Edwards drops out

I'm sad to be a little late to this. Fortunately, I have the words of comrades Jon Cohn and Matt Yglesias to associate myself with.

Still, I'd like to dissent from this bit in Jon's post:

Still, if Edwards wants to blame somebody for his defeat, he shouldn't look at the media. He should look at himself. And I mean that in the best sense possible. Edwards' biggest problem may have been that he was too compelling—so compelling that his rivals effectively adopted his agenda. From the beginning, Edwards was positioning himself as the champion of Americans struggling to get ahead financially. And rather than simply offer populist rhetoric, he backed it with a serious, comprehensive set of policies.

By the time Clinton and Obama had fleshed out their respective agendas, however, there simply wasn't that much difference among them. Pundits frequently criticized Edwards for his unabashed populism and, it's true, his rhetoric was the most openly confrontational of the three leading Democrats. But in terms of what the three were actually proposing to do, the agendas were virtually identical—not to mention widely popular, if the polls are to be believed. We're all populists now.

Basically, I think this is what happened: Edwards announced his candidacy in New Orleans a little over a year ago and has been swinging for the fences ever since. But by that time, the media was already ginning up a hypothetical Clinton-Obama head-to-head, and doing so to such an extent that they barely noticed Edwards had tossed his hat in at all. Soon, and unsurprisingly, the media got what it wanted--the candidate who was in to win and the candidate who had audacious amounts of hope--and, following the national polling data they'd helped create, they turned the eight person contests it into a two person race. The only shot Edwards had from that point forward, I think, was to be the guy aggressively promising the voters the most across the board--which just wasn't possible: In the end Clinton and Obama basically mimicked his agenda and that was his kiss of death.

Because Edwards was running as a bold progressive, he couldn't really dilly dally on the details--he had to be out with them first. But because he was running against two celebrities he needed those details to be the most ambitious by far, and, in a race narrated as this one has been, that kind of an alignment was impossible. None of that is his fault. And it's not the electorate's fault for supporting Democratic ideas. It is the media's fault: for the haircut stories, and the mansion stories, yes, but mainly for all but ignoring the entire field save for the two biggest, most establishment-oriented names in the running. Which isn't to say Edwards deserved to win or that he warranted John McCain-like treatment from the press--nobody does. But he did deserve--much more so than Giuliani, or Thompson, or any of the other rubes reporters and pundits have decided to fawn over arbitrarily in the recent past--to be treated like a heavyweight.

This is the Democratic campaign's loss. Whether it's Hillary's or Obama's gain? That depends, I suppose, on the extent to which Edwards spends what's left of his political capital convincing his followers--among the most devoted to any mainstream candidate--to support Barack Obama.