Kucinich and Edwards (?!)

As you may have heard by now, Dennis Kucinich and John Edwards have a joint strategy for the Iowa caucuses that involves their supporters switching their votes to the other if their first-choice candidate isn't viable in a given precinct. Hell, I didn't explain that very well. An example: suppose only 10% of the people at a caucus are Kucinich supporters. Since 15% is the cutoff, they need to shift their allegiance. Kucinich has called on his supporters to go over to Edwards. And vice versa.

Obviously, the first scenario is going to happen a lot more than the second. The latest Iowa polls have Edwards surging and Kucinch, well, in the low single digits, where he's been all campaign long.

Over at Daily Kos, there's a fair amount of bewilderment at this. The standard line-of-thought is this: Kucinich is, by far, the most leftist candidate in the race. Edwards is about as centrist as you can get this side of Lieberman. There's no way they'd ally.

But here's the thing. Turns out Edwards isn't as much a centrist as everyone (me included) thought. Congressional Quarterly recently ranked the 100 senators based on how frequently they voted for the Bush agenda. Guess who voted against Bush the most. Ted Kennedy? Russ Feingold? Nope. John Edwards. I was shocked when I heard that.

Now there's more to selecting a candidate than finding the one who's the least like Bush. But it might just be that Edwards, not Dean, is the next best thing for Kucinich supporters (it depends, of course, on which of Kucinich's stance people like. If it's the anti-war fervor, Dean's their guy. But on domestic issues it look as if Edwards might be closer to Kucinich than Dean. Who knew?)