“The whole thing is just baffling”

The whole thing is just baffling. Why would Edwards enter the race under these circumstances? And why didn’t Edwards quit the race a few months later when it was discovered his wife’s cancer had spread — giving him a graceful reason to bow out? Did John and Elizabeth Edwards really think the affair could be kept secret indefinitely? Was there any thought at all given to the impact on their children, their supporters, the Democratic Party and the nation if and when the affair was exposed?

Was Edwards really so egotistical, so ambitious to think taking the risk was worth the possible (and likely) consequences?

Apparently so.

Kalamazoo (MI) Gazette

I would ask Elizabeth that last question, too.

John Edwards’ Wife: New Book Will Address Affair

You’d think after the chaos last year surrounding former Senator John Edwards’ personal life, his wife, Elizabeth, would not be looking for more publicity — or inviting questions.

But on May 12th, Broadway Books, a division of Random House, is releasing a new short memoir by Elizabeth called “Resilience,” a follow up to her best selling “Saving Graces.”

Edwards insiders are wondering if “Resilience” will be a tell-all, tell-some, tell-none, or an exercise in denial. The Broadway Books catalog says Edwards has written “an unsentimental and ultimately inspirational meditation on the gifts we can find among life’s biggest challenges.”

The publication of “Resilience” may not prove so inspirational to one reader, however: Rielle Hunter, the woman who gave birth last year to a baby girl whom many speculate was fathered by Edwards. Hunter has privately told friends that the child is Edwards’. Sources say the resemblance is as good as a paternity test.

So far, Hunter and Edwards have not come to any agreement about the baby’s paternity or finances — absolutely some of “life’s biggest challenges.”

The usually private Elizabeth Edwards, I am told, is definitely including her take on the relationship in her new book. Her publicist says she will be addressing John’s “affair and how she experienced it.”

Indeed, how Elizabeth “experienced” may be just as the public did: Edwards suddenly exited the race for the Democratic presidential nomination on January 30, 2008. In early August, after much pressure and a sting by the National Enquirer, he admitted the affair. What he didn’t say: the end of his campaign came exactly one month before Hunter gave birth to baby Frances Quinn.

Fox News

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.

snip

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.”

snip

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.

Obama better than Edwards at his best

In Des Moines, hours before the boisterous political beauty pageant that precedes the nation’s first nominating vote, every utility pole, every sidewalk crack big enough to jam a spike into, every patch of soil around the trees lining Fifth Avenue sported red, white and blue placards for Hillary Clinton.

The work by thousands of volunteers outside and inside the auditorium was a stunning display of the organizational strength that, beyond money and charisma, really wins in Iowa. But by the time the 9,000 Democrats arrived for the Nov. 10 Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner, there were strong signs of — and for — her competitors.

Supporters of Barack Obama were especially “fired up” and “ready to go,” as they would chant all night. The campaign shrewdly used a concert by John Legend as a magnet for thousands who, clad in red T-shirts, then marched noisily to the hall.

John Edwards was at his best, even though his supporters numbered fewer than Obama’s or Clinton’s. His passionate populist appeal eclipsed Clinton’s lower-keyed, broad-themed argument for her candidacy. Then Obama, speaking last by lot, leaped over both of them with a powerful speech that, while not mentioning her by name, skewered Clinton relentlessly.

Most of Iowa’s political and pundit class opined that Obama thus established himself as the guy to beat here. “Clinton opened the door by merely being good,” said state Rep. Dolores Mertz, 82, the grande dame of Iowa’s legislature, who is not supporting any candidate. “Obama walked right through it.”

Daily Press 11/23/07
http://www.dailypress.com/news/opinion/dp-ed_levy_1123nov23,0,2915836.story

Iowa county official jilts Edwards for Obama

Ernie Schiller isn’t afraid to make the ultimate comparison in the Democratic Party. Sen. Barack Obama, he said, reminds him of President John F. Kennedy.

“I remember as a kid that John F. Kennedy was the first president who kind of brought people to their knees thinking about America,” Schiller said last week. “I do believe Sen. Obama offers that hope.”

Schiller is a Lee County supervisor and retired high school teacher. He’s already signed on to serve as a precinct chair for Obama in the Jan. 3 Iowa Caucuses.

The campaign keeps pushing him into the limelight, however, because of a past allegiance. It turns out that, until a few weeks ago, he was backing John Edwards.

Schiller broke with the former senator from North Carolina after watching Edwards’ Iowa poll numbers take a hard downward turn. Now he feels it is important to let his neighbors know.

“I had supported Sen. Edwards all along …,” he said, “but I’m looking for somebody who can take our nation to the next level without any cause for not getting elected, and I feel he’s kind of flailing out there right now.”

The Hawk Eye 11/22/07
http://www.thehawkeye.com/Story/obama_112207

Edwards’ aggressive strategy snubbed by Clinton

John Edwards is taking an aggressive strategy against Democratic rival Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton — warning against trading “corporate Republicans for corporate Democrats.”

snip

Clinton has, for the most part, ignored Edwards’ attacks. At a campaign appearance in Iowa this week, Clinton made no mention of Edwards.

Edwards and Clinton do not differ significantly on most issues. But Edwards has tried to cast himself as an outsider who will push for change, while depicting Clinton as part of the entrenched Washington establishment.

Edwards’ recent aggressiveness — a dramatic change from the sunny optimism that marked his 2004 run for the presidency — has sparked mixed reaction among Iowa voters.

snip

Edwards has walked a fine line. He doesn’t call Clinton corrupt but says she is part of a corrupt system in Washington controlled by powerful drug, insurance and oil companies. Edwards that says he respects Clinton’s positions but that voters have a right to know the differences between the candidates.

Edwards’ criticism is almost exclusively directed at Clinton. He is vying with Obama for the anti-Clinton vote, so he is careful not to say anything that would alienate those voters on the fence.

Raleigh News & Observer 11/22/07
http://www.scrippsnews.com/node/28512

“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/

Edwards and Obama camps de facto allies?

Edwards goes on to enumerate the many “differences I have with Senator Clinton on a whole range of issues.” But when I ask about Barack Obama, Edwards not only speaks warmly of how they are substantively simpatico, he prefaces his comments about their stylistic divergences—Obama’s tendency toward conciliation, Edwards’s toward confrontation—with the emphatic phrase, “Now, I’m not criticizing him.”

On first inspection, the strategy of going after Clinton while giving Obama a pass might seem odd: After all, Edwards and Obama are competing for the non-Hillary vote in Iowa. But the Edwards approach has its logic. Roughly 120,000 voters participated in the caucuses in 2004, and the savviest operatives in all three campaigns assume that something like half of likely caucusgoers are still undecided. (That public polls put the percentage at between 10 and 15 percent is dismissed as yet another sign of those polls’ notorious unreliability when it comes to Iowa.) For the Edwards campaign, the first crucial task in the next month and a half is to raise the stakes of the election in the eyes of those 60,000 undecided voters, to convince them that fundamental change is necessary, that not just any Democrat will do in 2008. Because if any Democrat will do, Clinton—the safe choice, the known commodity—likely wins.

In the drive to raise the stakes thus, the Obama campaign serves a useful purpose, for its message of root-and-branch transformation of Washington echoes that of Edwards. It’s also the case that Obama and Edwards’s demographic bases (upscale for the former, downscale for the latter) don’t overlap as much as Edwards’s and Clinton’s do, so Edwards and Obama can both grow their ranks of supporters without cannibalizing each other’s. And that, if Edwards and Clinton later wind up in a one-on-one race, the Edwards people hope to pick up Obama’s fans, particularly the young ones—hence an imperative to tread lightly on the Illinois senator.

So the Edwards and Obama camps are de facto allies in the cause of toppling Clinton? Certainly, in the weeks following Clinton’s wretched debate performance at the end of October in Philadelphia, the two sides seemed not just to be crooning from the same songbook, but doing so in perfect-pitch a cappella harmony. In the blogosphere, where some Edwards boosters saw the putative alliance as a suicide pact for their man, theories even sprouted that Trippi—who angled for a job with Obama before signing on with Edwards and is a friend of Obama’s backroom Svengali, David Axelrod—was an Obama mole within the House of Edwards.

In fact, the Obama campaign has never seen the situation the way the Edwards people do. If there was any doubt that this was true, it was removed last week, when David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, unleashed a strategy memo that strafed Edwards almost as severely as it did Clinton. “On many core issues the Edwards of today is different than the Edwards of 1998, or even 2004,” Plouffe wrote. “It’s admirable to admit mistakes but John Edwards has apologized for most of his record while in the Senate, saying he got it wrong on trade with China, Right to Work, Packer Ban, No Child Left Behind, Bankruptcy reform and of course, the Iraq War.” And for good measure, Plouffe added, “Senator Edwards does not show an inclination toward unity, suggesting compromise is a dirty word.”

The objectives of Obama’s team are straightforward: to make Iowa (and the rest of the contest) a two-person race between their guy and Hillary. In Plouffe’s telling, Edwards is fading fast in Iowa. And a key Obama supporter there, the former state party chairman Gordon Fischer, gave an interview last week disparaging the turnout of Edwards supporters at the big-deal Jefferson-Jackson Dinner on November 10, arguing that Obama was well poised to pick up Edwards’s voters, whom he described as “up for grabs.”

New York Magazine 11/18/07
http://nymag.com/news/politics/powergrid/40989/index1.html

“Product Liability”

(CNN) — “Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio took a direct shot at fellow White House hopeful former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina at Thursday’s CNN Democratic presidential debate.

“In the last debate, Hillary Clinton was criticized by John Edwards for some trade-related issue,” said Kucinich. “But the fact of the matter is, John, you voted for China trade understanding that workers were going to be hurt. Now, you’re a trial lawyer, you knew better.”

When given the chance to respond, Edwards said, “I’m not sure what being a trial lawyer has to do with it.”

Kucinich quickly shot back “product liability.”

CNN Political Ticker 11/15/07
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2007/11/15/kucinich-and-edwards-spar/

Edwards’ negativity helps Obama’s rise

After the first Democratic debate, at the end of April, when Hillary Clinton made her main rivals seems small and insignificant, I expected that Barack Obama would fade from contention even before the Iowa Caucus. And in the months that followed, Obama seemed to be doing just that. But Clinton’s recent missteps, amplified by John Edwards’ strident attacks upon her, provided Obama with an opening–and in a stirring speech before the Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Des Moines November 10, Obama took it. Based purely on opinion polls–and some scattered interviewing–I still see Clinton as the favorite for the nomination, but I can now envision a scenario in which Obama could surpass her.

snip

After the debate, Edwards, whose own campaign seems to be floundering, seized upon Clinton’s missteps to run the kind of incendiary ads one would expect to see from opponents in a general election. The ads, dubbed “The Politics of Parsing,” showed Clinton offering contradictory or equivocal responses on whether to withdraw from Iraq, how to fix social security, and what to do about driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants. Edwards’ attacks may not help his own standing with voters, but they are likely to wound Clinton, just as Dick Gephardt’s attacks wounded front-runner Howard Dean before the 2004 Iowa Caucus.

The prime beneficiary of Edwards’ ads, and potentially of Edwards’ flagging support, is Obama, who has pulled statistically even with Clinton in the latest Iowa poll. In the past Clinton was able to argue that there was no significant political difference between herself and Obama, and that due to her superior experience, she was more likely to accomplish what they both advocated. But Clinton’s equivocation and transparent calculation raised questions about whether she was sufficiently committed to carry out their common objectives. Clinton could also benefit from the perception that a white woman of considerable experience was more electable than a black man who had only served in the Senate for three years and had little to show for it. But Clinton’s equivocation–and the controversy over the White House papers–was a reminder of her political vulnerabilities, which would be fully exploited in a general election campaign. (One need only recall the 2004 election when John Kerry’s positioning and flip-flopping, widely known to reporters, barely surfaced during the primaries, but were successfully made into a major issue during the general election.)

Obama’s speech at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner advanced the argument for his own candidacy. None of the other Democratic or Republican candidates can match his sheer rhetorical brilliance: his ability to be at once cool and passionate, cerebral and emotional. Earlier in the campaign, his eloquence appeared superfluous. It was negated by Clinton’s polish and experience. But as Clinton’s vulnerabilities have reemerged, Obama’s oratorical powers have suddenly become relevant again. They are seen as his means of transcending his inexperience and race (which will be a disadvantage in a general election campaign). They are a promise that, unlike Clinton, he will actually do what he says he is going to do without getting caught in the maelstrom of Washington party politics.

The New Republic 11/15/07
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=c8aebe97-6289-4ec2-b6c8-ad14e59ccc0a