John Kerry's running mate has never stopped running for president. He tried to get Kerry to fight on in Ohio even after it was clear there weren't enough uncounted ballots to put Kerry over the top. Kerry was smart enough to realize that delaying the inevitable may have excited the party's base but would have done terrible damage to a potential comeback in 2008. But Edwards' plea wasn't about getting Kerry into the Oval office; it was about Edwards pandering to the Left and his '08 ambitions. Since then, Edwards has jettisoned much of the Southern "centrism" that got him elected Senator from the state of North Carolina and on the 2004 ticket. On Iraq, he was a hawk. He voted for the war and made forceful speeches on why Saddam Hussein must go. Now, like Kerry, he has repudiated his old position and sounds more like Howard Dean, the man who sent the Democratic establishment into a panic pre-Iowa and New Hampshire. Yesterday, Edwards was in Iowa sounding very much like the Dean of 2004. According to the Des Moines Register,
Former U.S. Sen. John Edwards said Thursday, at the outset of an Iowa swing, that Democrats ought to express their outrage over the Bush administration's reported use of millions of telephone records to track terrorists, despite caution from others in his party on a similar issue. The 2004 vice presidential nominee, considered a likely candidate for president in 2008, said the National Security Agency's use of telephone records to track suspected terrorists should be a political issue. "Most Americans want us to monitor al-Qaida, but they hate the idea of the president not following the law," Edwards told the Register by phone. Some Democrats eyeing the 2008 presidential nomination, including Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack and Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, have said party leaders should be wary about making a political issue out of a similar Bush policy. In December, it was reported that Bush had authorized the NSA to wiretap, without warrants, international phone calls and e-mails traveling to or from the United States. Without evidence that the policy has wronged anyone specifically, Democrats could be falling into a Republican campaign trap, Vilsack has argued. This month, reports were published that the NSA had collected domestic telephone records of millions of Americans, as part of its tracking of potential terrorist activity. Edwards echoed Democrats who have called for congressional hearings on the record-keeping, which leaders in the Republican-controlled Congress have declined to convene. "The reason it has political impact is because it goes to a lot of other things that show this president doesn't respect the law and the Constitution," Edwards said.
I can't help but think that Howard Dean must be amused by it all.