John Edwards 2008: What’s not to like

Asked about the haircut by the Iowa press afterward, Edwards, hand on hip, eyes squinting in the sun, says, “My whole life has been spent standing up for people who have no voice, and I’ll do that as long as I’m alive. It’s a ridiculous amount of money for a haircut. I’m actually embarrassed by it.”The honesty is disarming, especially since the Beverly Hills stylist Joseph Torrenueva has already said that Edwards is a “longtime client”—it’s no accident that he got a $400 haircut; he just got busted. But whatever: Edwards has transformed embarrassing news into a punch line and a moment of plainspoken humanity. For now, the message has won.

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But in the South, Edwards’s good looks and polished oratory can sometimes obscure what’s credible about him. And as Edwards himself observes in Four Trials, his 2004 book about fighting courtroom battles for children and families with personal injury, juries “rarely miss a trick, and probably never when it really is a trick. They take in every movement, fact, word, hesitation, and glance.” Add to that $400 haircuts—not to mention the palatial house that he and his wife recently finished building outside Chapel Hill. With Edwards polling third among Democrats in South Carolina, where he was actually born (he moved to North Carolina when he was 12), he needs to prove he’s got more than just a genuine accent—that, in fact, the heartfelt message and the perfect messenger are one and the same.

History hasn’t always borne out Edwards’s Dixie confidence. It’s been hotly debated whether he would have won reelection to the Senate had he run again in 2004, given the pervasive resentment in North Carolina that he used his seat as a way station for national ambitions. While Edwards did well in the South Carolina Democratic primary in 2004, the Kerry–Edwards ticket not only didn’t win a single Southern state, it didn’t win Edwards’s home state, his home county, or his hometown of Robbins. Edwards says people vote for a president, not a vice president, and he and Kerry have been at each other’s throats over the finer points of that debate since they ceded the election to Bush. Edwards has openly blamed Kerry for not fighting back hard enough against the Swift Boat attacks, while Kerry’s people have accused Edwards of failing to deliver Southern votes (though Kerry ignored the South until he chose Edwards as his running mate).

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By apologizing for voting in 2003 to allow President Bush to invade Iraq, Edwards has made candor his presiding virtue, positing himself as the antidote to the prevarications of the Bush era (while giving himself a stick with which to wallop Clinton, who hasn’t quite budged on her vote). He’s also become much more stridently protectionist on trade, courting the labor vote by hiring campaign manager David Bonior, a former congressional majority whip and longtime union advocate who worked with Dick Gep-hardt on the congressman’s 2004 presidential run. (Labor might help Edwards in key primary states, like Nevada and Bonior’s home state of Michigan.) Edwards confessed to Bonior that his 2000 Senate vote supporting free trade with China was, like his war vote, a “mistake.” (more…)

While it might be that Edwards was something of a late bloomer when it came to politics and government, it appears that his interest in politics and political issues has been superficial at best:

Will Americans really want a candidate who was so disengaged from government that he voted in only 7 of the 13 elections before his own race? Who has so little regard for his own political history that he cannot recall whom he supported for the nomination in 1992? (”My guess would be Kerrey,” Mr. Edwards said of former Senator Bob Kerrey. “But I don’t remember.”)

Because of Edwards’s relative lack of experience, it should come as no surprise that even Kerry family members were skittish about him being chosen as the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate. Indeed, it should come as no surprise that Kerry himself expressed concerns about Edwards’s qualifications during the Democratic primaries — concerns that Republicans are all too happy to throw back against the Kerry-Edwards campaign. And why shouldn’t they? From discussing how we must deal with Iraq to discussing the issue of gay marriage, Edwards has been consistently found wanting in his knowledge of policy issues.

Edwards won national attention and acclaim thanks to his stump speech about “Two Americas” and thanks to his image as a former trial lawyer who is a champion for the average American. Of course, as a lawyer myself, I certainly don’t begrudge Edwards his decision to follow a career in the law, and certainly, plaintiffs’ attorneys are needed to keep excesses in check. But that does not justify Edwards’s contribution to the propagation of unsound medical care thanks to his work in one particular trial. Edwards’s “Two Americas” speech is similarly off-base. Indeed, if it is the case that the economy will grow faster this year than it has in the past two decades, Edwards’s pessimistic speech and populist arguments will seem especially hollow.

America’s first ever Vice President, John Adams, once remarked that “Today I am nothing, but tomorrow I may be everything.” In an age where we are fighting a war against terrorists whose last attack in the United States sought to destroy major government buildings and kill government leaders, Adams’s words serve emphasize the importance of selecting a Vice President who is knowledgeable about the issues. Instead, John Kerry has wasted his first Presidential choice by selecting a charming man who at best does not care, and at worst is genuinely confused about the policy issues of the day. Democrats will inevitably counter that George W. Bush was/is clueless as well, and if that is what they think, then they can cast their votes accordingly. But apart from this being nothing more than a fallacious tu quoque reply, it begs the following question: If Democrats are so repulsed by the caricature of an out-of-his-depth George W. Bush, then why did they agree so willingly with the choice of a Vice Presidential candidate who fits that caricature in so many ways?

Tech Central 7/15/04
http://www.techcentralstation.com/071504F.html

Edwards’ accent is upcountry Carolina. His ancestors came from Georgia and the hills of South Carolina. Like thousands of other Southerners in the early 20th century, they were sharecroppers who left the farms to work in the textile mills, where there at least was a steady paycheck.

His maternal grandparents worked in a cotton mill in Utica, a mill village on the outskirts of Seneca, about 10 miles from Clemson University. His father’s people were more upwardly mobile. Edwards’ grandfather ran a small furniture store and served on the town council of nearby Walhalla.

Edwards’ parents, Wallace Edwards and Bobbie Wade, were both working in the mill when they met at a square dance at a nearby state park. They married in 1952 and settled into a three-room rental in Utica Mill Village.

Edwards’ first home may be the perfect campaign prop in his quest for the presidency — the modern equivalent of the log cabin. Earlier this summer, Edwards and his parents stood outside the mill village house and took questions from reporters.

“We didn’t know any better than this was good,” said Wallace Edwards. “We had the basics, food and clothes.”

Their first child, Johnny, was born in 1953, his father taking out a $50 bank loan to pay the hospital bill. Six months later, Bobbie was back at work folding sheets on the night shift at J.P. Stevens. Wallace, who worked the day shift, took care of their son in the evenings.

They lived briefly in a public housing project, but things soon got better for the young family.

Wallace spent most of his career with Milliken & Co., a huge textile operation based in Spartanburg. He was transferred from town to town in the textile belt as he got increasingly better jobs in the industrial engineering department. He took his family to Union, S.C., Rutherfordton, N.C., Clemson, S.C., back to Seneca, and then to Thompson, Ga.

John Edwards says his South Carolina neighborhoods were pretty rough. When he was about 8, his father and an older cousin, Tim Addis, taught him how to battle bullies.

“You wait until they get close to you and then you hit them as hard as you can right in the nose,” Edwards said, laughing. “And they were right; it worked. You punch somebody in the nose, and they will back off, every single time.”

By the time Wallace Edwards brought the family to Robbins in 1965, he was a department head and soon would become production manager of the local Milliken plant.

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The Edwardses were solidly middle class. For most of the time in Robbins, they lived on leafy Frye Street. Their neighbors included an insurance agent, a teacher, a lawyer and a truck driver. An optometrist now lives in the house where Edwards spent the longest period of his childhood.

His father eventually left Milliken, frustrated that he could not advance further in the company because he had not attended college. He set up his own consulting firm advising textile companies.

His mother held a series of jobs, including starting a small roadside antiques store where she bought furniture, refinished it and sold it to help put her son through college. She worked for the county board of elections. She took her last job, as a rural letter carrier in West End, to provide her family with health insurance.

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Edwards’ college days were a time of great turmoil and social unrest. At NCSU, students organized antiwar marches and held “Dump Nixon” signs. The country was bitterly divided over the Watergate scandal.

But Edwards — focused on his studies, sports and girlfriends — seems to have floated above the political and cultural wars. Many young men at NCSU sported long hair and beards. But pictures of Edwards show him cleanshaven at NCSU and sporting a neat mustache and longish hair at Carolina. Edwards never served in the armed forces; the draft was abolished in 1973, when he was still in college.

Edwards acknowledges that he tried marijuana “not frequently [but] more than once” while in Raleigh and Chapel Hill. He said he had not used marijuana since leaving school.

His parents were lifelong Republicans, in part because of the corporate culture of the company headed by Roger Milliken, a major GOP donor who encouraged his executives and managers to become Republicans.

“John and I used to debate the Nixon-McGovern election,” said Garner, his NCSU roommate. “I kind of went in the direction of protesting the war. John was more firmly seated in supporting our government. Part of that was the influence of his father.”

Garner remembers that Edwards was undecided about whether to vote in 1972 for President Richard Nixon or whether to vote for the Democratic challenger, Sen. George McGovern.

Edwards says he does not remember how he voted. But he says he might have first registered as an independent. He says he thinks he changed his registration to Democrat by 1976.

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It was Johnny Reid Edwards, however, who changed his name, although not legally. In law school, he started referring to himself as John. He believed that sounded better for his new career.

Charlotte Observer 9/7/03
http://www.newsobserver.com/politics/politicians/edwards/eyeonedwards/story/1401790p-7371865c.html