The Last of the Gents

I see that lots of people are picking up on the comparison between John Edwards and Grover Cleveland. Fine with me; I've been a big Cleveland fan ever since I read H. L. Mencken arguing that he was "the last of the gentlemen" (I suppose it is in that old yellow Vintage paperpack)--except that in this case, I think maybe the more appropriate nuance would be "gent."

The way I hear tell, Cleveland probably did not father that illegitimate child, but that of all the suspects, he was the only bachelor, and so he did the manly thing and took the rap. So far as I can tell, nobody has yet recalled his canonical response to the accusation against him:

I didn't enter this race as a gelding.

That would have been 1880, or thereabouts. The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, and politics has never been the same.

By the way for clarity, I see not the slightest reason to dissent from the consensus view that John Edwards is an effing moron.

Update: Larry says John Edwards is "the white southern male equivalent of Bill Clinton." I guess I get that.

Political Footnotes while Queuing

I'm queued up waiting to get online with Comcast to report an outage (I'm 165! Ooh, I'm 168! Ah, I'm 157!). Anyway, I might as well take the time to data-mine the Iowa statistic (culled from Saturday's paper NYT):

• The youth-and-women candidates: Obama and Huckabee. Both swamped the competition among young voters. Huckabee also had a strong lead among women. NYT says Obama ran "almost as well" among women as Hillary--but I could swear I heard somebody on the radio just now saying he actually led her among women.
  

• John Edwards' best income bracket: voters with incomes over $100,000--so much for working-class populism. But Edwards is also the runaway favorite among caucusers who identify themselves as "conservative" (and BTW, how long has it been that voters with incomes over $100,000 have been numerous enough to count in the Iowa caucus?).

• If New Hampshire is shaping up as McCain v. Obama, here's a curiosity: among Democrats, Obama got 50 percent of the under-45 vote (and only 24 percent of those over 45). Meanwhile among Republicans, McCain got 58 percent of voters over 60. So, old v. young?
  

• Kleiman speculated the other day (link) that independents in New Hampshire will abandon McCain for Obama. But actually iin the Iowa Republican caucus, McCain did not rank first among independents: that ribbon goes to Ron Paul.

• Ha!"Among those who said that shared values or personal convictions were the most important consideration, almost no one voted for Mr. Giuliani."
  

I'm up to 121 in the queue. This is going to be a long morning.

Hillary the Unbold

When Bill Richardson starts looking good to you, you know the Democratic Party field is weak. In this week’s London Review of Books, Linda Colley helps to explain why:

[Hillary] can still appear confined within some of the radical priorities of the later 20^th century, and unable or unwilling to generate a comprehensive and compelling vision of America and of the world’s present and future. But it is Al Gore who has hammered out an informed and powerful position on the environment, energy conservation and global warming. She has only belatedly borrowed some of his language and ideas. And it has been John Edwards who has been steering the Democratic Party firmly back form the direction of economics. He, not Hillary, has been the most eager to address the gulf between America’s rich and poor. A one-time Democratic senator’s critique of Hillary’s initial hard-line support of the Iraq war therefore seems more broadly applicable. She puts herself, he argued “in the position of looking backward, not forward, of caving to conventional wisdom instead of moving in the direction of…new ideas, being bold.”

—Linday Colley, “The Clinton Succession”, LRB 5, 16 Ag 2007

Could It Be He?

Admit it, now, you haven't any idea whom you want to vote for in 2008. You enjoy Obama, but you know he's an empty suit. You figure you ought to like John Edwards, but you're really not crazy about his shallow populism. You take a deep breath and figure it has to be Hillary, but then she does something tacky and mean-spirited that gives you the hiccups.

The Republicans, oh don't get me started. What a sorry lot of embarrassments they are--even to themselves. I'd still wager a few bucks on the proposition that the frontrunners beat each other to a pulp and they wind up with this guy (and I see I'm in good company).

Admit it also, you weren't all that nuts about Al Gore back in 2000. Remember? You gnashed your teeth a hundred times over the way he ran his campaign (good company again: Bill Clinton felt the same way). And don't get me started on the tangle on Tallahassee.

Okay, that was then. It doesn't say anything to venture that Gore would have done better--who wouldn't have? Six years later and we know that a burnt stump could have done better. But what if it turns out that Gore is not just a default improvement, but actually the kind of guy you might want as President? Jump cut to The New Yorker, and let David Remnick explain.