Well, organizationally speaking, it appears that John Edwards has picked up some major steam over the past couple months in the race for the 2008 Dem nomination. Before I go on, I should point out that I do like Edwards, and of course would support his candidacy should he get the nod. However, I personally don't rank him at the top of the list of likely candidates, and would prefer someone else.
This feeling is rooted in a few places. First, when the caucus/primary season started in 2004, after I saw John Edwards on the news a couple times and read an article about him in Newsweek he became my favorite candidate out of the bunch. I was living in Nebraska at the time and had no real exposure to Howard Dean (if I had I think he'd have been my overwhelming favorite). I thought John was smooth, charismatic, and had a great message. When it was clear that John Kerry was going to win the nomination I felt that Edwards would be the best Veep choice. I now think that was a bad pick....in retrospect I think in 2004 Democrats didn't accept the fact that national security was the ONLY issue you had to win on to win the election and that John Kerry should have picked Wes Clark as his running mate. But I digress.....after Edwards was chosen as the running mate for Kerry I started to see him more and more on C-Span, and other outlets....and I got more bored listening to his stump speeches than I ever did at Kerry's! I'm not sure why, because Edwards is clearly the better speaker of the two....but I thought the 2 Americas thing got very old, and I don't think it really resonated that well with most people. I thought he did a piss poor job in the debate against Cheney, which was very disappointing to me because I thought he would shine like a star on his feet like that. So in short, I was very disappointed in his performance as VP nominee.
My next problem with him is that I don't see how he will have any kind of powerful voice on Foriegn Policy...in fact my gut tells me that he'll have a harder time climbing that credibility mountain that most of the other candidates who have the same gap. It will be very easy to paint his history on the Iraq war as unpricipled and calculated, whereas Feingold, Clark, and even Hillary can all say that they have done what they thought was right. I honestly think that Kerry has done the best job of all the flip floppers of saying, "I was wrong, but I'm able to make it right." I just hope that the dems get somebody who can take on the right wing in the foreign policy debate and kick their ass....and I don't think Edwards is the guy who can do it.
And last, and you're going to think that this is very petty, but I saw John speak briefly at a luncheon in Nevada (my current home)supporting a ballot initiative for a state minimum wage increase. He photographs well, but in person he is literally 5-foot-nothing, and about a buck-15 tops. To be quite honest with you, I think he'll look like as much of a pussy at the debates as Michael Dukakis did, and whether it should be an issue or not, image is important in politics. I hope I'm very wrong about this stuff, and of course I will volunteer, give money, make phone calls, canvas neighborhoods, and whatever else I can possibly do to elect whoever we nominate, including John Edwards. But I hope he impresses me more as a candidate for president than he did as a candidate for VP. Just my two cents....go ahead and neuter me Edwards fans.