Already Hedging

Two stories about shifting positions

First, the Los Angeles Times has a story about how all that posturing from Nancy Pelosi and others about fighting back against big business is mostly just that: empty posturing. It's sad that our Democratic congress is only 100 hours in and already drawing back on a number of campaign promises. After all their talk about student aid, we got only cuts in Stafford Loans (The Boston Globe has a good summary here), with no help in Perkins Loans or Pell Grants or any other programs that specifically target poorer students. Couldn't they have had enough backbone between 330 congressmen and representatives to be actual Democrats for one week? It is sad.

Second, one place that can be counted on for finding people who will do impressively deep research is Daily Kos (of course, there are plenty people who do almost none. There's a front page post right now gloating about how "effective" Pelosi has been. I guess it's easy to say that when you ignore that the bills she's passing are compromising on every issue.) Anyways, this new set of diaries, starting here, chronicles every vote where John Edwards and Hillary Clinton differed while they were in the Senate together from 2001-2005. The first part chronicles their approximately thirty vote differences in 2001, and shows that, contrary to Edwards's attempts to portray himself as the farthest left in this primary, he actually was more likely that Hillary to be pro-business and anti-campaign finance reform. I was particularly disappointed to learn that Edwards, for example, supported the 2001 Bankruptcy Act that progressives like Paul Wellstone fought against. Obviously, Edwards (whom I supported in 2004) has had time to change his views, and I hope that further parts of the series will show that he did so while in the Senate, not more recently because he thought it would position him better. But it does support those who would say it's easier for Edwards to position himself as more progressive since he's no longer in the Senate After all, it's easy to tell Congress to cut funding for the Iraq War, when you're don't actually have to vote for it.