You wouldn’t know it from his campaign speeches, but John Edwards has a credential that no other presidential candidate can claim: He is the only one, from either party, who has ever been on a national ticket.snip
In a recent interview, Edwards waved off questions about whether he’d learned anything from the experience of helping run a national campaign that nearly defeated George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
The former North Carolina senator said the experience helped him understand how to function in the glare of an around-the-clock spotlight, but he said he couldn’t think of any other lessons.
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His Iowa campaign co-chairman, Rob Tully, said Edwards appeared frustrated after setting aside his presidential hopes and agreeing to be the vice presidential candidate in 2004.
“I saw a candidacy that was stifled by the Kerry campaign,” Tully said. “If you noticed, his talk about ‘two Americas’ just died. They did not let John Edwards be John Edwards.”
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Many Edwards backers believe he could have won Iowa if he’d had a few more weeks to campaign. That could have led to an Edwards/Kerry ticket.
Tully, a former state party chairman, said that Edwards is a better, more natural campaigner than Kerry, and that he believes the team could have beaten Bush if Edwards had been at the top of the ticket.
Part of the difference between the two men, Tully said, is that Edwards’ instinct is to swing back when someone attacks. He said Edwards was dismayed when Kerry’s campaign declined to return fire after critics questioned Kerry’s credentials as a war hero. Edwards “tried to persuade these guys to hit back, and they wouldn’t do it,” Tully said.The candidate’s father said that Edwards has ambitious ideas on how to help working people, but that he felt frustrated in trying to move them forward as a vice presidential candidate and as a senator.
“I think he saw how tough it was to really accomplish what he really wanted to accomplish,” Wallace Edwards said during a recent trip to Iowa. Those frustrations help fuel his son’s ambition to be president, the elder Edwards said.
As his wife, Bobbie, sat by his side, Wallace Edwards said their son was kept on a short leash as the vice presidential candidate.
“That’s not unusual,” he said. “We’ve heard a lot of comments that if he’d been at the top of the ticket, we probably would have won,” he said. “We felt that way, too.”
University of Iowa political science professor Peverill Squire is skeptical of the theory that Edwards/Kerry would have stood a better chance of winning than Kerry/Edwards.
Edwards had only been in the Senate since 1998, he had never held any other public office, and he had little name recognition nationally, Squire said.
By contrast, Kerry had been in the Senate since 1985, and he was fairly well known before he ran for president.
DesMoines Register 11/26/07
http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071126/NEWS09/711260313/-1/caucus
