Al Hunt offers a strong argument for the Edwards' choice. You won't find this one in the National Review, Weekly Standard, et al.
Edwards against Cheney is a nobrainer. For the Dems.
The Boomerang Factor
July 8, 2004; Page A15
Inexperienced on national security and an ambulance-chasing trial lawyer -- the central elements of the Republican attack machine on John Edwards -- may be more briar patches of opportunity than problems for the Democratic vice presidential candidate.
He is inexperienced on foreign affairs. But the contrast will be with Dick Cheney, who came to office with unrivaled experience and has displayed terrible judgment. The North Carolinian has spent much of his professional career as a plaintiff's lawyer, an unpopular breed, but he has represented not dubious causes, but people whose lives have been profoundly impaired by corporate or medical malfeasance.
This selection has further energized the Democratic Party; Sen. Edwards doesn't hurt the ticket anywhere and clearly helps in key battlegrounds. He will face intense new scrutiny, but during the primaries, he campaigned exhaustively for over a year and made no major mistakes; that impressed Sen. Kerry's uber-vetter, Jim Johnson.
The one drawback to the Edwards choice is, if the ticket wins, governing; unlike Dick Gephardt, he's not versed in the ways of Washington.
Republicans argue, not without merit, that 9/11 resurrected the old Cold War criteria for national office. George W. Bush couldn't have passed that test in 2000, and John Edwards couldn't pass it this year, as a presidential candidate. But the candidate is John Kerry, versed in foreign-policy issues and a former war hero, who easily meets the commander-in-chief threshold.
The comparison with the more worldly Mr. Cheney may not be what the Republicans want. This is not your father's Dick Cheney, a bright, principled conservative, respected on both sides of the political aisle for his prudence and civility. Instead, Vice President Cheney has become a rigidly partisan ideologue who shuns relations with Democrats and even some Republicans who don't toe the party line.
He once was held in high public esteem, but polls show that has changed; he's particularly unpopular with independents and swing voters. Although a virtual certainty to remain on the ticket, this week there's widespread speculation in the capital, among Republicans as well as Democrats, over possible dump-Cheney scenarios.
His record should give Republicans discomfort. On Iraq, the Cheney misjudgments are stunning: He was the lead figure in claiming Saddam had nuclear weapons, suggested that reconstruction should be easy as we would be greeted as welcome liberators, and even today refuses to acknowledge that the Saddam-al Qaeda ties were unsubstantial. Tuesday, the bipartisan leaders of the independent commission investigating the September 11 attacks directly refuted Mr. Cheney's claims that he had more intelligence than they did about those ties. The commission, and most independent experts, have found no collaborative links between the Iraqi regime and the terrorist network.
That should complicate the Bush campaign's scenario that the vice president makes mincemeat of John Edwards on national security in their fall debate. It'd be the first time the articulate and always thoroughly prepared North Carolinian was taken apart in a debate.
That, of course, raises the trial lawyer background. Republicans -- with the help of outside fellow travelers like right-wing activist Grover Norquist and business lobbyist Jerry Jasinowski -- already are charging that an administration with the litigious-crazed John Edwards in the White House would destroy American business and the economy.
That's preposterous. Look for the Democrats to trot out the Bob Rubins and Warren Buffetts to talk about the macro-economy. On the narrower issues, the political critics distort Mr. Edwards' work before he came to the Senate. There are, to be sure, sleazy trial lawyers; he wasn't one of them.
He won huge verdicts on behalf of people who were victimized by insensitive companies, inattentive hospitals or inept doctors. When the Bush-Cheney cheerleaders talk about ambulance-chasing or "jackpot justice," they should cite particulars, like the parents of Bailey Griffin. She was born severely brain damaged, and Mr. Edwards won a multimillion-dollar judgment after a jury found negligence; she died at age six. Her father says he doesn't feel like a big winner or a rip-off artist when he visits "my daughter's grave."
There is a real legal/economic problem with huge class-action lawsuits and massive judgments, where some beneficiaries were barely affected. John Edwards wasn't one of these lawyers. The courts are clogged, chiefly because of businesses suing other businesses. That wasn't his forte either.
He did a lot of medical malpractice where some reforms are needed; it's a system that threatens some good medical practitioners, especially specialists like obstetricians and neurosurgeons. But virtually every expert says big judgments, a rarity, and lawyer's contingency fees are only a small part of this problem; the Congressional Budget Office estimates the tort reform measures sought by the White House and Congressional Republicans would reduce health-insurance premiums by only one-half of 1%. And it would shut out some victims.
At the core of the complaint against the tort system practiced by John Edwards is economic elitism and social snobbery. These critics argue that a jury of peers is unfit to consider these cases; they are too affected by the emotional pleas of skilled advocates like John Edwards. But they have no problems with the jury system in death-penalty cases.
Electoral politics, like sporting contests, is about match-ups. John Edwards is an almost perfect complement for John Kerry -- geographically and generationally, biography and style. And the most successful trial lawyer in the state of North Carolina is likely to prove more than a match for the Republican attack teams and Dick Cheney. |
