The Stupidest Thing Said This Campaign Season So Far

Ding ding ding! We have a winner. Stupidest thing anyone has said this campaign season goes to Lawrence O'Donnell:

John Edwards is a loser. He has won exactly two elections in his life and lost 31. Only one of his wins and all of his losses were in presidential primaries and caucuses. He remains perfectly positioned to continue to lose with a Kucinich-like consistency. Nothing but egomania keeps Edwards in the race now. All presidential candidates are egomaniacs but some of them have party status worth preserving that forces them to drop out when they hit the wall. A loser like Edwards has no status or dignity to lose. Campaigning and losing is his life. So, he will continue his simple-minded, losing campaign and deny Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton the one-on-one contest they deserve.

If John Edwards stays in the race, he might, in the end, become nothing other than the Southern white man who stood in the way of the black man. And for that, he would deserve a lifetime of liberal condemnation.

1. People in New Hampshire had their asses handed to them making these kinds of pronouncements before the primary. O'Donnell seems to be the only one who didn't get the memo. John Edwards has earned the right to stay in the race as long as he wants to and can, he's a serious candidate and his presence is not a matter of anyone else's convenience.

2. Edwards has pretty much single handedly driven the populist, anti-poverty message this campaign, which both Clinton and Obama have been heavily appropriating of late. Just as Bill Richardson made a valuable contribution with his "no residual forces in Iraq" promise in the debate, so too has Edwards dragged everyone kicking and screaming onto the "dangers of corporate America" turf. That has value, and that value is ongoing unless you want to boil the slog to November down to simple horserace politics.