Edwards just wins all the debates. If he were not there the progressive agenda would be ignored.
Centrist? Clinton and Obama are the centrists compared to Edwards, with his class-conscious left-populist talk of “Two Americas.”
Even though he’s not my top candidate I think Edwards should definitely stay in the race as long as he can, for his own reasons as well as mine. I know people factor in the effect of the votes he may or may not be taking away from Obama or Clinton as long as he stays in, but can’t beat either of them, but I don’t like the inevitable "he should drop out for two reasons.
One, I’m sick and tired of the media writing about results and predictions in ways that influence whether people will continue to participate and continue to support someone they’ve thoughtfully selected. Too many times I’ve felt that whenever candidates are written about as inevitably winning or losing, this can discourage people from participating further.
Two, politics is a game to be played up until the end and if part of the game is for Edwards to continue to garner delegates towards some end other than the nomination (king-maker, play for a cabinet position, etc.), I say he should. That’s participatory politics at its best, for both the candidates and the electorate.
You said:
While you didn’t explicitly mention church attendance, frequency of church attendance is the best correlate we’ve got to significance of one’s Christian faith, which is what you did mention.
Was that not obvious?
Another reason why Edwards - or any candidate whose support hasn’t fallen below the 1% level - should stay in: everybody in later states always bitches about how they wanted to vote for X, but X had already dropped out before their state had its primary.
I think that’s a real problem with the system, and IMHO, the simplest fix is for candidates to not formally concede until the primaries are over.
The answer to “Yeah, X hasn’t dropped out, but he’s not campaigning” is “So? Vote for him anyway, if you feel like voting for him. If there aren’t enough of you that feel that way, them’s the breaks. Why do you think X stopped actively campaigning?”
Most people just ask for a cite, you know.
The website and the phone number listed here do not work.
In addition, the charity is described in numerous places as defunct, which seems to give credence to the characterization of it in the New York Times as a vehicle to keep Edwards politically viable. What better way to have donors fund your travel between campaigns than have some charity pick up the tab?
What is more, donors to that charity don’t have to be disclosed - charities don’t fall under FEC jurisdiction.
You’re linking here to info about the nonprofit that’s not the charity. You’d said the charity’s website no longer worked.
Please go back and read the NY Times article you cited, so we can have an intelligent discussion about it. Or, failing that, my post which summarized the facts about there being two nonprofits - one a charity, and one not. This isn’t very complicated.
Is the charity out of business? Or are you saying the noncharitable nonprofit’s defunct? I don’t really give a flip about the latter; it’s the charity that’s key here, IMHO.
ETA: Just one more typical Mr. Moto discussion. First, no cite; then a cite that doesn’t say the things you say it says. Par for the course. But why do you always do this? Can’t you be bothered to check stuff, or what?
Then I’m afraid your best isn’t good enough. 62% of Americans describe themselves as “committed Christians”, but only about 40% of Americans attend church in a given week, a figure that many pollsters believe is inflated. (Figures from Religious Tolerance dot org.)
I didn’t say Edwards was centrist. Try again.
Okay. My characterization of it as a charity was mistaken.
And if 62% of Americans described themselves as “hot dogs with mustard and relish,” would you take them at their word? Or would you look for some corroborating evidence that would verify the truth of it?
Thanks.
No, you said he is supported by centrists. What are you basing that on, and how would you account for it?
That has to stand among the most astonishingly stupid rebuttals in the history of Great Debates, made all the more eye-popping for having been conceived by a man of your intellectual brilliance. You, after all, were relying on polls — exit polls, to be exact — in which people were asked whether they attend church, to make your own point. Did your exit pollsters call the pastors of those churches to verify the attendance roles? If not, why do you take them at their word? Maybe by “church” they meant “baseball park”.
I’m basing it, like I said, on how it seems to me. I would account for it simply on the basis that it is the image I think Edwards projects — a white male church-going southern Christian, and the longstanding notion that birds of a feather tend to flock together.
It dawns on me that I might need to explain that not all white male church-going southern Christians are right-wing.
Why, thanks. 
Because people’s responses to poll questions are both more consistent and more meaningful with respect to clearly defined concepts.
Most people have pretty similar concepts of what ‘church’ is, and what it means to attend it.
People clearly have widely varying understandings of what it means to be a “committed Christian,” else we’d have 62% of Americans diligently following Jesus’ teachings from the Gospels, and we as a nation would be a lot closer to being that collection of “peaceful, honest people” to which you occasionally refer than we actually are.
Okay, then what about Edwards? He *thinks * he’s Christian. We need you to tell us whether he knows what he’s saying.
According to this, Edwards’ advisors say he’s hoping to play a “kingmaker” role at a brokered convention. (I just hope that means him throwing his support behind Obama at the end of the day.)
Let’s review my point:
This was about polls. Polls are samples of a larger population, with the aim of extrapolating (within limits) to that larger population. I have some modest knowledge of this field.
But however strong or weak my knowledge of statistical sampling is, it has nothing to say about what John Edwards says about himself. That’s completely out of scope.
Let’s review my original point, that white male Christians might tend to gravitate to Edwards since he is a white male Christian.
Let’s review your response to me, that exit polls showed church attendance implied support for Obama rather than Edwards. You left out the “white” part and the “male” part, leaving the possibility that the church attenders who supported Obama were predominately Black and constituted a greater proportion of voters than white males. And in so doing, you tied church attendance to Christian identity.
Let’s review my response to you, that polls (the things you cited for your own point) show that more people self-identify as Christian than attend church. I would be one example, as would my wife, sister, and brother-in-law, and Triskadecamus if memory serves. And so your response was debunked for having left out two major criteria and interpreting the third on a personal whim.
Let’s review your response to me, that people might lie in polls, identifying themselves as hot dogs with mustard and relish, whereupon I reminded you that polls were what you yourself had cited for your own original point. Apparently people do not lie in polls that benefit your argument but only in polls that do not.
Now let’s review where we stand. I retorted that since people can identify themselves as hot dogs with mustard, then it stands to reason that they can identify churches as baseball parks, and that at any rate, Edwards identifies himself as Christian, and he is a white male.
So we’re back at the beginning.