There was a point in the early summer in which it looked like John Edwards looked at Barack Obama as a rival to be targeted. Edwards publicly questioned Obama’s electability, and accused the Illinois senator of “stealing” some of his policy proposals.
As a strategy, this made perfect sense. With Hillary Clinton leading the field, and establishing herself as the frontrunner early on, the race for the nomination would likely shape up as a two-person race between Clinton and someone else. Obama and Edwards would fight for the slot, and only one would make it. The rivalry was likely to get intense.
Except it didn’t. As of late Friday, John Edwards told reporters, “The differences between Sen. Clinton and myself are much more dramatic than the differences between Sen. Obama and myself.” Noting that neither he nor Obama take contributions from lobbyists, Edwards added, “I think also on some of the substantive issues we’re closer than I am with Sen. Clinton.”
Ben Smith adds an interesting piece to the broader Obama-Edwards dynamic, including a great anecdote from Saturday night in Iowa, after the Jefferson-Jackson dinner. The scene: 2am, on the sidewalk outside the Hotel Fort Des Moines, with Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, Terry McAuliffe, just inside the hotel’s glass doors:
The organizers were men and women in their 20s, and all dressed identically: jeans and red T-shirts with Obama’s logo and his call to arms, “Fire it up.”
When a man on the edge of the group yelled the slogan, they answered with the response they’d been chanting all night: “Ready to go.”
“Fire it up!” the rumpled, older man yelled again.
“Ready to go!” the crowd shouted back again. “Fire it up!” he called. “Ready to go!”
“Let’s kick her ass,” the cheerleader finally called out, and the crowd roared.
The cheerleader — Joe Trippi, chief adviser to Sen. John Edwards, new-politics guru, and all-around mischief maker — glanced gleefully over at McAuliffe.
Trippi, of course, is not supposed to be firing up Obama supporters, even if it is just for McAuliffe’s benefit. So what’s going on?
The Obama and Edwards campaigns have come to view each other — warily on Obama’s side, more warmly on Edwards’ — as arms-length allies against [Hillary Clinton]. […]
The shared tactical goals of the Edwards and Obama campaign fall far short, at the moment, of the true coordination between Sen. John F. Kerry and Rep. Dick Gephardt in 2004, when — former staffers of both campaigns say — aides to the campaigns secretly coordinated their attacks on the insurgent Howard Dean.
There’s no evidence of actual behind-the-scenes links between the Obama and Edwards campaigns, and while their attacks on Clinton reinforce one another, they also fly from differing, and sometimes contradictory, perspectives.
Still, at Saturday night’s Jefferson Jackson dinner, their messages seemed to echo one another.
Last week, the two did trade mild shots at one another. Edwards questioned whether Obama was prepared to be partisan enough to fight for progressive causes, and Obama responded by suggesting Edwards’ populism is a new-found trait for a former moderate. Maybe this would escalate a bit? Not even a little — shortly thereafter, asked about Obama’s criticism, Edwards reemphasized how much he and Obama have in common, and said Obama’s rebuke was the result of a misleading question from a reporter.
I suppose the strategy may be that Edwards and Obama still want a two-person race, but they want it to be them, with Clinton out of the mix. But who really thinks that’s possible? Clinton leads in every state, and in every national poll. Surely these two don’t really think they’re going to force Clinton out of the top two at this point.
Perhaps they’re hoping to be a possible running mate with the other? Maybe, but that seems a little far-fetched, too. Especially if Obama manages to win the nomination, it’s hard to imagine Edwards wanting to be the running mate for two different Democratic candidates in successive elections.
I can’t really say what’s behind the thinking, but it’s an interesting dynamic to keep an eye on. If anyone has any theories, I’m all ears.