|
Mark,
John Edwards is back in the news these days. You were the very first high-profile columnist to recognize Edwards for the phony he is. ( Correct me if I'm wrong). Your readers might enjoy a look your very first column on "the subject". I know I would.
If I'm not mistaken, you had him pegged even before he was chosen as the lesser half of the Dem's '04 "Dream Ticket".
John Gross
Quebec
MARK SAYS: I think the first time I wrote about him was in The Spectator during the New Hampshire primary after getting up close and personal, at least to his hair:
My man John Edwards, the pretty-boy trial lawyer with the fabulous bangs and a lovely layered nape (I’ve seen a lot of his neck this primary season), hailed his spectacular triumph of tying with General Clark, when only a week earlier General Clark had had double his numbers in the polls. This is true. But Senator Edwards didn’t catch up with General Clark. Instead, General Clark dwindled down to Senator Edwards — and it’s hard to see how the Senator can take credit for that. More importantly, coming out of Iowa a week earlier as a strong second to Kerry with 32 per cent of the vote, Edwards should have had a real bounce. Instead, he flopped, ending not with his fabulous bangs but with a whimper. I saw him up in the mountains on Saturday, when he brought his ‘positive message’ to Gorham Town Hall. ‘This election is about the future of the country,’ he said. Howard Dean and John Kerry and Wes Clark also say it, but Edwards says it better: Dean says it angrily, and Kerry says it groggily, as if he’s in danger of falling asleep midway through the sentiment, and Clark says it tetchily, usually in response as to why he’s claiming he’s always been against the war when in the Times of London last April he gave the full Monica to Bush and Blair for their tremendous military victory.
So give Senator Edwards credit: he can pull off this platitude better than his rivals. But all his issues are weird trial-lawyer obsessions — you should have the right to sue your health insurer; credit card companies and mortgage lenders should have to explain their interest rates in bigger print. He sounds like he’s auditioning next year’s class action suits. If he was the nominee and there was another chad-dangling stand-off, I’d bet on Edwards to represent himself and sue his way into the White House.
Otherwise, the pretty boy is relentlessly positive — as he says, ‘If you’re looking for the best candidate to attack the other Democrats, I’m not your guy,’ which is itself a not so subtle attack on the other candidates. But eventually the condescension grinds you down. Even Democrats, even in a broken-down North Country mill town, don’t want to be told they’re helpless children who can’t function in the world without Edwards swaddling them in a cocoon of government regulations. And, after a while, you begin to notice that while he’s got policies to address the fine print on your MasterCard statement, he’s got nothing to say about the great issues of the day, aside from taking action to prevent ‘war profiteering’ by Bush cronies. In the crush as he was leaving, I asked him what he would do about Iraq.
‘We need to get the UN in there,’ he said.
‘But they were in there. They pulled out because it was too dangerous.’
‘We need to get Nato in there,’ he said.
‘But 21 out of the 34 countries with troops on the ground are, in fact, Nato members.’
‘Hey, that’s what I love about these town hall meetings,’ he said, shaking my hand. ‘You get to hear from the people.’
He was always an oleaginous creep. What we didn't realize at the time was that he was a sociopath - and that the otherwise elusive "coatless girl" who figured in so many of his speeches would turn out to be his own love-child. The profile below is from a few months after the primary. Don't forget, the SteynOnline Request of the Week appears each Thursday, so do drop a line requesting a favorite column or even a favourite column here.
The Tearjerker
from The Sunday Telegraph, July 11th 2004
“We've got better vision. We've got better ideas. We've got real plans. And we've got better hair," said John Kerry, introducing his running mate. The Kerry-Edwards vision, ideas, etc don't look so good in the cold light of day, but John Edwards's hair does. I can personally vouch for his beautiful layered nape, having spent much of New Hampshire primary season looking at the back of his tanned neck on chilly winter mornings. He likes to campaign in the round, so all winter, in Legion halls and diners, the advance men rearranged the furniture and then the pretty-boy Southerner would come bouncing into the circle to the strains of Small Town (by has-been rocker John Mellencamp).
Radiating all the vigour and enthusiasm Kerry had surgically removed at birth, the honey-toned Edwards found himself adored by the media for his "two Americas" stump speech, a Disraelian portrait of Dickensian gloom conjured in the tones of a Depression-era sob-sister. Even if you have never heard it, you know how it goes: there's one America where Dick Cheney's oil buddies are swigging down Martinis and toasting their war profits; but there's another America where "tonight a 10-year-old little girl will go to bed hungry, hoping and praying that tomorrow will not be as cold as today because she doesn't have the coat to keep her warm".
You'd have to have a heart of stone not to be weeping with laughter at that line. But Democratic primary voters aren't that rude. So they looked thoughtful and engaged, and they nodded and they applauded. And then they went out and voted for somebody else. After you've heard the speech a couple of times, you realise that John Edwards is perhaps the most condescending candidate in America. But the voters condescended right back, smiling politely at the clean-cut charmer, and then going away and forgetting about him.
In New Hampshire, he came a poor fourth. Likewise, New Mexico and North Dakota. In Delaware, he came third, with 11 per cent of the vote. In Oklahoma, he came second, managing to lose to loopy General Wesley Clark. The only place he won was the state of his birth, South Carolina. In Florida, he pulled 10 per cent of the vote; Maine, 8 per cent; Mississippi, Arizona, 7 per cent. Edwards is a lawyer, and supposedly his great strength is his ability to make an argument and sell it to a jury. But the more the primary jurors heard his argument, the less they were sold on it. "There are two Americas," said Conan O'Brien on NBC. "Unfortunately for Edwards, neither one voted for him."
Who is John Edwards? Well, in a nutshell, he's the metaphorical brother of that non-existent coatless girl. Now 51, but looking a well-preserved 12, he was born in Seneca, South Carolina, and had a soi-disant dirt-poor, hardscrabble childhood in Robbins, North Carolina. His dad worked in the textile mills, and John was the first member of his family ever to go to college. Where Senator Kerry's biography is full of problematic phrases like "Swiss finishing school", Edwards's is a classic American story - if one overlooks some of the details. According to Sidney Blumenthal, Clinton-stain-mopper-turned-Guardian-columnist, "He bears the memory of his father taking the family to a local restaurant after church only to leave when he realised he could not afford anything on the menu."
Really? Robbins was a town of just over 1,000 people, so presumably it was, if not the only restaurant, one of only two or three. In small towns, folks generally know what the local eateries charge. And, while the Edwards family was poor by comparison with John Kerry, dad was in fact the mill's production manager (though the son tends to leave that bit out). So, in a mill town, at a restaurant presumably priced to cater for mill workers, the management of the mill couldn't afford to eat?
Ah, well. There are two Americas, and, as a successful plaintiff's attorney, Edwards spent 20 years exaggerating the gulf between them. "Plaintiff's attorney" is American for the kind of lawyer who specialises in those suits that Britons find so fascinating - you spill the coffee on your lap, so you sue McDonald's for a gazillion dollars, etc. Edwards worked an ostensibly less ridiculous seam: suing doctors and hospitals when babies were born with brain defects. He made his name with a 1985 cerebral palsy case, where he channelled the words of the unborn child as she waited in the womb, hour after hour.
"She said at 3, `I'm fine.' She said at 4, `I'm having a little trouble, but I'm doing OK.' Five, she said, `I'm having problems.' At 5.30, she said, `I need out'," Edwards told his hushed jury. "She speaks to you through me. And I have to tell you right now - I didn't plan to talk about this - right now I feel her. I feel her presence. She's inside me."
The jury came back with a $6.5 million award, and Edwards was the hottest trial lawyer in North Carolina. His line, in that and other cases, was that there would have been no brain damage if the doctor, instead of the breech delivery, had performed a caesarean. Thanks in part to lawyers like Edwards, there are now far more caesarean sections than ever before, yet without any reduction in birth defects. The correlation between C-sections and birth defects is non-existent. But Edwards sold junk-science to jury after jury, for big bucks. In his "two Americas" routine, he talks about his commitment to "bringing down the cost of healthcare". One reason it costs more than it did is because of Edwards and his fellow ambulance-chasers.
Nonetheless, if the Bush campaign is figuring on tarring Edwards as a fancypants trial lawyer, they should rethink. He spent much of his life defending kids against corporations, and, whatever the fine print, the basic outline of that terrain is not favourable to Republicans. For another, his own son died in a car accident at the age of 16 - the one stark tragedy in Edwards's effortless career rise and happy home life with his college sweetheart. Today, John and Elizabeth Edwards have three children - a daughter at college, and two youngsters born since the death of their first son. What the Republicans see as a shyster the media will paint as a champion of defenceless children driven by a heart-rending twist of fate.
It's standard on the Left now to insist that Bush's "war" is a fiction cooked up by Dick Cheney to enrich his pals. But Edwards's two Americas are the real fantasy. Take that 10-year old girl, hungry and coatless. In America, poverty doesn't mean hunger, it means fat - it's harassed moms shovelling 99-cent cheeseburgers into their kids because it's cheap and quick. Nor does poverty mean coatlessness. Edwards's shivering 10-year-old can get a brand-new quilted winter coat for $9.99 at JC Penney, or secondhand for three bucks at my local thrift shop - at least until Edwards and Kerry crack down on the cheap textile imports they've been attacking these past two years.
There may be two Americas, but Edwards's America doesn't exist anywhere from Maine to Hawaii. Even as a lurid Victorian melodrama designed to frighten prosperous soccer moms into voting against hard-hearted Republicans, it sounds ridiculous
In the meantime, Edwards has nothing to say on foreign policy except a pledge to end "war profiteering by Halliburton". Once he discovered that you can't sue al-Qaeda, he seems to have lost interest in the subject, and his shallowness was embarrassing in some of the primary debates. As I wrote here in February, "His basic pitch is that the entire electorate are victims, and his candidacy is the all-time biggest class-action suit on your behalf." John Edwards's approach - the American people are helpless children - is the wrong message for dangerous times.
Back when his maudlin 'twas-Christmas-Day-in-the-workhouse shtick was still new, I offered to buy a brand new coat for every 10-year-old coatless girl the Edwards campaign could produce if in return he included one substantive passage on foreign policy in his stump speech. I'm still waiting on both counts.
|
