This is a few days late, and I’m sure other have made a similar observation, but I found it appropriate that John Edwards launched his campaign for president with a shovel in his hands. What bothers me about Edwards is not his positions on the issues (though I disagree with most), his inexperience or even his hair, it’s the ease with which he says things like this,
As a young trial attorney in 1985, about a dead baby,
“She speaks to you through me,” the lawyer went on in his closing argument. “And I have to tell you right now â?? I didn’t plan to talk about this â?? right now I feel her. I feel her presence. She’s inside me, and she’s talking to you.”
The jury came back with a $6.5 million verdict in the cerebral palsy case, and Mr. Edwards established his reputation as the state’s most feared plaintiff’s lawyer.
And as a young politician in 2004, Edwards infamously told a Kerry-Edwards rally in Newton, Iowa,
“If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.”
Charles Krauthammer, himself confined to a wheelchair, had this to say,
In my 25 years in Washington, I have never seen a more loathsome display of demagoguery. Hope is good. False hope is bad. Deliberately, for personal gain, raising false hope in the catastrophically afflicted is despicable. Where does one begin to deconstruct this outrage?
I have a hard time taking John Edwards seriously as a candidate. That is not to say he isn’t a serious candidate, just that I can’t get past his reliance on utter BS.