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.

A couple of points worth making (though I’m sure there will be many more):

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.

3. It is hardly fait accompli that Edwards votes would accrue to Obama. One diarist over at MyDD observed that as a Clinton volunteer on the ground in New Hampshire said were actively (and successfully) targeting the Edwards vote with low and middle income voters. So while CW had it that Edwards remaining in the race was a spoiler for Obama, that may not in fact be true. Nobody — and certainly not Lawrence O’Donnell — knows for sure.

4. Jerome Armstrong: "Certainly, Obama and Clinton have a monetary edge over Edwards, but don’t discount earned media or Edwards having enough funds to compete well enough. All of the post-Iowa national polls have shown Edwards trending up into the 20 percents, and he’s viable. There is no frontrunner."

5. The ugly identity politics on display here is a prime example of the place that nobody — especially liberals — wants to go. The day we stop talking about substance and this election all becomes about race and gender, we all lose. It is, abjectly, the stupidest thing that can happen in this campaign season.*

They’re already mocking O’Donnell’s ridiculous statement over at Kos. And rightly so. It’s offensive on so many levels it’s hard to count.

Update:  * To clarify: I think there are very good discussions of race and gender that need to be had and hopefully having the these two candidates be our frontrunners will lead to that happening. What I meant to say, and probably didn’t say clearly enough is that a bunch of gender and race baiting that leads everybody to run off into their identity corners — which then becomes the arbiter of who supports whom — is a bad day for everyone.

Update II:  Chris Hayes, writing about the Edwards campaign in The Nation:  "Few remember that the signature economic policy of Bill Clinton’s presidency, balancing the budget, originated as a plank in the platform of his primary rival Paul Tsongas. If the next Democratic President manages to pass universal healthcare or a carbon cap-and-trade, we’ll owe the Edwards campaign a significant debt.

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