Now listen, I don't know the dimensions of outer space, but if the National Enquirer stories about John Edwards turn out to be some cosmic accident, I'd like to think this means the universe is on his side.
If you think I'm here to talk about some damn tabloid news story, you're wrong. In the months since the "suspension" of Edwards' latest vanity campaign, he has rightly faded into obscurity both here and elsewhere. But in this obscurity, more than just the man is obscured. Key facts crucial to understanding him have fallen through the cracks of public consciousness as well, not the least of which being that John Edwards sucks.
This is the guy who, had his campaign not been mysteriously cut short -- well, let's talk about that "mysteriously." Some will no doubt argue that he simply realized at that random spot in February (or whenever it was) not really connected with any of the primaries that he just didn't have any path to the nomination. But does anyone really believe that? It was dead obvious he wasn't going to win a priori without any votes having been cast. After he lost Iowa, it was definitively over for him. No, I have to think his reasons for hanging around as long as he did had nothing to do with viability (very much like Clinton's reasons later on) and that his reasons for dropping out had just as little to do with the same.
But anyway, this is the guy whose exit polling showed overwhelming support from people who didn't want to vote for a woman or the black guy and whose naked pandering to the seedier elements of the blogosphere created a small, but annoying army of supporters who arguably permanently debased the recommended diary section with a pattern of coordinated voting not envisioned by the designers of the system. Indeed, for months, users were assaulted with sleazy hit pieces directed at the eventual Democratic nominee in the service of a candidate who, in the final analysis, sucks.
As we all know, John Edwards is a slick, southern white guy with a history of DLC-esque politics typical of slick, southern white guys within the Democratic coalition. He was one of the major Democratic supporters of the Iraq war in the U.S. Senate, though he apologized rather opportunistically for it when the damage was done and political gain was to be had. In his overwrought pandering desperation, he campaigned in the primary for the second term of the Carter administration in spite of his track record of positions, earning him a reputation as a phony.
In short, John Edwards sucks.
Update: ctexdem has, below, offered an interesting piece of reportage from Time magazine that I think is very appropriate here. The quote:
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
Just to unpack this a bit, he's lying to Kerry when he says he's never told this well-rehearsed story to anyone else. He's using this anecdote to gain the confidence of people in the political world and probably had done so dozens of times before, probably with the same claim he had told no one else the story -- this way, people would be less likely to repeat the story to others and give him away. Maybe the story's true, maybe not. I would tend to think not. The critical thing is the guy is a phony and opportunist of the first water.