the withdrawal of john edwards from the race leaves two questions hanging:
(1). to whom will his voters turn now?
(2). who will he endorse?
there are gigabytes of speculation about these questions pinging around the blogosphere as we speak, and I won't add to them at any length, because the only straight answers are, nobody knows. But here are some observations:
(1). there is no simple answer to this now, nor will there be after Super Tuesday. His voters will break in different ways in different states. Some will vote for the other candidate promising a change from the establishment status quo. Some will turn to the other white candidate. Some of them may even vote John McCain, in states where you're allowed to vote as an independent.
(2). on the face of it, you'd say Obama. He's the other candidate of change, and Edwards has praised him consistently, and criticised HRC consistently, over the course of the campaign. BUT Edwards is nothing if not ambitious. He hasn't given up on being President of the United States at some point in the future. So, he's quite capable of endorsing Hillary should he judge it's in his self-interest to do so. And that will depend on fine calculations about who he thinks will win this race, who he perceives to be taking him and his key issue of poverty the most seriously, and what he thinks the post-2008 political landscape will look like.
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