times - Apr 1, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/opinion/01rich.html
Elizabeth Edwards for President
By Frank Rich
Elizabeth Edwards's choice to stay in the political arena despite a
Stage 4 cancer diagnosis didn't tell us anything we didn't already know
about Elizabeth Edwards. People admired her before she was ill for the
same reasons they admire her now. She comes across as honest, smart and
unpretentious - as well as both devoted to and independent of her
husband. But we have learned a great deal about the political arena from
the hubbub that greeted her decision. For all the lip service Washington
pays to valuing political players who are authentic and truthful, it
turns out that real, honest-to-God straight talk about matters of life,
death and, yes, political ambition, drives "some people" (to use Katie
Couric's locution) nuts.
If you caught Elizabeth and John Edwards in the Couric interview on
"60 Minutes" or at their joint news conference in Chapel Hill, you saw a
couple speaking as couples chasing the presidency rarely do. When Ms.
Couric gratuitously reminded Mrs. Edwards that she was "staring at
possible death," Mrs. Edwards countered: "Aren't we all, though?" It's
been a steady refrain of her public comments that "we're all going to
die" and that she has the right to make her own choice to fight for her
husband's candidacy even as she fights for her life. There are no
euphemisms or equivocations in her language. There's no apologizing by
either Edwards for the raw political calculus of their campaign plans.
There's no sentimental public hand-wringing about the possible effect
her choice might have on her children. The unpatronizing Mrs. Edwards
sounds like an adult speaking to adults.
Americans understood. A CBS News poll found that by more than two to
one, both women and men support the decision to move forward. So do
prominent cancer survivors in the media establishment, regardless of
where they fall on the ideological spectrum: Tony Snow (before his own
rehospitalization), Laura Ingraham, Cokie Roberts and Barbara Ehrenreich
all cheered on Mrs. Edwards. But others who muse on politics for a
living responded with bafflement and implicit moral condemnation - and I
don't mean just Rush Limbaugh, who ridiculed the Edwardses for
dedicating themselves to their campaign instead of, as he would have it,
"to God."
No less ludicrous were those pundits who presumed to bestow their
own wisdom upon the Edwards household as it confronted terminal illness.
A Washington correspondent for Time (a man) fretted that "Edwards's
supporters, and surely many average Americans" will be wondering when
his "duties as a husband and a father" will "trump his duty to his
country and the cause of winning the White House." (Oh those benighted
"average" Americans!) A former Los Angeles Times reporter (a woman) who
covered the 2004 Edwards campaign suggested to USA Today that "this is a
time when they would want to be home together savoring every moment that
they've got." A Washington Post columnist, identifying herself as a
fellow mother, faulted Mrs. Edwards for not being sufficiently
protective of her children.
As Mrs. Edwards moves forward both to manage her cancer and to
campaign for her husband, she'll roil more of the Beltway crowd. In a
political culture where nearly every act by every candidate and spouse
is packaged to a fare-thee-well for the voters' consumption, the
Edwardses' story by definition will play out unpredictably in real time,
with a spontaneity that is beyond any consultant's or media guru's
control. Here is one continuing familial crisis that cannot be scored
with soothing music to serve as a Hallmark homily in an inspirational
infomercial at the next election-year convention. The Edwardses'
unscripted human drama will be a novelty by the standards of our
excessively stage-managed political theater and baffling to many in its
permanent repertory company.
That's one reason it will be good for the country if Mr. Edwards can
stay in this race for the duration, whether you believe he merits being
president or not. (For me, the jury on that question is out.) The more
Elizabeth Edwards is in the spotlight, the more everyone else in the
arena will have to be judged against her. Next to her stark humanity,
the slick playacting that passes for being "human" and "folksy" in a
campaign is tinny. Though much has been said about how she is a model to
others battling cancer, she is also a model (or should be) of personal
transparency to everyone else in the presidential race.
This is especially true in a campaign where the presumptive (or at
least once-presumptive) front-runners in both parties have made candor
their calling card: John McCain is once again riding his Straight Talk
Express and Hillary Clinton is staking her image on the rubric "Let the
Conversation Begin!" They want us to believe that they are speaking in a
direct, unfiltered manner, but so far their straight talking, even
without Elizabeth Edwards as a yardstick, seems no more natural than
Cheez Whiz.
Senator McCain's bus has skidded once more into a ditch since the
Edwards news conference. He's so desperate to find the light at the end
of the tunnel in Iraq that last week he told the radio jock Bill Bennett
that "there are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk."
Yes, if they've signed a suicide pact. Even as the senator spoke, daily
attacks were increasing in the safest of Baghdad neighborhoods, the
fortified Green Zone, one of them killing two Americans. No one can
safely "walk the streets of Baghdad, nor Mosul, nor Kirkuk, nor Basra,
nor Tikrit, nor Najaf, nor Ramadi, without heavily armed protection,"
according to the retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who delivered an Iraq
briefing (pdf) to the White House last week.
Mrs. Clinton's campaign "conversations" with the public have not
stooped to the level of Mr. McCain's fictions. But they have been laced
with the cautious constructions that make her stabs at spontaneity seem
as contrived as her rigidly controlled Web "chats." This explains why a
74-second parody ad placed on YouTube by a Barack Obama supporter had
enough resonance to earn (so far) nearly three million views. Reworking
a famous Apple Macintosh commercial from 1984, the spot recasts Mrs.
Clinton as an Orwellian Big Brother by making her seemingly innocuous
campaign catchphrases ("I intend to keep telling you exactly where I
stand on all the issues" and "We all need to be part of the discussion")
sound like the hollow pronouncements of the Wizard of Oz rather than the
invitations to honest interchange the words imply.
Since the Edwards storm broke, there have been unintended
consequences for other campaigns, too. In an accident of timing, Judith
Nathan picked the same day as the Edwards news conference to explain
that she was only now, after six years in public life, correcting the
inaccurate published record of the number of her pre-Giuliani marriages
(two, not one). Juxtaposed with the Edwards headlines, the dishonesty
unmasked by this confession looked even worse than it might have
otherwise. In a less vulgar vein, the first major Democratic campaign
event after the Edwards announcement, a forum on health care, prompted
more than the usual sniping about Mr. Obama's substance when his policy
prescription lacked the specifics in Mr. Edwards's plan.
The power of Elizabeth Edwards's persona is such that the husband at
her side will be challenged to measure up to her, too, perhaps even more
so than his opponents. No one may be labeling him "the Breck girl"
anymore (the subject of another popular Web video parodying his coiffure
maintenance), but should his campaign prove blow-dried when he moves
beyond health care, he'll pay his own hefty political price for the
inauthenticity.
Whatever Mr. Edwards's flaws as a candidate turn out to be, he is
not guilty of the most persistent charge leveled since his wife's
diagnosis. As Ms. Couric phrased it, "Even those who may be very
empathetic to what you all are facing might question your ability to run
the country at the same time you're dealing with a major health crisis
in your family."
Would it be better if he instead ran the country at the same time he
was clearing brush on a ranch? Polio informed rather than crippled the
leadership of F.D.R.; Lincoln endured the sickness and death of a
beloved 11-year-old son during the Civil War. In the wake of our
congenitally insulated incumbent, who has given our troops neither
proper armor nor medical care and tried to hide their coffins off
camera, surely it can only be a blessing to have a president, whether
Mr. Edwards or someone else, who knows intimately what it means to cope
daily with the threat of mortality. It's hard to imagine such a
president smiting stem-cell research or skipping the funerals of the
fallen.
Indeed, of all the reasons to applaud Elizabeth Edwards's decision
to stay in politics, the most important may be her insistence, by her
very action, that we not compartmentalize the harsh reality of death and
the imperatives of public policy, both at home and at war. Let the real
conversation begin.
***
----- Original Message -----
From: Sherna Berger Gluck
Sent: Tuesday, April 03, 2007 3:47 PM
Subject: URGENT - attack on KPFK
Ed, I hope you'll mobilize your list to help us fight back. See bottom
paragraphs below.
We need people to write Gelson's, Trader Joe's, Whole Foods - who have all
been intimidated by this campaign and asked to have their names taken off
KPFK site (acknowledging their food donations).
Sherna
RADIO INTIFADA
Voices from Kolkata to Casablanca
Voices of struggle, Voices for change
Thursday, April 5, 2007, 3-4pm
WE WILL NOT BE SILENCED!
In remembrance of Deir Yassin & Land Day,
Celebrating Free Speech Radio
On April 9, 1948, 124 Palestinians in the village of DeirYassin outside
Jeruslaem were massacred in a prelude to what Palestinians call the nakba -
the catastrophe - that led to the expulsion and flight of 750,000
Palestinians from what became Israel. 28 years later, on March 30th, six
Palestinian citizens of Israel were killed and 100 injured as they went on
strike against massive land confiscations in the Galilee,
This week's program,commemorates those events with a focus on the ongoing
struggle for peace and justice waged on the ground by Palestinians, Israelis
and internationals - and their refusal to be silenced.
In the face of recent, vicious attacks on Radio Intifada and KPFK - accusing
us of being anti-Semitic - RADIO INTIFADA is proud to again present the
voices of Palestinians and Israelis not heard in mainstream media. We will
not be silenced and we will not participate in the silencing of Palestinians
and Israelis who speak out against the Israeli violation of human rights, UN
resolutions and international law.
For more information on the attack on Radio Intifada, go to the website of
the group that has launched this attack:
http://www.geocities.com/truthmasters/jointheboycott.htm
GM Eva Georgia will be airing an editorial at the end of Radio Intifada, and
this attack on KPFK will be discussed in the Report to the Listeners,
Friday, April 6th, 5pm. Keep up to date on the issue by checking out the
KPFK website. In the meantime, speak out/stand up for FREE SPEECH RADIO
yourselves - write Gelson's, Trader Joe's and Whole Foods in support of KPFK
and the kind of programming we do here; and send letters of support to the
station.
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