It began early last month when
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
with only minor difficulty got himself reelected, eliciting from Edwards a
remark in a congratulatory communiqué that Landrieu
should keep his campaign promise to serve the full term – meaning he would
not run for governor against Edwards. That he found it necessary not just to
state this, but also not to keep it private, constitutes an admission by
Edwards that if Louisiana Democrats’ candidate statures were akin to a 45 rpm
single, he is stamped on the B-side.
Then, days later on the eve that
campaign finance reports were due for major office candidates in the contest
that, as of the end of that reporting period, only had Edwards as a significant
candidate, his campaign
breathlessly announced that he had pulled in $550,000 or so in the period,
leaving around $475,000 in the bank. Never mind, of course, that the only other
announced significant candidate, Republican Sen. David Vitter, already had a group set up
to help him raise three times that and hinted that had effectively doubled in
the previous few weeks, or that the all-but-announced candidate Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne (whose report
lists the office in question as “statewide”), who felt no need to broadcast it,
had raised over $750,000 in this period and at the end of 2013 sat on $1.225
million.
Turns out, however, about then
that he was plunking down a bit of the kitty on some polling, spurred possibly
by getting wind of a Public Policy Polling survey that was about to go out
about the governor’s race. PPP, whose methodology leans its results in favor of
Democrats, found a disheartening
picture for Democrats in the contest, with both Vitter and Dardenne beating
Landrieu and Edwards by double digits – with Edwards getting clocked by over 20
points by each. Perhaps most discouragingly to him, when respondents were asked
about whether they liked or disliked him, of the only 30 percent who said they
had any opinion of him, only 11 percent said they liked him scoring him -9 –
while Dardenne was +25, Landrieu +18, and Vitter +18 (his being on job
performance).
If Edwards anything to say about
this, he never made such remarks public. But last week he had plenty to say
about an internally-commissioned
poll that appeared to have been in the field around the same time that –
surprise – showed he fared much better against the hypothetical field. Here, he
trailed Vitter by only 6 points, but after a series of questions designed to
convey laudatory aspects about the candidate (and devoid of any that
acknowledged issue preferences of the candidate that run against majority
public opinion or any controversy about him), which is known as a “push poll,”
then, mirabile dictu, he led Vitter
by 6 points! And he
was not shy about telling the world about it.
Now, why should Edwards make
these remarks 21 months before the actual election when it doesn’t matter what cash
is raised now as opposed to how it’s raised and deployed later, or that early
polling often bears no resemblance to later efforts, or even to the lineups and
results that actually come from a real, not hypothetical, election? Because not
only does Landrieu loom in the background, like a bully on the Democrat
playground all too ready to swipe the candy cane from poor John Bel, but now
the shadow of another big boy, former state party chairman Jim Bernhard, has
fallen across the toddler Edwards.
Bernhard, having sold off a firm
he helped build from scratch for tens of millions of dollars, now has much time
and money with little to do and so has taken to musing
about how he might take a stab at the governor’s office. Edwards knows all
too well what tools these his hands would make to wreck his campaign.
So, just as with Landrieu, he
needs, like a puffer fish, to blow himself up with enough of his own hot air to
make himself look more formidable to Bernhard, or to everybody else. Except that
there’s something one should learn in the world of academia, in the game of
love, and, indeed, in many different ventures of life: the more you talk about
yourself, you show to others the less there is about you worth talking about.
If you have to go out and try to convince
people you’re a quality candidate who can win, you aren’t, because supporters
and voters don’t need such prompting when the real things emerges. In trying to
foster this image of himself in order to scare away potential Democrat
opponents, Edwards’ puffery is just as likely to be taken as a soft underbelly
ready to be gutted.
1 comment:
When you take this much time and space to try to denigrate John Bel, it is clear evidence to me that he is a candidate to be reckoned with.
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