Edwards camp eat Kerry-Edwards sour grapes, even Dad

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.

“Will the real John Edwards please stand up?” Kucinich said.

MANCHESTER, NH — Revelations in today’s New York Times regarding John Edwards’ staunch pro-war stance as a Vice Presidential candidate in 2004 “raise serious questions about the credibility of his positions on every issue being debated in this Presidential campaign,” Ohio Congressman and Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich said today.“Voters have every right to ask, ‘Were you telling the truth then, John, or are you telling the truth now?’ And Senator Edwards has a responsibility to answer,” Kucinich said.

In a major story today about the relationship between Edwards and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry during the 2004 campaign, the Times reported, “Mr. Kerry had increasing doubts about the war. But Mr. Edwards argued that they should not renounce their votes — they had to show conviction and consistency.” Edwards was a co-sponsor of the 2002 war authorization resolution, along with Sen. Joseph Lieberman.

“Mr. Kerry yielded to his running mate,” according to the Times story, and told reporters early in the 2004 campaign that he would still have voted for the 2002 war authorization even knowing that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction. Six weeks later, in a speech at New York University, he reversed himself, over the objections of Edwards, the Times reported. A year later, in an opinion piece published in The Washington Post, Edwards reversed his own position, a move that some Kerry aides described as “politically expedient” in the planned run-up to the 2008 Presidential campaign.

“John Kerry was hammered by the Republicans and by many in the media for changing his positions on the war and other issues in the 2004 campaign,” Kucinich noted. “The fact of the matter is that he wanted to come out against the war in 2004, and John Edwards argued against it.”

“Now,” Kucinich continued, “we have a candidate who voted for the war and voted to fund the war, but says he against it. He voted for the Patriot Act, and now he complains about its abuses. He voted for China Trade in 2000 knowing that Americans would be hurt, and now he’s decrying the unsafe products pouring into this nation from China. He supported nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, now he’s against it.” “Will the real John Edwards please stand up?” Kucinich said.

Dennis 4 President 11/21/07
http://www.dennis4president.com/go/newsroom/edwards%92-pro%11war-posture-in-%9204-raises-serious-credibility-questions/

Kerry-Edwards 2004 rocky road

So the running mates set off across the country together with different messages, sometimes delivered at the same rally: Mr. Kerry leading the crowd in chants for “help,” Mr. Edwards for “hope.” The campaign printed two sets of signs. By November, the disagreement had been so institutionalized that campaign workers handed out fans with both messages, on flip sides.To the end of their disappointing run, the two men were unable to agree on the script, whether for slogans or more substantive matters. And like so many political marriages, the one between Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards — Senate colleagues who became rivals then running mates but never really friends — ended in recrimination and regrets.

Kerry aides complain that Mr. Edwards never stopped running for president — a Democratic Party official recalled some aides wearing “Edwards for President” pins at a fund-raiser long after they were working for the Kerry-Edwards ticket. Kerry supporters say Mr. Edwards refused to play the traditional vice-presidential role of attack dog even going up against a purebred, Dick Cheney. And Mr. Kerry had barely conceded the race, they say, before Mr. Edwards was aiming for 2008 and embarking on what one campaign aide called the “it wasn’t my fault tour” around his home state to distance himself from the loss.

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“We were getting our heads taken off and he was still talking about two Americas,” said David Morehouse, Mr. Kerry’s traveling chief of staff.

“We were constantly negotiating backwards,” said Marcus Jadotte, a Kerry deputy campaign manager who was assigned to travel with Mr. Edwards. “He refused to get to a place where they were truly in concert.”

Edwards believed faulty science on Yucca Mountain, doesn’t anymore

John Edwards, when he was a North Carolina senator, voted twice to open the dump and once against it.

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The former 2004 vice presidential nominee’s has a mixed record on the issue.

After he was selected as Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry’s running mate, Edwards announced he would defer to Kerry’s anti-Yucca position and promised Nevada Sen. Harry Reid he would fight the project.

The former North Carolina senator has said he was trying to protect his constituents by supporting the dump in Nevada.

“We had an issue in North Carolina where they were going to start storing nuclear waste in North Carolina unless we had some other place for the nuclear waste,” Edwards said on his first stop in Nevada as a presidential candidate. But looking at the project from a “national perspective” it doesn’t work, he added.

Edwards now says faulty science was used to support the Yucca Mountain project, and he doesn’t believe nuclear energy is a safe energy source.

Nevada Appeal 11/18/07
http://www.nevadaappeal.com/article/20071118/ELECTIONS/111180127

Elizabeth Edwards criticizes Kerry-Edwards campaign ads

Among other things, she talked about the campaign’s fifty state strategy and differentiated Edwards from the strategy used in 2004 and the one she’s hearing from DC consultant types this cycle too. In 2004 the strategy was the Gore states plus Florida. This year many of the Democratic political class is looking to a Kerry states plus Ohio.

Elizabeth said thats not how John Edwards will campaign if he gets the nomination, she noted the Democrats didn’t air one ad in North Carolina in 2004. They were up in Louisiana for about two seconds.

She went on, “They didn’t run one ad in Tennessee, because Al Gore didn’t carry it in 2000. Kansas? Thomas Frank wrote a whole book about What’s the Matter with Kansas. And Oklahoma, what state could be more Republican than Oklahoma? OK Montana.”

Boston for Edwards 10/27/07
http://eyeopener.typepad.com/bostonforedwards/2007/10/elizabeth-edwar.html

Edwards objected to Kerry-Edwards 2004 concession, wife says

In the interview, Edwards also suggested that John Kerry shouldn’t have conceded when he did in 2004.

RG: Were you disappointed that Sen. Kerry conceded as quickly as he did?

EE: I was very disappointed, not just because we did not count the votes, but because we promised people that if they stood in line and fought for the right to vote, that we would fight with them. And I was very disappointed that the decision was made by the campaign, over John’s objection, not to fight.

You can listen to the interview here.

Politico 10/4/07
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/1007/Elizabeth_Takes_on_Limbaugh.html

One electoral vote for president received by John Edwards in 2004

But all other electoral votes have always been counted by Congress, no matter whom the elector voted for. Thus Congress counted the one electoral vote for president received by John Edwards in 2004, from Minnesota, even though it was believed that the anonymous presidential elector who voted for John Edwards for president in 2004 had merely made a clerical error. In Minnesota, the electors vote secretly, and the Democratic elector who voted for John Edwards never stepped forward to identify himself or herself and explain why he or she had voted for John Edwards.

Ballot Access News 7/20/07
http://www.ballot-access.org/2007/07/20/do-sore-loser-laws-apply-to-presidential-candidates/

Honesty disarming… and false

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.

snip

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).

snip

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.”

Edwards Statement on Bob Shrum and Iraq war vote

MR. RUSSERT: And this is what you write: “That fall of 2002, as a vote loomed on the resolution giving Bush authority to go to war in Iraq, Edwards convened a circle of advisers in his family room in Washington to discuss his decision. He was skeptical, even exercised about the idea of voting yes. His wife Elizabeth was a forceful no. She didn’t trust anything the Bush administration was saying.

“But the consensus view from both the foreign policy experts and the political operatives was that he was” just “too junior in the Senate; he didn’t have the credibility to vote against the resolution. To my continuing regret, I said he had to be for it.

“As I listened to this, I watched Edwards’ face; he didn’t like where he was being pushed to go. The meeting did him a disservice; of course, he was the candidate and if he really was against the war, it was up to him to stand his ground.” And “he didn’t.”

Senator Edwards is now the first candidate who voted for the war to acknowledge it was a mistake.

MR. SHRUM: Right.

MR. RUSSERT: When his campaign learned you were on the program, they sent this statement: “Bob Shrum’s thoughts about Iraq had zero influence on Senator Edwards’ vote. The meeting Shrum describes in his book was a meeting about domestic political issues” to which—“in which several people offered their opinions about Iraq to Senator Edwards. Unfortunately, in Bob Shrum’s worldview, the only conversations that matter are the ones he’s personally involved in. That’s not the truth, of course—but Bob and the truth have a, had a rocky relationship for a long time and this book is no exception.” What’s going on?

MS. MATALIN: Rarrr!

MR. MURPHY: Rarrr! Rarrr!

MR. SHRUM: I guess, I guess they don’t like the book, and I’m not going to respond in kind. Look, that meeting happened. That meeting was about the Iraq war. I’m not suggesting that John Edwards or John Kerry or anybody else went out and voted for that war on purely political grounds. I’m suggesting that the politics they talked about may have shaped and influenced the lens through which they saw and weighed the issue. People have cherry-picked that book about John Edwards. I talk in that book about meeting him in 1997, calling my partners and saying, “I just think I met a future president of the United States.” I think that may still be true. He’s the man who put poverty back on the Democratic Party agenda and the national agenda. I’m sorry they kind of overreact that way, but Kerry, but, but John Edwards himself confirmed the fundamentals of what I said in one of these early debates when he said, “What I learned from the whole experience was to put more faith in my own judgment.” Well, what was his own judgment? I think it was an inclination to be against the war.

MR. RUSSERT: When—in 2004, you had to make a decision to work for John Kerry or John Edwards. You opted for John Kerry.

MR. SHRUM: Yes. I think it was the right decision.

MR. RUSSERT: Why?

MR. SHRUM: I think John Kerry was the best prepared person to be president, I think he was the person who had the best chance to beat George Bush, and although we always forget it and we administer a ritual beating to our defeated Democratic nominees, unlike the Republicans who kind of rehab candidates over and over again, John Kerry came very, very close to being the first person to defeat an incumbent president renominated by his own party in time of war.

Meet the Press
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18980244/

John Edwards’s changing tune on the Iraq vote

By Scot Lehigh, Globe Columnist | April 17, 2007

As he runs for president, John Edwards has cast himself as a candidate who puts candor ahead of politics by saying he was wrong to vote for the Iraq war resolution.

But candor wasn’t what he counseled as John Kerry’s vice-presidential nominee, when he argued strongly against admitting error on Iraq, according to veterans of the 2004 campaign.

On a Feb. 4 appearance on “Meet the Press,” for example, Edwards said he was very critical of himself for that vote, adding: “Anybody who wants to be president of the United States has got be honest and open, be willing to admit when they’ve done things wrong.” Clinton’s refusal to repudiate her vote is “between her and her conscience,” he said at Feb. 21 forum.

That confessional stance has won Edwards considerable credit with Democrats.

Yet as John Kerry’s 2004 ticketmate, the former North Carolina senator was anything but eager to acknowledge error on Iraq. Instead, according to several Kerry-Edwards campaign aides, Edwards argued repeatedly that the two should stand by their votes, even after it had become apparent that Iraq had neither weapons of mass destruction nor collaborative ties with Al Qaeda.

Snip: …one man who had been adamant that Kerry shouldn’t disavow his vote was Edwards. Although Edwards wasn’t with Kerry that day, the two had been traveling by train together over the weekend. Once Bush issued his challenge, the campaign knew the press would soon put the question to the Democratic duo, and so, prior to an event on that Aug. 7 in La Junta, Colo., Kerry and Edwards and various aides huddled to discuss possible responses.

“I specifically remember Edwards having a very distinct take,” says one person in attendance, who paraphrases Edwards’s argument this way: “We need to stick to this. We should stand by our votes, say we would vote that way again. If you admit a mistake, it shows weakness in time of war. That’s what the Republicans want us to do.”

Adds a senior adviser who was there: “There was a discussion about how to answer the question: ‘Was your vote on Iraq a mistake?’ John Edwards had a very strong opinion that we should not waver, and it would show a sign of weakness if we did.” A third source confirms those accounts.

In late September, Kerry struck a different tone at New York University, calling the Iraq war a “profound diversion” from the war on terrorism and making it clear he would not have gone to war knowing Iraq had neither WMD nor ties to Al Qaeda. In campaign discussions preparatory to that speech, Edwards is said to have argued again for sticking by the war resolution votes.

“His view was that we shouldn’t be having this debate, that we should stick by the vote, and more broadly attack the management of the war,” says the first person.

Adds the second source: “He could tell the tide had shifted, but he made one more attempt at having us not change our position. He thought it would show weakness.”

Asked about the difference between the advice Edwards was giving in fall 2004 and his stance now, campaign spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield would say only this: “John Edwards’s campaign is about looking forward and not backward and bringing about the kind of real change that we need in this country.”

Still, though the Edwards campaign would prefer not to look back, his counsel in the 2004 campaign raises this question: Is today’s John Edwards really the candid candidate he would have voters believe? Or is his supposed candor itself just more political positioning?

boston.com

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/04/17/john_edwardss_changing_tune_on_the_iraq_vote/