Edwards To Drop Out of Race Today - UPDATED

The only remaining candidate to run an honorable campaign thus far is bowing out of the bid for the presidency. John Edwards will make his announcement at 1pm today.

The former North Carolina senator will not immediately endorse either candidate in what is now a two-person race for the Democratic nomination, said one adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity in advance of the announcement. Both candidates would welcome Edwards' backing and the support of the 56 delegates he had collected.

Edwards waged a spirited top-tier campaign against the two better-funded rivals, even as he dealt with the stunning blow of his wife's recurring cancer diagnosis. In a dramatic news conference last March, the couple announced that the breast cancer that she thought she had beaten had returned, but they would continue the campaign.

Let's face facts. The only remaining candidate willing to take on corporate interests and insurance companies, and whom corporations viewed as the most dangerous of the three top Democratic candidates, was John Edwards. He also played a major role in the Democratic debates and on the campaign trail, focusing the discourse on the issues rather than on backbiting. Edwards will be sorely missed.

You can call me a conspiracy theorist if you want, but you have to believe that the mainstream media shut Edwards out because of his message. He was the only candidate consistently talking about poverty, the saving of the middle class, corporate greed and lobbyist corruption. The MSM is owned by corporations and therefore ignored him completely even after beating Clinton in Iowa and being outspent by his opponents 9 to 1.

UPDATE: TIME - Why Edwards Never Caught On

...The strategy at first seemed shrewd: build on Edwards' surprisingly good showing in Iowa in 2004 and make his native South Carolina his firewall while garnering union support. It was designed to take on the establishment candidate that everyone knew was going to run: former First Lady Hillary Clinton.

What no one, not Clinton or Edwards, was prepared for was the insurgency candidacy of Senator Barack Obama. Suddenly Edwards was running against a version of himself in 2004: the young, fresh, optimistic face, the Washington outsider with a thin resume but lots of charm, ruffling some feathers as he jumped the line. Except this version was an African American celebrity candidate with a cult-like following. Big and small donors flocked to Obama, the freshman senator from Illinois, as did the endorsements, and suddenly Edwards seemed like a third wheel.

...Edwards leaves the race having made a big impact on the two remaining candidates. His populist rhetoric forced his rivals to compete for union support, and he was the first out of the gate with detailed plans for universal healthcare and education, putting pressure on the field to match him. The former trial lawyer arguably won a majority of the debates, time and again challenging his opponents to refuse money from lobbyists and speed up their plans for withdrawing combat troops from Iraq.