Going Back To The Ol' 28,000 Square-Foot Fishin' Hole

If a tree falls over in a forest and nobody is present to hear it, does it make a sound?  I had never seen a matching political equivalent of that axiom - until now:

Democrat John Edwards is exiting the presidential race Wednesday, ending a scrappy underdog bid in which he steered his rivals toward progressive ideals while grappling with family hardship that roused voters' sympathies but never diverted his campaign, The Associated Press has learned.

The two-time White House candidate notified a close circle of senior advisers that he planned to make the announcement at a 1 p.m. EST event in New Orleans that had been billed as a speech on poverty, according to two of his advisers. The decision came after Edwards lost the four states to hold nominating contests so far to rivals who stole the spotlight from the beginning — Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.

The former North Carolina senator will not immediately endorse either candidate in what is now a two-person race for the Democratic nomination, said one adviser, who spoke on a condition of anonymity in advance of the announcement.

May I make a brutally frank observation?  Well, tough, I'm putting it out here anyway.  When Elizabeth Edwards' breast cancer returned a year ago, any good, loving, compassionate husband in Opie's position would have set aside his own political ambitions and focused on caring for his wife.  Instead, Edwards, knowing that his would be an uphill fight for the Democrat nomination even if Mrs. Clinton wasn't in the race, chose to use his wife's medical condition as a campaign prop - playing the sympathy card, as it were.  Not, evidently, without Mrs. Edwards' consent, but it's still precisely the sort of unspeakably tacky ploy one would expect from an ambulance-chaser of Opie's bottom-feeding calibre.

Of course, it didn't work, and the one-trick silk pony has finally taken the hint.

Will it have a big impact on the Donk race?  Admiral Ed thinks so.  I'm not nearly as convinced.  Even at this point in the process, with the Rodham-Obama polls narrowing, the combined delegate count of Opie and the Kennedys' newest "adopted son" still falls short of Mrs. Clinton's total, and that's without her Michigan and Florida delegates (which, mark my words, WILL be counted and seated at their convention this summer).  True, with Edwards gone, the anti-Hillary sentiment can fully coalesce around Obama; but I don't think there's nearly as much of it as Ed believes there is, a reality that will be made garishly apparent next Tuesday.

The one thing that could make Opie's departure actually relevant is if he would endorse Obama.  That would release his handful of delegates to him and give a formal anti-Hillary direction to his campaign's suspension.  There has been a rumor this week that Edwards would do just that, allegedly in exchange for a promise of being Obama's attorney-general.  Now maybe that's crap, or maybe Obama is keeping that offer close to the vest, or maybe part of the deal is that the two men won't spring that until later in the campaign if B.O. needs it.  But as it stands now, Opie delegates can scatter wherever they wish, and I wouldn't bet against a majority of them winding up in Senator Clinton's column.

He says it's back to Habitat For Humanity for him.  And, you know, six-figure speaking gigs and working for hedge funds and making preparations to take over the Justice Department a year from now, if all goes well.  We'd probably know more about that if there was anybody around him to listen.