Lawrence O'Donnell Plays the Race Card ... Badly

From the Huffington Post:

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.

Maybe Edwards is already not a factor in the campaign because Edwards voters would split evenly between Senators Obama and Clinton if Edwards dropped out. But we'll never know unless Edwards does the right thing and gets out of the way of the only two candidates who have a chance to get the nomination.

The white male monopoly on the Democratic nomination has finally come to an end. Someone has to tell John Edwards.

Captain Ed comments:

NBC correspondent Lawrence O'Donnell has been losing it for the last four years, but he usually restricts his extreme bombast for Republicans. He wouldn't allow John O'Neill (actually a Democrat) speak in a 2004 television appearance, screaming "Creepy liar" over him whenever O'Neill tried to respond. Just recently he let loose a barrage of anti-Mormon bigotry when discussing Mitt Romney. Now, however. O'Donnell aims his strange ire at John Edwards, whom he accuses of racism for staying in the primaries...

Wow. Just ... wow. I hold no brief for John Edwards, and think he's a political loser myself, as O'Donnell labels him. He's not going to win the nomination, and his continued presence in the race exemplifies his self-involvement more than anything else.

But to suggest that Edwards' failure to withdraw constitutes racism as O'Donnell clearly implies is nothing short of insane. Does O'Donnell believe that Obama's presence in the primaries requires all other candidates to withdraw to prove that they're not racist? In fact, isn't the suggestion that Obama can't win this on his own without people throwing the election a racist notion in and of itself? At the very least, it's offensively paternalistic.