CanadianKid
New member
Well since we got Desh and Cypress and Darla on here thinking that Edwards is such a good guy, Democratic apologists all of them. Sure Edwards is a Democrat but he aint no liberal. Thats why liberal bloggers like myself, and others on Dailykos, Mydd hate this motherfucker... Since some of our dumb democratic apologist followers dont know the reasons... Here they are...
Kerry's Regrets About John Edwards
By Bob Shrum for Time Magazine
After a day of filming at Edwards's summer home on Figure Eight Island in the Outer Banks, we went out to dinner. Afterward, while Elizabeth drove the car home, John and I headed back on his boat; as the darkness closed in, we got lost in the tall grasses of the shallow waterways. He finally found the channel; and back in his living room, we talked about the likelihood of war in Iraq. Edwards said no one had yet made the case to him.
That fall, as a vote loomed on the resolution giving Bush authority to go to war, 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. 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 even though Edwards was on the Intelligence Committee, he was too junior in the Senate; he didn't have the credibility to vote against the resolution. As I listened to this, I watched Edwards's face; he didn't like where he was being pushed to go. The process violated a principle I'd learned long before—candidates have to trust their own deeply felt instincts. It's the best way to live with defeat if it comes, and probably the best way to win.
The meeting we held in the Edwardses' family room 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. He didn't. If he had, it almost certainly would have been Edwards and not Dean who emerged early on as the antiwar candidate. But Edwards didn't want to look "liberal" and out of the mainstream; he was, after all, the southern candidate and thought of himself as Clintonesque. He valued the advice and prized the support of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. I had my own concerns: If he took the antiwar route, I knew I would have been characterized as a malign force moving him to the left—which wasn't true, although I wish it had been given that I now regard the Iraq invasion as one of the great mistakes in the history of U.S. foreign policy.
Kerry had asked Jim Johnson to head up the vice-presidential search. Jim, my friend stretching back to the 1972 campaign, was one of Washington's best connected "wise men"—at times successively, and at times simultaneously, not only chairman of the giant mortgage company Fannie Mae, but of the Kennedy Center and the Brookings Institution; he had been Gore's chief debate negotiator in 2000, and was a likely treasury secretary or White House chief of staff in a Kerry administration. The candidate was obsessed with keeping the veep process closely held to prevent the speculation and leaks that had embarrassed him when he was on Gore's final list in 2000. This worked—until the last hour.
One option, the one that would have sealed the election, was off the table. John McCain's political strategist John Weaver had talked earlier with Cahill and said he needed to see Kerry about McCain. According to Kerry, when he met with Weaver and Cahill, Weaver said McCain was serious about the possibility of teaming up with him. Kerry had then sounded out McCain, who rejected the idea. McCain, I told Kerry, was running—but for president, in 2008, against Kerry if he was elected, or after a second Bush term. This meant he'd have to prove his loyalty to Republicans; and we couldn't expect much if any help from him if Kerry was slimed by some "independent" Republican group. It didn't matter that Kerry had rallied across party lines to McCain's defense when he was smeared in the 2000 primaries. Kerry nonetheless clung to the hope that if his service record was questioned, being a member of the "band of brothers" would be more important to McCain than party ID. But I didn't expect much "straight talk" from him this time around.
With McCain off the list, I walked from my house to Johnson's, which was next door, on a spring afternoon. The obvious vice-presidential choice, we agreed, was John Edwards; in the primaries, he'd emerged as a first-rate campaigner—and I told Jim that despite thiness on substance, I thought, as I been in 2000, that he could handle Cheney in a debate; We couldn't afford to repeat the Lieberman mistake. But there were two other clear possibilities: Dick Gephardt and Hillary Clinton. Kerry was ready to partner with Clinton if it was the way to win, but he doubted it was. He liked Gephardt, was confident he was up to the job of being president, and hoped he might help carry Missouri, which could make the difference in a close election. But both he and Teresa worried that Gephardt was a gray choice who wouldn't light any fires. While Edwards might, they were both uneasy with him. I'd said to Kerry early on that all I cared about was picking the strongest choice—personal feelings had nothing to do with it.
Johnson had compiled a list of about twenty-five "serious" candidates—and some others besides—and we reviewed it in his living room. In addition to Edwards, Clinton, and Gephardt, it included New Mexico governor Bill Richardson and some "out-of-the-box" choices, like Nebraska's maverick Republican senator Chuck Hagel, a kind of McCain surrogate. Hagel, who I guessed wouldn't accept and didn't know his name was on the list, was a nonstarter because he had a zero rating from the League of Conservation Voters. Richardson's prospects were shadowed by alleged womanizing. Publicly reluctant, he coveted the publicity of being considered, but withdrew before the process was finished.
A quiet round of polling helped guide the search. Hillary Clinton had high negatives—she would hurt the ticket; Dick Gephardt apparently didn't help in Missouri—in fact, Edwards's numbers were decidedly stronger there. When I heard this, I should have questioned whether the numbers actually reflected the ultimate impact of a Gephardt pick. As Kerry's running mate, Gephardt's campaigning and the institutional forces in Missouri might have given us a chance in the state, and he might have boosted us a little in Ohio, maybe just enough. But the process was evolving to where it had started—perhaps not in Kerry's mind, but in the conventional wisdom and the will of the Democrats across the country. When I handed Johnson a memo about advertising to be rolled out right after the choice was announced, I included a contingency for "a VP selection... from outside the present battleground states." Johnson and I both knew that meant North Carolina—and Edwards—but Kerry and Teresa still weren't there.
Kerry talked with several potential picks, including Gephardt and Edwards. He was comfortable after his conversations with Gephardt, but even queasier about Edwards after they met. Edwards had told Kerry he was going to share a story with him that he'd never told anyone else—that after his son Wade had been killed, he climbed onto the slab at the funeral home, laid there and hugged his body, and promised that he'd do all he could to make life better for people, to live up to Wade's ideals of service. Kerry was stunned, not moved, because, as he told me later, Edwards had recounted the same exact story to him, almost in the exact same words, a year or two before—and with the same preface, that he'd never shared the memory with anyone else. Kerry said he found it chilling, and he decided he couldn't pick Edwards unless he met with him again. When they did, Kerry tried to get a better personal feel for his potential number two; as rivals for national office since 2000, shortly after Edwards had entered the Senate, the two men hadn't spent a lot of time together. Kerry also wanted a specific reassurance. He asked Edwards for a commitment that if he was chosen and the ticket lost, Edwards wouldn't run against him in 2008. Edwards agreed "absolutely," as Kerry recalled him saying. If Kerry had shared this at the time, I would have told him what I did later: it was naive to think he could rely on a promise like that. Unlike Joe Lieberman, who'd been plucked from relative obscurity by Gore, Edwards had made his own mark in the primaries. He was ambitious—and if he saw his chance the next time, he was likely to go for it.
On the day the Edwards pick was made public, Edwards and I talked for the first time since I had informed him of our decision to work for Kerry and he had reacted angrily. He said he knew I'd helped get him on the ticket and he was grateful. I told him that I welcomed the possibility that we might be friends again, but that wasn't the reason for my preference. I believed it was the right move for Kerry. Kerry's relationship with Edwards would sour after the election—and mine would simply fade away. When Elizabeth discovered she had breast cancer, John and Teresa reached out to help the Edwardses find the best doctors they could. Marylouise and I called—but afterward, never heard from John again. Maybe we shouldn't have expected to. Kerry told me that the Edwardses simply stopped returning calls or talking to him and Teresa. Within months, Edwards started preparing for a bid in 2008. Kerry said that he wished he'd never picked Edwards, that he should have gone with his gut.
Copyright (c) 2007 by Robert Shrum. From the forthcoming book No Excuses by Robert Shrum, to be published by Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.
This is half the reason why Edwards is a hack...Here is the other half in the NY Times... See there is a huge difference between liberals and democrats...
And token fatass admins think they are the same thing right beefy?
The Long Run
For Edwards, a Marriage Made in Politics That Never Quite Fit
Ting-Li Wang/The New York Times
John Kerry and John Edwards, running mates but never really friends, ended 2004 in recrimination and regrets.
Mr. Edwards refused to play the traditional vice presidential role of attack dog.
The next night, wanting to give the American people something more tangible, John Kerry offered his own pledge, one intended as the ticket’s new slogan: “Help is on the way.”
But Mr. Edwards did not want to say it.
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.
Today, Mr. Edwards insists he is “the same person I’ve always been.” But his experience as a vice-presidential candidate who went down in defeat has clearly influenced his current run for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Having seen up close the perils of seeming to shift with the wind, he is selling himself as the candidate of “conviction” and “bold ideas” and trying to portray the front-runner, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as tacking for political gain. Once the sunny centrist who did not want to criticize his rivals by name, Mr. Edwards has become the most confrontational candidate in the race. And he has courted his party’s left wing by renouncing his vote on the war, something he counseled Mr. Kerry not to do.
“There’s no question John Edwards is different now than he was in 2004,” said Peter Scher, whom Mr. Kerry recruited to run Mr. Edwards’s vice-presidential campaign. “There’s a great deal more confidence in his own instincts and his own judgment. You see much less reliance on consultants and pollsters and media advisers, and more of a willingness to say what he believes and let the chips fall where they may.”
Kerry loyalists, meanwhile, seethe as they watch his new aggressiveness. Stephanie Cutter, who was Mr. Kerry’s communications director, said, “A lot of what I’m seeing now, I wish I’d seen in 2004.”
Mr. Edwards defends his change in tone, calling it the result of “a maturing process.”
“I believe that presidential candidates actually have a responsibility to point out substantive differences, to point out perspectives that are different,” he said in an interview. “I’m totally comfortable doing it.”
Unlikely Pair
John Edwards began campaigning to be John Kerry’s running mate as soon as his own presidential run collapsed when he failed to win any of the Super Tuesday primaries in March 2004. He appeared at rallies for Mr. Kerry. He dispatched emissaries to party officials and Kerry aides, promising that he could raise $20 million and help win his home state, North Carolina, and others the campaign hoped to turn to blue from red. And, as an experienced trial lawyer, he could take on Mr. Cheney.
Mr. Kerry remained hesitant. He had not really known Mr. Edwards in the Senate, and on the primary trail, small resentments had built up. Mr. Kerry wondered why Mr. Edwards thought he could be president before even finishing his first Senate term; Mr. Edwards thought Mr. Kerry did not know how to talk to rural and Southern voters and could not win without them. He bristled at Mr. Kerry’s presumption: when Mr. Kerry said in a debate how he would take on President Bush, Mr. Edwards rebuked him, “Not so fast, John Kerry.”
The two men could hardly have been more different. Mr. Kerry was the craggy Brahmin raised in privilege, Mr. Edwards, smiling, Southern and self-made. Mr. Kerry had all the gravitas Mr. Edwards was often accused of lacking, but Mr. Edwards charmed colleagues and connected with voters in a way that Mr. Kerry could only envy.
Mr. Edwards at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 told Americans, “Hope is on the way.” Mr. Kerry preferred “help.”
Mr. Kerry had spent a career in the Senate, where success depends on accommodating all sides of an issue; he called friends ceaselessly to solicit different points of view until aides seized his cellphone. Mr. Edwards had built his career by choosing a side and not relenting; he was well known for turning down big settlement offers because he was confident he could win his case.
Mr. Edwards and others believed he had done surprisingly well in the primaries because he refused to go negative. Staff members gave away opposition research to other campaigns, one said, because he would not use it.
At the Democratic convention in late July, Mr. Kerry’s advisers encouraged Mr. Edwards to reprise his theme of the primaries, a pledge to bridge the gap between two Americas, one rich, one struggling. Preaching “the politics of hope,” Mr. Edwards mocked the negative campaigning the Republicans were sure to deliver: “Don’t you just hate it?”
But the convention was barely over when the attacks began, starting with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth accusing Mr. Kerry of lying about his military record. Kerry aides complained that Mr. Edwards would resist or try to tone down language when they asked him to deliver negative lines — “pundit lines,” as one of Mr. Edwards’s aides scoffed. He argued it was more important to talk about what the Democrats would do differently rather than what the Republicans had done wrong.
He objected to anything more than the most generic attacks on the Bush administration. After weeks of battering by the Swift boat group, he called only for the president to “stop these ads.” When Mr. Cheney said voting for the Democrats would invite a terror attack, Mr. Edwards called it “un-American.”
“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.”
As prominent Democrats began calling for Mr. Edwards to be more aggressive, Mr. Kerry met with him in Springfield, Ohio, on the last night of the Republican convention and implored him to be tougher on the Republicans.
Mr. Edwards soon stepped up his rhetoric, particularly in his debate with Mr. Cheney. But the Kerry people saw it as a draw at best.
Some campaign aides speculated that Mr. Edwards was trying to protect his reputation so he could run for president again. Others concluded that he believed the lesson of the primaries was that staying positive worked.
“He thought that the right way to win a campaign was to be about hope and a positive message, and in many ways he’s right,” Mr. Jadotte said. “The reality is, that’s the job of the presidential nominee, not the vice-presidential nominee.”
The Edwards camp complained that it was hard to know what the Kerry campaign wanted, and when. “In the beginning it was what both of us were doing, was running a 100 percent positive campaign, and that was the campaign I came into,” Mr. Edwards said in the recent interview. “It was natural for me.”
Mr. Edwards pointedly declined to talk about his conversations or relationship with Mr. Kerry, saying only, “I respected and admired John Kerry.”
Mr. Edwards understood his job was to be tough on the Bush-Cheney administration. “I did it, and I did it with everything I had,” he said. “Would I have rather been the presidential candidate? Of course. That’s why I ran.”
Signs of Strain
The two men were better than the sum of their parts on the rare occasions they campaigned together; Mr. Kerry seemed more energetic and easygoing, and Mr. Edwards seemed to present his case for Mr. Kerry better when he was next to him, like a client in a courtroom.
But their differences strained the relationship, and ultimately, the campaign. There were small things, like help-hope. Mr. Kerry inserted “help” into his speech the night before he was to give it. Mr. Edwards’s speech had been written two weeks in advance, and he did not want to change lines. (He tried “help” once, an aide recalled, and thought it sounded goofy.)
And there was the overshadowing issue of Iraq, a debate that brought out everything Mr. Edwards found most maddening about Mr. Kerry.
Both men had voted for the 2002 resolution authorizing President Bush to go to war with Iraq; Mr. Edwards had sponsored it with Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut. In 2004, they found themselves in an impossible position: antiwar Democrats were pushing Mr. Kerry to say he would pull out troops, while Republicans were calling him a flip-flopper whenever he tried to attack Mr. Bush on the war.
Mr. Kerry yielded to his running mate after Mr. Bush issued a challenge in early August: would Mr. Kerry still vote the same way, knowing now that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction? Mr. Kerry told reporters he would have voted the same, but done everything else about the war differently.
The Republicans delighted in another flip-flop. Six weeks later, Mr. Kerry gave a speech at New York University declaring that he would not have voted for the war, calling it a “profound diversion” from the real threat, Osama bin Laden. Mr. Edwards had argued against the speech in a conference call into the early morning hours. While Mr. Kerry was hailed for showing resolve, the campaign never fully recovered from the accusation that the Democratic presidential candidate — unlike Mr. Bush — did not know what he stood for.
On Election Day, the running mates spent much of the day believing exit polls that showed them winning. The next morning, with Ohio still up in the air, Mr. Edwards pressed to send lawyers to Columbus to challenge the way the state counted provisional ballots. But Mr. Kerry finally concluded that even winning all those ballots would not make him president.
As the men ended the campaign at Faneuil Hall in Boston, Mr. Edwards refused to say “lose” or “concede” or “defeat” — what his wife, Elizabeth, described in her memoir as his “small gesture” of defiance.
“The fight has just begun,” Mr. Edwards said. “We will keep marching toward that one America, and we’re not going to stop until we get there.”
Kerry aides heard that as his first bid for 2008.
Moving On
A year later, Mr. Edwards wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Post that began, “I was wrong.” It laid out his case against the war in Iraq.
An interviewer asked Mr. Kerry about it. “I said that before Senator Edwards wrote that,” he replied.
Mr. Edwards told Terry McAuliffe, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, that he had wanted to “go after Bush.” “Terry, they wouldn’t let me,” he said, according to Mr. McAuliffe’s book, “What a Party!”
Mr. Kerry declined to comment for this article. A spokesman said he had no interest in relitigating the 2004 race. But he told Mr. McAuliffe that he could not get Mr. Edwards to fight. Kerry aides said, and Mr. Shrum wrote in a memoir, that Mr. Edwards had promised Mr. Kerry that he would not challenge him in a run for the 2008 presidency. Mr. Edwards demurred about any agreement; he told one interviewer in early 2005 that he was focused on seeing his wife through her cancer and would decide “the right thing to do based on what’s going on with my own family.”
“The most important thing that had changed was time to reflect on what I’d done,” he said. “I had to live with what I’d done, and I couldn’t live with it if I didn’t tell the truth.”
While Mr. Kerry, too, had emerged as a leading voice against the war after the election, his comments at a campaign event just before the 2006 midterm elections — what he called “a botched joke” about Iraq — raised old doubts about his agility in a campaign. In January, when Mrs. Clinton, Barack Obama and Mr. Edwards already dominated the talk about 2008, Mr. Kerry announced he would not run.
The former running mates have spoken little since that day in Faneuil Hall. In March, Mr. Kerry telephoned the Edwardses after Mr. Edwards announced that his wife’s cancer had returned and was incurable, and that he was still running for president. A spokesman for Mr. Kerry said they had had a nice conversation. A spokesman for Mr. Edwards, however, said Mr. Kerry had spoken only with Elizabeth.
These 2 articles show you the disingenious nature of John Edwards...Unlike some Democratic cheerleaders on here, this is why liberals dont like John Edwards, never have, never will.... And no Desh you are not a liberal...
CK
Kerry's Regrets About John Edwards
By Bob Shrum for Time Magazine
After a day of filming at Edwards's summer home on Figure Eight Island in the Outer Banks, we went out to dinner. Afterward, while Elizabeth drove the car home, John and I headed back on his boat; as the darkness closed in, we got lost in the tall grasses of the shallow waterways. He finally found the channel; and back in his living room, we talked about the likelihood of war in Iraq. Edwards said no one had yet made the case to him.
That fall, as a vote loomed on the resolution giving Bush authority to go to war, 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. 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 even though Edwards was on the Intelligence Committee, he was too junior in the Senate; he didn't have the credibility to vote against the resolution. As I listened to this, I watched Edwards's face; he didn't like where he was being pushed to go. The process violated a principle I'd learned long before—candidates have to trust their own deeply felt instincts. It's the best way to live with defeat if it comes, and probably the best way to win.
The meeting we held in the Edwardses' family room 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. He didn't. If he had, it almost certainly would have been Edwards and not Dean who emerged early on as the antiwar candidate. But Edwards didn't want to look "liberal" and out of the mainstream; he was, after all, the southern candidate and thought of himself as Clintonesque. He valued the advice and prized the support of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. I had my own concerns: If he took the antiwar route, I knew I would have been characterized as a malign force moving him to the left—which wasn't true, although I wish it had been given that I now regard the Iraq invasion as one of the great mistakes in the history of U.S. foreign policy.
Kerry had asked Jim Johnson to head up the vice-presidential search. Jim, my friend stretching back to the 1972 campaign, was one of Washington's best connected "wise men"—at times successively, and at times simultaneously, not only chairman of the giant mortgage company Fannie Mae, but of the Kennedy Center and the Brookings Institution; he had been Gore's chief debate negotiator in 2000, and was a likely treasury secretary or White House chief of staff in a Kerry administration. The candidate was obsessed with keeping the veep process closely held to prevent the speculation and leaks that had embarrassed him when he was on Gore's final list in 2000. This worked—until the last hour.
One option, the one that would have sealed the election, was off the table. John McCain's political strategist John Weaver had talked earlier with Cahill and said he needed to see Kerry about McCain. According to Kerry, when he met with Weaver and Cahill, Weaver said McCain was serious about the possibility of teaming up with him. Kerry had then sounded out McCain, who rejected the idea. McCain, I told Kerry, was running—but for president, in 2008, against Kerry if he was elected, or after a second Bush term. This meant he'd have to prove his loyalty to Republicans; and we couldn't expect much if any help from him if Kerry was slimed by some "independent" Republican group. It didn't matter that Kerry had rallied across party lines to McCain's defense when he was smeared in the 2000 primaries. Kerry nonetheless clung to the hope that if his service record was questioned, being a member of the "band of brothers" would be more important to McCain than party ID. But I didn't expect much "straight talk" from him this time around.
With McCain off the list, I walked from my house to Johnson's, which was next door, on a spring afternoon. The obvious vice-presidential choice, we agreed, was John Edwards; in the primaries, he'd emerged as a first-rate campaigner—and I told Jim that despite thiness on substance, I thought, as I been in 2000, that he could handle Cheney in a debate; We couldn't afford to repeat the Lieberman mistake. But there were two other clear possibilities: Dick Gephardt and Hillary Clinton. Kerry was ready to partner with Clinton if it was the way to win, but he doubted it was. He liked Gephardt, was confident he was up to the job of being president, and hoped he might help carry Missouri, which could make the difference in a close election. But both he and Teresa worried that Gephardt was a gray choice who wouldn't light any fires. While Edwards might, they were both uneasy with him. I'd said to Kerry early on that all I cared about was picking the strongest choice—personal feelings had nothing to do with it.
Johnson had compiled a list of about twenty-five "serious" candidates—and some others besides—and we reviewed it in his living room. In addition to Edwards, Clinton, and Gephardt, it included New Mexico governor Bill Richardson and some "out-of-the-box" choices, like Nebraska's maverick Republican senator Chuck Hagel, a kind of McCain surrogate. Hagel, who I guessed wouldn't accept and didn't know his name was on the list, was a nonstarter because he had a zero rating from the League of Conservation Voters. Richardson's prospects were shadowed by alleged womanizing. Publicly reluctant, he coveted the publicity of being considered, but withdrew before the process was finished.
A quiet round of polling helped guide the search. Hillary Clinton had high negatives—she would hurt the ticket; Dick Gephardt apparently didn't help in Missouri—in fact, Edwards's numbers were decidedly stronger there. When I heard this, I should have questioned whether the numbers actually reflected the ultimate impact of a Gephardt pick. As Kerry's running mate, Gephardt's campaigning and the institutional forces in Missouri might have given us a chance in the state, and he might have boosted us a little in Ohio, maybe just enough. But the process was evolving to where it had started—perhaps not in Kerry's mind, but in the conventional wisdom and the will of the Democrats across the country. When I handed Johnson a memo about advertising to be rolled out right after the choice was announced, I included a contingency for "a VP selection... from outside the present battleground states." Johnson and I both knew that meant North Carolina—and Edwards—but Kerry and Teresa still weren't there.
Kerry talked with several potential picks, including Gephardt and Edwards. He was comfortable after his conversations with Gephardt, but even queasier about Edwards after they met. Edwards had told Kerry he was going to share a story with him that he'd never told anyone else—that after his son Wade had been killed, he climbed onto the slab at the funeral home, laid there and hugged his body, and promised that he'd do all he could to make life better for people, to live up to Wade's ideals of service. Kerry was stunned, not moved, because, as he told me later, Edwards had recounted the same exact story to him, almost in the exact same words, a year or two before—and with the same preface, that he'd never shared the memory with anyone else. Kerry said he found it chilling, and he decided he couldn't pick Edwards unless he met with him again. When they did, Kerry tried to get a better personal feel for his potential number two; as rivals for national office since 2000, shortly after Edwards had entered the Senate, the two men hadn't spent a lot of time together. Kerry also wanted a specific reassurance. He asked Edwards for a commitment that if he was chosen and the ticket lost, Edwards wouldn't run against him in 2008. Edwards agreed "absolutely," as Kerry recalled him saying. If Kerry had shared this at the time, I would have told him what I did later: it was naive to think he could rely on a promise like that. Unlike Joe Lieberman, who'd been plucked from relative obscurity by Gore, Edwards had made his own mark in the primaries. He was ambitious—and if he saw his chance the next time, he was likely to go for it.
On the day the Edwards pick was made public, Edwards and I talked for the first time since I had informed him of our decision to work for Kerry and he had reacted angrily. He said he knew I'd helped get him on the ticket and he was grateful. I told him that I welcomed the possibility that we might be friends again, but that wasn't the reason for my preference. I believed it was the right move for Kerry. Kerry's relationship with Edwards would sour after the election—and mine would simply fade away. When Elizabeth discovered she had breast cancer, John and Teresa reached out to help the Edwardses find the best doctors they could. Marylouise and I called—but afterward, never heard from John again. Maybe we shouldn't have expected to. Kerry told me that the Edwardses simply stopped returning calls or talking to him and Teresa. Within months, Edwards started preparing for a bid in 2008. Kerry said that he wished he'd never picked Edwards, that he should have gone with his gut.
Copyright (c) 2007 by Robert Shrum. From the forthcoming book No Excuses by Robert Shrum, to be published by Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.
This is half the reason why Edwards is a hack...Here is the other half in the NY Times... See there is a huge difference between liberals and democrats...
And token fatass admins think they are the same thing right beefy?
The Long Run
For Edwards, a Marriage Made in Politics That Never Quite Fit
Ting-Li Wang/The New York Times
John Kerry and John Edwards, running mates but never really friends, ended 2004 in recrimination and regrets.
Mr. Edwards refused to play the traditional vice presidential role of attack dog.
The next night, wanting to give the American people something more tangible, John Kerry offered his own pledge, one intended as the ticket’s new slogan: “Help is on the way.”
But Mr. Edwards did not want to say it.
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.
Today, Mr. Edwards insists he is “the same person I’ve always been.” But his experience as a vice-presidential candidate who went down in defeat has clearly influenced his current run for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Having seen up close the perils of seeming to shift with the wind, he is selling himself as the candidate of “conviction” and “bold ideas” and trying to portray the front-runner, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as tacking for political gain. Once the sunny centrist who did not want to criticize his rivals by name, Mr. Edwards has become the most confrontational candidate in the race. And he has courted his party’s left wing by renouncing his vote on the war, something he counseled Mr. Kerry not to do.
“There’s no question John Edwards is different now than he was in 2004,” said Peter Scher, whom Mr. Kerry recruited to run Mr. Edwards’s vice-presidential campaign. “There’s a great deal more confidence in his own instincts and his own judgment. You see much less reliance on consultants and pollsters and media advisers, and more of a willingness to say what he believes and let the chips fall where they may.”
Kerry loyalists, meanwhile, seethe as they watch his new aggressiveness. Stephanie Cutter, who was Mr. Kerry’s communications director, said, “A lot of what I’m seeing now, I wish I’d seen in 2004.”
Mr. Edwards defends his change in tone, calling it the result of “a maturing process.”
“I believe that presidential candidates actually have a responsibility to point out substantive differences, to point out perspectives that are different,” he said in an interview. “I’m totally comfortable doing it.”
Unlikely Pair
John Edwards began campaigning to be John Kerry’s running mate as soon as his own presidential run collapsed when he failed to win any of the Super Tuesday primaries in March 2004. He appeared at rallies for Mr. Kerry. He dispatched emissaries to party officials and Kerry aides, promising that he could raise $20 million and help win his home state, North Carolina, and others the campaign hoped to turn to blue from red. And, as an experienced trial lawyer, he could take on Mr. Cheney.
Mr. Kerry remained hesitant. He had not really known Mr. Edwards in the Senate, and on the primary trail, small resentments had built up. Mr. Kerry wondered why Mr. Edwards thought he could be president before even finishing his first Senate term; Mr. Edwards thought Mr. Kerry did not know how to talk to rural and Southern voters and could not win without them. He bristled at Mr. Kerry’s presumption: when Mr. Kerry said in a debate how he would take on President Bush, Mr. Edwards rebuked him, “Not so fast, John Kerry.”
The two men could hardly have been more different. Mr. Kerry was the craggy Brahmin raised in privilege, Mr. Edwards, smiling, Southern and self-made. Mr. Kerry had all the gravitas Mr. Edwards was often accused of lacking, but Mr. Edwards charmed colleagues and connected with voters in a way that Mr. Kerry could only envy.
Mr. Edwards at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 told Americans, “Hope is on the way.” Mr. Kerry preferred “help.”
Mr. Kerry had spent a career in the Senate, where success depends on accommodating all sides of an issue; he called friends ceaselessly to solicit different points of view until aides seized his cellphone. Mr. Edwards had built his career by choosing a side and not relenting; he was well known for turning down big settlement offers because he was confident he could win his case.
Mr. Edwards and others believed he had done surprisingly well in the primaries because he refused to go negative. Staff members gave away opposition research to other campaigns, one said, because he would not use it.
At the Democratic convention in late July, Mr. Kerry’s advisers encouraged Mr. Edwards to reprise his theme of the primaries, a pledge to bridge the gap between two Americas, one rich, one struggling. Preaching “the politics of hope,” Mr. Edwards mocked the negative campaigning the Republicans were sure to deliver: “Don’t you just hate it?”
But the convention was barely over when the attacks began, starting with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth accusing Mr. Kerry of lying about his military record. Kerry aides complained that Mr. Edwards would resist or try to tone down language when they asked him to deliver negative lines — “pundit lines,” as one of Mr. Edwards’s aides scoffed. He argued it was more important to talk about what the Democrats would do differently rather than what the Republicans had done wrong.
He objected to anything more than the most generic attacks on the Bush administration. After weeks of battering by the Swift boat group, he called only for the president to “stop these ads.” When Mr. Cheney said voting for the Democrats would invite a terror attack, Mr. Edwards called it “un-American.”
“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.”
As prominent Democrats began calling for Mr. Edwards to be more aggressive, Mr. Kerry met with him in Springfield, Ohio, on the last night of the Republican convention and implored him to be tougher on the Republicans.
Mr. Edwards soon stepped up his rhetoric, particularly in his debate with Mr. Cheney. But the Kerry people saw it as a draw at best.
Some campaign aides speculated that Mr. Edwards was trying to protect his reputation so he could run for president again. Others concluded that he believed the lesson of the primaries was that staying positive worked.
“He thought that the right way to win a campaign was to be about hope and a positive message, and in many ways he’s right,” Mr. Jadotte said. “The reality is, that’s the job of the presidential nominee, not the vice-presidential nominee.”
The Edwards camp complained that it was hard to know what the Kerry campaign wanted, and when. “In the beginning it was what both of us were doing, was running a 100 percent positive campaign, and that was the campaign I came into,” Mr. Edwards said in the recent interview. “It was natural for me.”
Mr. Edwards pointedly declined to talk about his conversations or relationship with Mr. Kerry, saying only, “I respected and admired John Kerry.”
Mr. Edwards understood his job was to be tough on the Bush-Cheney administration. “I did it, and I did it with everything I had,” he said. “Would I have rather been the presidential candidate? Of course. That’s why I ran.”
Signs of Strain
The two men were better than the sum of their parts on the rare occasions they campaigned together; Mr. Kerry seemed more energetic and easygoing, and Mr. Edwards seemed to present his case for Mr. Kerry better when he was next to him, like a client in a courtroom.
But their differences strained the relationship, and ultimately, the campaign. There were small things, like help-hope. Mr. Kerry inserted “help” into his speech the night before he was to give it. Mr. Edwards’s speech had been written two weeks in advance, and he did not want to change lines. (He tried “help” once, an aide recalled, and thought it sounded goofy.)
And there was the overshadowing issue of Iraq, a debate that brought out everything Mr. Edwards found most maddening about Mr. Kerry.
Both men had voted for the 2002 resolution authorizing President Bush to go to war with Iraq; Mr. Edwards had sponsored it with Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut. In 2004, they found themselves in an impossible position: antiwar Democrats were pushing Mr. Kerry to say he would pull out troops, while Republicans were calling him a flip-flopper whenever he tried to attack Mr. Bush on the war.
Mr. Kerry yielded to his running mate after Mr. Bush issued a challenge in early August: would Mr. Kerry still vote the same way, knowing now that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction? Mr. Kerry told reporters he would have voted the same, but done everything else about the war differently.
The Republicans delighted in another flip-flop. Six weeks later, Mr. Kerry gave a speech at New York University declaring that he would not have voted for the war, calling it a “profound diversion” from the real threat, Osama bin Laden. Mr. Edwards had argued against the speech in a conference call into the early morning hours. While Mr. Kerry was hailed for showing resolve, the campaign never fully recovered from the accusation that the Democratic presidential candidate — unlike Mr. Bush — did not know what he stood for.
On Election Day, the running mates spent much of the day believing exit polls that showed them winning. The next morning, with Ohio still up in the air, Mr. Edwards pressed to send lawyers to Columbus to challenge the way the state counted provisional ballots. But Mr. Kerry finally concluded that even winning all those ballots would not make him president.
As the men ended the campaign at Faneuil Hall in Boston, Mr. Edwards refused to say “lose” or “concede” or “defeat” — what his wife, Elizabeth, described in her memoir as his “small gesture” of defiance.
“The fight has just begun,” Mr. Edwards said. “We will keep marching toward that one America, and we’re not going to stop until we get there.”
Kerry aides heard that as his first bid for 2008.
Moving On
A year later, Mr. Edwards wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Post that began, “I was wrong.” It laid out his case against the war in Iraq.
An interviewer asked Mr. Kerry about it. “I said that before Senator Edwards wrote that,” he replied.
Mr. Edwards told Terry McAuliffe, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, that he had wanted to “go after Bush.” “Terry, they wouldn’t let me,” he said, according to Mr. McAuliffe’s book, “What a Party!”
Mr. Kerry declined to comment for this article. A spokesman said he had no interest in relitigating the 2004 race. But he told Mr. McAuliffe that he could not get Mr. Edwards to fight. Kerry aides said, and Mr. Shrum wrote in a memoir, that Mr. Edwards had promised Mr. Kerry that he would not challenge him in a run for the 2008 presidency. Mr. Edwards demurred about any agreement; he told one interviewer in early 2005 that he was focused on seeing his wife through her cancer and would decide “the right thing to do based on what’s going on with my own family.”
“The most important thing that had changed was time to reflect on what I’d done,” he said. “I had to live with what I’d done, and I couldn’t live with it if I didn’t tell the truth.”
While Mr. Kerry, too, had emerged as a leading voice against the war after the election, his comments at a campaign event just before the 2006 midterm elections — what he called “a botched joke” about Iraq — raised old doubts about his agility in a campaign. In January, when Mrs. Clinton, Barack Obama and Mr. Edwards already dominated the talk about 2008, Mr. Kerry announced he would not run.
The former running mates have spoken little since that day in Faneuil Hall. In March, Mr. Kerry telephoned the Edwardses after Mr. Edwards announced that his wife’s cancer had returned and was incurable, and that he was still running for president. A spokesman for Mr. Kerry said they had had a nice conversation. A spokesman for Mr. Edwards, however, said Mr. Kerry had spoken only with Elizabeth.
These 2 articles show you the disingenious nature of John Edwards...Unlike some Democratic cheerleaders on here, this is why liberals dont like John Edwards, never have, never will.... And no Desh you are not a liberal...
CK
I don't bother reading any opening post that exceeds a paragraph or two...just briefly describe your comment...then post a link...if it goes to a long winded rant I always pass!
