Why John Edwards Should be the Democratic Nominee

I think anybody who is a Democrat or anybody who wants what is good for this country will agree that John Edwards is the best nominee for president for the Democratic party. Those two groups to which I just referred (Democrats or anybody who wants what is best for this country) I believe have the same goal, that is for the Democrats to win this next election and try to fix some of damage done to our nation at home and abroad under the current administration.

The Democrats should and must win this election after suffering two embarrassing defeats at the hands of the incompetent idiot that is George Bush. To lose to such a character is an utter disgrace. Some people may attempt to blame the people of this nation for such a catastrophe to occur. I disagree vehemently and am, in fact, angered by such notions. The blame rests instead entirely on the leadership of the Democratic party. To lose in the way in which Al Gore did is acceptable. To lose by nominating John Kerry, a candidate who stood no chance of winning, being a far too left leaning extreme liberal from Massachusetts, is unacceptable. The leadership of the Democratic party is nominating their favorite candidate instead of the candidate who stands the best chance of winning and in doing so allowing somebody like George Bush to get elected.

The Democratic party leadership needs to put away their ultra-liberal agenda, which they have no hope of ever enacting, and sacrifice their selfish personal whims for the good of their party and the good of the nation. They must instead try to connect with average Americans, and particularly voters, who are slightly more conservative in nature. This means nominating a more moderate candidate who stands a better chance of winning. This is not the election to experiment with an extremely liberal woman nominee from New York in Hillary Clinton, or a liberal, so-called black nominee from Chicago. Barack Obama is black in skin tone only. He lived his childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia in the presence of mainly whites and few blacks.

He then went on to Harvard. I would even go so far as to say that John Edwards has more in common with the average black person than does Obama. He comes from modest backgrounds and worked tirelessly to get into a public university. The town where John Edwards grew up had a much higher portion of blacks than anywhere that Barack Obama grew up. And Edwards stood up and supported the integration process and reached out to the black community when he was younger at a time when it was not socially acceptable for whites to do so.

My main contention in this paper is that plain and simple John Edwards is the most electable Democratic candidate. And to me that is all that matters because any Democrat’s policy is better than that of any of the Republicans. It is easy to see why John Edwards is the most electable candidate. He would win all the states that Obama and Clinton would win in the electoral vote (which is currently all that matters) plus other states that they would never compete in. Edwards would win all the same liberal strongholds that Democrats always win, which are for the most part the northeast, the pacific coast and the states surrounding the great lakes. He would in addition, however compete in more conservative areas such as the South, the Midwest and the old northwest (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois).

John Edwards would most certainly win in his home state of North Carolina, which is more than either Clinton or Obama can say, and I predict he could win Arkansas, a state whose U.S. congressman are all Democrats, whose senators are all Democrats and whose governor is a Democrat, as well as Louisiana, a state that also has a large Democratic base. People seem to right off the South as a Republican stronghold. This is not true in my mind. The Democratic party is and always has been the party of the South. The Democrats just need to nominate better candidates to gain support there.

I hope it is now clear to anybody who has read this article what the Democratic party’s strategy should be. Nominate John Edwards and win the election. The results do not lie. The last three presidents that were Democrats were all from the South (Johnson, Carter, and Clinton). I no longer want to see victories for the Ultra-conservatives who only want to conserve their own power and well being, or pathetic defeats suffered by the Ultra-liberals who stand no chance of winning.

It is instead time for a victory for the common American. I do not believe that the common American is found far to the left or right in the political spectrum, but somewhere in the middle. That is why I believe John Edwards, a populist, (socially conservative, yet liberal in providing government service to struggling Americans) best represents America’s voters and should be nominated by the Democratic party to win the next presidential election and help the common American.