"The Campaign Goes On"
"The campaign goes on. The campaign goes on strongly," said Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards at a press conference today where he announced his wife, Elizabeth, has had a recurrence of her cancer.
As word got out late last night about the news conference, speculation immediately started up as to what the two would say and what it would mean for Edwards' presidential campaign. With most assuming there was to be announcement about his wife's health, three scenarios bubbled to the surface inside the beltway:
1.) John Edwards would end his presidential campaign.
2.) Edwards would continue his campaign.
3.) Edwards would suspend campaigning for a period of time to deal with his wife's illness.
45 minutes before the scheduled press conference, news reports quoting unnamed sources "confirmed" that it would be scenario #3, which, of course, turned out to be untrue after the Edwards' announcement.
In hindsight – and hindsight is always 20/20 – scenario #3 doesn't make much sense if John Edwards wants to continue to be a competitive force in this year's presidential campaign - just consider the colossal amounts of money that have to be raised to be competitive in next year's primaries.
Because of the earlier and more compressed primary schedule – there's a chance that two dozen states could have primaries on Feb. 5, just three weeks after Iowa's first-in-the-nation caucus – the buzz is that candidates will need to have raised $100 million by then to be competitive.
Let's say Edwards has $20 million today (there's no way to know exactly until he files a financial statement with the Federal Election Commission after March 31). That would mean he would have to raise $250,000 per day from now until Feb. 5, 2008 to get to $100 million.
If he suspended his campaign, the money pressures would have increased exponentially as the weeks went along. And his effort to climb into that top-tier of candidates would have taken a severe hit by putting his campaign on hold, potentially forcing him to eventually have to end his campaign anyway.
Clearly, Edwards understood that reality saying today, "we know from our previous experience that when this happens, you have a choice.
"You can go cower in the corner and hide or you can be tough and go out there and standup for what you believe in."