Again, please go to ChaseMartyn.com for your future Chase Martyn needs.

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I wrote previously that Edwards really drove much of the debate during the 2008 Democratic primary. He was the first candidate to release a universal health care plan, the first to really push hard against accepting PAC and lobbyist money, and, perhaps most importantly, it was Edwards, not Obama, who most aggressively criticized Sen. Hillary Clinton as Clinton saw her armor of inevitability begin to crack.

Now the question is how his exit from the race will affect the remaining two candidates. Where his supporters go will tell us a lot about how primary voters really make their decisions.

At OpenLeft, Chris Bowers thinks there are two conflicting factors that will determine which of the top two candidates Edwards’s supporters choose: momentum and demographics. He says momentum benefits Obama, while demographics benefit Clinton.

I think there’s a third, more important factor related to message and process issues. If Edwards supporters break for Obama, it’s that factor that will explain it. If they break for Clinton, it will be based on demographics or, to put it another way, identity politics.

If the rest of the country were like Iowa, it is pretty clear from anecdotal evidence and some polling that Edwards supporters will shift towards Obama. When Iowans were introduced to Edwards, he was still an angry progressive who railed against Clinton’s acceptance of PAC and lobbyist money, against NAFTA, and against “corporate Democrats.” If they stuck with Edwards through the summer and fall, they weren’t going to support Clinton.

But the rest of the country isn’t like Iowa. Most Americans were tuned out during Edwards’s angry phase. As we saw in South Carolina, the demographic exit poll data seemed to show Edwards and Clinton splitting the white vote. Whether this was a coincidence or not, it was used to vindicate theories of identity politics. White men preferred Edwards, white women preferred Clinton, and black voters of both genders preferred Obama.

What will happen over the next week? Will Edwards’s supporters, who are a significant (and potentially decisive) block of votes in many Super Tuesday states, choose the candidate who lines up closest to Edwards on process issues? If so, they’d likely pick Obama, who, like Edwards, refuses money from PACs and lobbyists. Obama has run an outsider campaign like Edwards.

Or will Edwards supporters line up behind Clinton? If they do, it could be based more on demographics and identity than anything else. There are a few policy issues (most notably, perhaps, a health care mandate) where Clinton lines up closer to Edwards than Obama does, but voters who are tuned into the the subtleties of policy aren’t likely to overlook the process issues that tie Edwards to Obama in order to support Clinton.

There’s also the question of organized labor. Do the unions who backed Edwards, if not officially than unofficially, head to Obama or Clinton? And what about trial lawyers?

Of course, a lot could turn on who Edwards himself decides to endorse. Pundits on television seem unwilling to give odds on which candidate he would choose, should he choose one. Perhaps they are merely too cautious to speculate on this, but I’m reckless:

If Edwards supports a candidate, it’ll be Obama. I have heard him say too many bad things about the Clintons for him to get away with an endorsement of Hillary. I have heard his staff say far worse things about her. Mudcat Saunders just said on MSNBC that he would do everything in his power to prevent Edwards from endorsing her, and Joe Trippi has at times appeared as much as an Obama operative as an Edwards operative. There’s no way he endorses Clinton, so the question is whether he endorses Obama or no one at all.

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Monday night afforded the Democratic Party a different opportunity. It was chance for them diminish Bush’s presidency by giving a speech with more ambitious an agenda than the president himself.

Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius’s speech was clearly envisioned not as a response to Bush’s proposals but rather a substitute for what presidents are supposed to say in their State of the Union addresses. For all the meaningful-but-theoretical talk on the presidential campaign trail about asking Americans to unite behind a cause and to make sacrifices for it, Sebelius’s speech may have been the first time (in a long time) that a sitting official has actually asked it of us directly with such a big megaphone.

Sebelius has been criticized by several bloggers for lacking enthusiasm and emotion in her delivery of the speech. That’s a criticism that I understand, but I’m not really sure how I would’ve read the message differently. Aside from putting an audience in the room and adding multiple camera angles, I’m not sure how much more interesting it could have been. If Bush was forced to give his speech in a room with no audience and no additional camera angles, it would’ve been boring, too.

The address was meant to seem serious and presidential. On that point, it succeeded. Too much flash would have diminished the message the speech was intended to send.

Sebelius’s response was not merely a response; it was a speech to set the agenda for “a new American majority.” And out here in the Midwest, that’s the message that wins.

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Democrats in Florida objected to the GOP’s imposition, although there is some debate about how strenuously they actually did so. Once the date was set, conservatives ensured that at least one harmful referendum would be placed on the ballot, preventing Florida Democrats from deciding to hold a primary on a different day. To do so would almost guarantee the passage of the Republican ballot initiative, which would provide for a regressive restructuring of property tax rates in a state that already has no income tax.

For Democrats in early states and elsewhere across the country, the issue became a question of who controls the Democratic Party’s presidential nominating contest: should it be the DNC, or should it be Florida’s GOP-controlled legislature? Only one Democratic candidate thinks it should be the latter.

Sen. Hillary Clinton plans to campaign in Florida, hoping that she can make a meaningful competition out of a beauty contest. So far, the media doesn’t seem like it’s going to give her that opportunity:

Like other candidates, she pledged not to campaign in Florida after the state jumped ahead on the schedule of caucuses and primaries set by the Democratic National Committee. She had to make that pledge if she hoped to compete in the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses and the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary, as Iowa and New Hampshire zealously guard their starting status on the political calendar.

But Iowa and New Hampshire are history and, after a landslide loss in South Carolina on Saturday, Clinton needs a win.

So she has begun appearing in Florida in anticipation of Tuesday’s Democratic primary there.

Clinton’s move insults not just the voters in Iowa and New Hampshire who trusted her pledge but also the voters of all the states that respected the DNC’s outline for the nominating process. Effectively, she is saying to Democrats in states that will participate in February 5th’s “Super Tuesday” primaries and caucuses and in the two dozen states that have scheduled later votes: You may follow the rules if you please, but I write the rules as I please.

That’s the raw political reality of Clinton’s move, even if she is spinning it as an embrace of participatory democracy.

Clinton’s pretext for campaigning in Florida was an argument that virtually no one in the media believed carried much weight, for good reason. She claimed that Sen. Barack Obama’s national cable news advertising buy, which meant that his advertisements would appear everywhere in the United States where MSNBC and CNN are carried, meant that he was actively campaigning in Florida. I spoke to some politicos around Iowa, and none of them thought Obama’s ad buy violated the pledge he made to the early states, but that was Clinton’s argument.

But there’s a difference between making a national advertising buy and intentionally campaigning in Florida. Fortunately for Clinton, there isn’t actually an official early state pledge referee. In place of one, I think I can propose a pretty obvious standard for what should count as a violation of the pledge and what shouldn’t: if a candidate’s decision had been made public before Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina voted, would the results from those states have been any different?

For Obama’s national television ad buy, the answer is probably no. But for Clinton’s decision to physically appear in Florida, particularly to give an acceptance speech that night in Florida after the polls close, the answer is probably yes. At the very least, it would have discouraged some of her higher-profile endorsers from making their support of her candidacy public.

Now is the time to ask Clinton’s state co-chairs and surrogates in the early states whether they support Clinton’s decision circumvent the DNC rules and the pledge she made to follow them. Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack was able to muster a hollow sense of outrage on a Clinton campaign conference call discussing Obama’s national TV ad buy, but what does he have to say about Clinton’s decision?

What about the Shaheen family in New Hampshire? If they hope for future political success, they must defend their candidate’s decision to threaten their state’s first-in-the-nation primary.

I grew up in Palm Beach County. I protested with Jesse Jackson during the 2000 election recount. I remember the Florida Republican power-plays that essentially handed a presidential election to George W. Bush. The US Supreme Court drove the final nail into the coffin, declaring that a recount that would have awarded Florida’s electoral votes to Al Gore was unconstitutional; but it was Florida’s GOP that manufactured the legal question in the first place. That Floridians have once again been disenfranchised is a matter that hits very close to home.

This year’s primary date debacle is again the fault of Florida’s Republican elected officials, who are content to play fast and loose with their Democratic constituents’ voting rights. No Democratic candidate should cave in to their pressure, because it only legitimizes them.

To protect the long-term integrity of the Democratic party’s ability to make strategic decisions about its own nominating calendar, not to mention the long-term integrity of Florida’s overly-politicized elections system, the Clinton campaign must reverse course and agree not to do anything to give GOP state legislators more power.

Although it might sound like Clinton’s newly-publicized strategy is inclusive, it sets a dangerous precedent.

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It is the dogmatic pro-Bill Clinton expectations put forth by other bloggers that prompted me to write this post. In particular, I am troubled by my friend Taylor Marsh’s recent opinion that she might not support Sen. Barack Obama should he win the nomination because Obama had the audacity to criticize Clinton, whom she repeatedly and admiringly describes as “the only two term Democratic president since F.D.R.”

Bill Clinton’s presidency was, in many ways, a success. We had eight years of relative economic prosperity, relative peace, and relative stability. I came of age politically during the Clinton years, and it certainly influenced my current set of beliefs.

But let’s not let Clinton’s political success overshadow the weaknesses that we were all aware of during his presidency. I wrote the other day that Obama benefits from engaging the former president for a variety of strategic reasons, but I also think he benefits because his criticisms ring true — even if some Democrats think it is a sin to admit it.

First, Ronald Reagan really did have a bigger lasting impact on American politics than Bill Clinton. This doesn’t mean Ronald Reagan was good and Bill Clinton was bad (in fact, I don’t know any Democrats who believe that), but just watch any of the recent Republican presidential debates, in which candidates adopt a half dozen or more strategies in an effort to lay claim to whatever pieces of Ronald Reagan’s legacy that they can.

Clinton led the United States through a period of prosperity that he gets plenty of credit for, but in 12 years there will not be a field of presidential candidates trying to out-Clinton each other, and the terms “Clintonomics” and “Clinton Republicans” will not be part of the lexicon. Reagan was a “transformative” president in ways that Bill Clinton was not, and Democrats have to admit it even if we don’t like it.

Second, from the perspective of most Americans looking back, the Republican party was, in many ways, the party of ideas during the 1980s and 1990s.

What was the Clinton doctrine on foreign policy? What was Clinton’s economic policy aside from a fairly moderated version of Republican economic policy? Where was our contract with America?

The explicitly centrist Democratic Leadership Council became the braintrust of the Democratic Party during the Clinton years. Many progressives blame that fact for electoral defeats all the way through 2004. The most-cited reason is that they failed to inspire Americans with original ideas to counter the original (albeit harmful) ideas of the GOP.

The Clinton administration exhibited a devastating inability to properly frame issues, which they admit was one reason why their efforts for health care failed. But it wasn’t just health care. Throughout the 1990s, the media wrote stories about sex scandals and welfare queens while the Clinton administration desperately tried to change the story. They won small battles here and there, but they lost the larger war.

Third, even some loyal Bill Clinton supporters believe that he’ll ’say anything to get elected.’ If one man embodies the definition of “politician” in the minds of most Americans, it’s probably Bill Clinton. The moniker “Slick Willy” may have been coined by right-wing radio hosts, but plenty of Democrats repeated it affectionately while loyally pulling the lever for Clinton in the 1990s.

The electorate expected the president to be likable, and they expected his administration to be good for their wallets and pocketbooks. Bill Clinton was, so who cared what he said or who he slept with? That’s what I remember hearing during the 1990s, anyway.

And finally, a lot of Democrats rightfully blame Clinton for a lot of things. Workers complain about NAFTA. Political strategists believe he poured gasoline on the flames of the culture war, poisoning about a decade’s worth of political discourse (they believe it even if they are too afraid for their own careers to say it out loud). Many young people are just a little tired of the Clintons. Some may wonder why Bush has been able to make so many more noticeable changes in their lives than Clinton did, even if they think Bush’s changes were bad.

The former president’s biography is truly inspiring, and his ambition is certainly impressive. There is no question that his presidency did a lot of good for a lot of people, and the man continues to work to develop solutions to the world’s problems through a truly innovative foundation. But a saint, he ain’t.

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The conventional wisdom is wrong. Obama will benefit from the highly publicized arguments with Bill Clinton.

1. Arguing with Bill Clinton makes Obama look presidential.

The top political headlines in today’s newspapers will continue driving the “Bill Clinton v. Barack Obama” story line. Former presidents don’t usually bother themselves with petty criticisms of first-term Senators, but something makes Obama special enough to get that kind of treatment. Every time the former president says Obama’s name, Obama seems more presidential.

2. It keeps Hillary Clinton’s name out of the paper.

When reporters cover the spat, they generally only make reference to Hillary Clinton, the one who is actually running for President, as an afterthought. Stories make first reference to her as merely “his wife,” and they mention only that the former president was campaigning for her before quickly turning back to the subject at hand. Here’s Exhibit A.

3. Former Presidents don’t win “change” elections.

Although the term “change election” bothers me to no end, I’m told that this is one. The former president makes a compelling argument to the contrary (I’ve heard it on the campaign trail), but the 2008 definition of “change” does not mean “defeating an incumbent Republican president in 1992.” Whatever the hell “change” means, Bill Clinton probably isn’t its poster boy. He shouldn’t be making more news for the Clinton campaign than his wife.

Maybe Bill Clinton’s attacks on Obama do hurt Obama, but they hurt Hillary Clinton more.

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And then you make excuses to yourself for it. Excuses like “the template for my blog has gotten old,” or “my web address is childish.”

Today, my fair readers, the well of excuses runs dry. The other shoe drops. And my metaphorical bag of tricks, which contains the rest of my metaphors (and not really much else), returns to the scene.

Notice the new address. It’s more descriptive, but it keeps to that familiar “initials + preposition + noun” formula that you’ve come to expect. Old links to the old me will still function — both online and in person.

Also notice this site’s new design, which I hope you will find usable but distinctive. Let me know what you think.

As always, this blog shouldn’t be about me. Yes, I know, blogging pretty much has to be about the blogger on one level or another or it isn’t blogging. Call me a self-loather if you will, but when I write posts like these, I do my best not to think about myself but rather to consider your wishes — if there’s even a “you” out there reading right now.

Please, if you exist, come back again.

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So far, turnout seems light. Given that no Democrats are running field operations there, I suppose that’s not a surprise.

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Mohamed did not win a single precinct in Iowa, let alone a single delegate. But he still earned a mention on MSNBC today, when Dan Abrams listed a few of the unknown candidates who are also on the ballot.

Perhaps Sal’s rather lackluster presidential campaign has really been a strategy for building name identification in a strategically important state for next time. That would explain it.

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And too bad for David Yepsen, who remained detrimentally cynical of young and first-time voter participation the whole way through. His demographic generalizations also turned out to be exaggerated or simply inaccurate. And remember his claim that heavy young voter participation would delegitimize an Obama victory going into New Hampshire? What happened with that?

Perhaps for the statewide paper of record, the win and the loss will balance each other out.

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