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Friday, February 29, 2008

I miss him.
Posted by Jill | 3:57 PM
John Edwards may be out of the presidential race, but he is not going to sit down and he is not going to shut up.

In fact, he's out there educating Americans (and hopefully the members of Congress who have aided and abetted George W. Bush's Perpetual War Without Point in Iraq that you simply cannot spend trillions of dollars on a war after you've cut taxes for your wealthy friends without the rest of the economy (and the middle class) paying a terrible price:

A coalition announced Monday and called Iraq Campaign 2008 seeks to tie anxiety over the faltering economy to anxiety over the duration of the war. Part of its agenda is targeting what it calls "obstructionist" members of Congress—Democrats as well as Republicans—that don’t seek a rapid withdrawal from Iraq. The campaign has an attention-getting front-man: former presidential candidate John Edwards. The effort, however, is not without problems—not least of which is the conundrum of whether antiwar activism turns out to be counterproductive to ending a war.

People don’t understand why we’re spending $500 billion and counting in Iraq," Edwards said in a Monday conference call, "when at the same time we’ve got 40-plus million Americans with no health care coverage, 37 million-plus living in poverty. It doesn’t make sense to them."

The effort is the brainchild of a group of liberal organizations: MoveOn.org, the Service Employees International Union, the VoteVets progressive veterans network, USAction and the Center for American Progress.

Countering both wars will require a variety of offensives. On Mar. 19, the fifth anniversary of the invasion, USAction, says executive director Jeff Blum, will mobilize thousands of protesters "from Bangor to Los Angeles" for candlelight vigils. Legislatively, the coalition has two priorities through the election: pressing Congress not to fund the war without tying money to a date for withdrawal and preventing President George W. Bush from signing a long-term security agreement with the Iraqi government, as he intends to do by the summer.

Politically, the effort is to be even sharper. "If they don’t act," Berger said, referring to Congress, "we will make it clear that they will have opposition, and we will take them out." She did not elaborate, and a spokeswoman for Iraq Campaign 2008 did not return a call today for comment.

MoveOn’s Eli Pariser said the coalition will target four Republican senators in particular who have "stood up against the interests of voters": Susan Collins of Maine; Norm Coleman of Minnesota; John Sununu of New Hampshire; and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Political analysts consider the first three to be among the Senate’s most vulnerable GOP incumbents. McConnell has an approval rating of 52 percent, which, if not actually poor, is a somewhat surprising choice, considering his 24 years in the chamber and ascendancy to the body’s most visible Republican. The coalition is still deciding which House districts to target.

Finally, the coalition will launch a field network it calls Operation Democracy. The multimillion-dollar effort will fund "door to door" campaigns—"people will talk to their neighbors about the moral, strategic and economic folly of Bush’s war in Iraq," Blum said.

The costs of the war have been far higher than the Bush administration forecast. White House Economic Adviser Larry Lindsay was forced to resign after publicly pegging the Iraq war’s price tag at $100 billion to $200 billion. In February 2003, a then-deputy defense secretary told a House panel that Iraq "could really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon." The prediction was less than prescient. In September, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the war could cost up to $2 trillion. Thursday, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz will testify to the congressional Joint Economic Committee that the war will cost $3 trillion, building off research for a forthcoming book.

Independent economists have found a connection between the war and the performance of the U.S. economy. Last May, the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that "after an initial demand stimulus, the effect of higher defense spending turns negative around the sixth year." That sixth year begins Mar. 19. The economists found harmful impacts on inflation and interest rates, annual truck and car sales, and the housing market, as well as job losses in construction and manufacturing. "Manufacturing is projected to lose 44,200 [jobs] after five years," the study found, while the construction sector would have a net gain of 8,500 jobs during the same time frame, but "it is projected to lose 144,200 after ten years."


Meanwhile, Mr. We'll Be In Iraq For 100 Years has an economic plan to just make things worse: more corporate tax cuts. Because everyone knows that when you give really really really really rich corporations even more money, they are so generous that they won't use it to stuff the pockets of their CEOs and other senior executives, and they'll stop sending all the high-paying jobs overseas. After all, isn't that the result of the Bush tax cuts of the last seven years that have gotten us into this mess?

Maybe in the Candyland of Gumdrops and Lollipops in which the Republican brain resides. Good thing we have people out there like John Edwards who still live in the real world.

(h/t: Melissa)

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1 Comments:
Blogger slag said...
I don't think it's a coincidence that both campaigns took a nosedive after Edwards went out. He had a very positive impact on the conversation.
3/3/08, 7:51 PM  
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