Former Edwards advisor Joe Trippi has a first person account in the newly-invigorated Politics (formerly Campaigns & Elections) magazine about how he wishes he'd urged his candidate not to abandon his primary campaign:
He could have kept his agenda in the forefront by staying in the race and forcing Obama and Clinton to focus on those issues because he, John Edwards, would hold the key to the convention deadlock. And maybe, just maybe, a brokered convention would have stunned the political world and led to an Edwards nomination.
P.S. While you're there, don't miss Doug Daniels' entertaining romp through the cesspool of Jersey City politics. Money quote:
"He was nude. Nobody made him nude, he took his clothes off!"
That would be the mayor they're referring to.
Update: Ed Kilgore throws cold water on Trippi's dreams of Edwards as a possible brokered-convention nominee, adding:
Edwards might have amassed and held onto enough delegates to hold the balance of power. But what would he have done with it? Forced Barack Obama to adopt an individual mandate in his health plan? Demanded that Hillary Clinton attack her own husband's administration, or suddenly apologize for her Iraq War Resolution vote?
The truth is that Edwards' agenda wasn't sufficiently different from those of his rivals to give him any particular leverage over what either of them would do as a candidate or as a nominee. Even without the lure of Edwards delegates, Clinton and Obama have competed to offer Edwards-style economic populist rhetoric, for the simple reason that the primary landscape rewarded it.
--Michael Crowley