Dead Cat Bounce and the Squirming Democrats

Last week, I bet many who watch MSNBC's "Scarborough County" were in the mood to drop-kick host Joe Scarborough into the upper ethers, as he repeatedly insisted that the new Kerry/Edwards ticket was guaranteed an immediate 10 point surge in the polls, followed by an additional 10 points in the wake of the Democratic convention by the end of July. Thank heavens for Scarborough's two guests, Jack Kemp and Steve Forbes, who managed to dampen the fool's mania. As to Scarborough's know-it-all attitude and political projections, the cable host is being proven wrong by unfolding events.

The John Edwards Veep-pick of July 6 has failed to generate a big bounce in polling numbers. In fact, the Democratic presidential ticket appears headed for a "dead cat bounce", which is nothing more than a minimal bump in the polls that is expected to quickly revert to prior levels. According to an Associated Press piece dated July 11, "John Kerry's choice of John Edwards as his running mate was received favorably by the public, polls suggest, but it has made little difference so far in the race with President Bush. Kerry strategists are trying to lower expectations for a bounce in the polls that presidential candidates sometimes get after choosing a running mate or attending a convention."

The AP poll conducted July 5 - 7 had to be the most discouraging for the Democrats with Bush-Cheney in the lead at 49 percent, trailed by Kerry-Edwards at 45 percent. In the July 6 - 7 Zogby poll, Kerry-Edwards only pulled ahead of Bush-Cheney by two points, 48 percent to 46 percent, certainly within the margin of error. The Rasmussen's presidential tracking poll of July 11 was a little better for the Democrats, with Kerry-Edwards running at 48 percent and Bush-Cheney at 45 percent. It would be fair to say that this presidential race is still a virtual dead-heat. Many political analysts now doubt that the Democratic convention will create a double-digit surge in the polls, or one with any sustaining value. The Democratic Party bigwigs should be worried.

Despite all the media hoopla surrounding the newly dubbed John-John ticket, Senator John Edwards is a notably flawed Veep choice. He's only a first term senator with limited experience, and lacks salient national security expertise that is pivotal during this war on terror. Any levelheaded person knows that the ability to exert credible leadership is key during troubled times. On the question of Vice Presidential leadership in this upcoming election, the public has a clear opinion. The latest Newsweek poll rates Vice President Cheney as a considerably stronger leader than Senator Edwards, 63 percent versus 53 percent. In contrast to Edwards, Vice President Dick Cheney has a stellar background: He served in the Congress, as White House Chief of Staff, Secretary of Defense, and now as Vice President during crisis times.

Edwards is little more than a profoundly Left-leaning trial lawyer - He's for raising taxes, engaging in protectionism and enacting extreme social liberalism including partial birth abortion. These political positions are out-of-sync with mainstream America, and only diminish the Democratic ticket. The few notable assets that Senator Edwards brings to the table are his good looks, charisma and youthful exuberance, all of which are important during an election year. But in today's complicated and demanding world, these superficial attributes will not suffice for any VP that might be called upon to assume the mantle of the presidency.

What will immediately impact the Kerry-Edwards ticket? Senator Kerry particularly revels in running around the campaign trail accusing Bush-Cheney of misleading the public about WMDs in Iraq. Yes, the Michael Moore Left-wing crowd eats this stuff up. Never mind that the prior Clinton administration, the United Nations, and intelligence agencies around the world all believed that Saddam's regime was in possession of stockpiles of WMDs until Iraq fell. Now, the Senate Intelligence Committee has issued its official conclusions on the matter - The CIA was at fault. The agency was inept, devoid of any decent human intelligence, and it promulgated its inaccurate analysis on WMDs in Iraq.

Now let's wait-and-see how the Kerry-Edwards ticket and the Democrats squirm and spin all of this.

Simply put, President Bush was given bad Intel. Well knock me over with a feather! Predicting that the Senate Intelligence Committee would blame the CIA is like predicting that a strung-out Courtney Love will again get arrested. The inevitability factor is in play. Most Americans, with the exception of delusional Left-wingers, already knew the score on the CIA and had come to expect the Committee's findings. But it's still nice that the Senate Intelligence Committee has released its pre-war intelligence report at this juncture.

Speaking of Edwards low popularity, from Mark Steyn yesterday:

Mark Steyn- The tearjerker (Profile: John Edwards) The Sunday Telegraph (U.K.) ^ | 07/11/04 | Mark Steyn Posted on 07/10/2004 3:22:08 PM PDT by Pokey78

'We've got better vision. We've got better ideas. We've got real plans. And we've got better hair," said John Kerry, introducing his running mate. The Kerry-Edwards vision, ideas, etc don't look so good in the cold light of day, but John Edwards's hair does.

I can personally vouch for his beautiful layered nape, having spent much of New Hampshire primary season looking at the back of his tanned neck on chilly winter mornings. He likes to campaign in the round, so all winter, in Legion halls and diners, the advance men rearranged the furniture and then the pretty-boy Southerner would come bouncing into the circle to the strains of Small Town (by has-been rocker John Mellencamp).

Radiating all the vigour and enthusiasm Kerry had surgically removed at birth, the honey-toned Edwards found himself adored by the media for his "two Americas" stump speech, a Disraelian portrait of Dickensian gloom conjured in the tones of a Depression-era sob-sister.

Even if you have never heard it, you know how it goes: there's one America where Dick Cheney's oil buddies are swigging down Martinis and toasting their war profits; but there's another America where "tonight a 10-year-old little girl will go to bed hungry, hoping and praying that tomorrow will not be as cold as today because she doesn't have the coat to keep her warm".

You would have to have a heart of stone not to be weeping with laughter at that line. But Democratic primary voters are not that rude. So they looked thoughtful and engaged, and they nodded and they applauded. And then they went out and voted for somebody else. After you've heard the speech a couple of times, you realise that John Edwards is perhaps the most condescending candidate in America. But the voters condescended right back, smiling politely at the clean-cut charmer, and then going away and forgetting about him.

In New Hampshire, he came a poor fourth. Likewise, New Mexico and North Dakota. In Delaware, he came third, with 11 per cent of the vote. In Oklahoma, he came second, managing to lose to loopy General Wesley Clark. The only place he won was the state of his birth, South Carolina. In Florida, he pulled 10 per cent of the vote; Maine, 8 per cent; Mississippi, Arizona, 7 per cent.

Edwards is a lawyer, and supposedly his great strength is his ability to make an argument and sell it to a jury. But the more the primary jurors heard his argument, the less they were sold on it. "There are two Americas," said Conan O'Brien on CBS. "Unfortunately for Edwards, neither one voted for him."

Who is John Edwards? Well, in a nutshell, he is the metaphorical brother of that non-existent coatless girl. Now 51, but looking a well-preserved 12, he was born in Seneca, South Carolina, and had a soi-disant dirt-poor, hardscrabble childhood in Robbins, North Carolina. His dad worked in the textile mills, and John was the first member of his family ever to go to college.

Where Senator Kerry's biography is full of problematic phrases like "Swiss finishing school", Edwards's is a classic American story - if one overlooks some of the details. According to Sidney Blumenthal, Clinton-stain-mopper-turned-Guardian-columnist, "He bears the memory of his father taking the family to a local restaurant after church only to leave when he realised he could not afford anything on the menu."

Really? Robbins was a town of just over 1,000 people, so presumably it was, if not the only restaurant, one of only two or three. In small towns, folks generally know what the local eateries charge. And, while the Edwards family was poor by comparison with John Kerry, dad was in fact the mill's production manager (though the son tends to leave that bit out). So, in a mill town, at a restaurant presumably priced to cater for mill workers, the management of the mill couldn't afford to eat?

Ah, well. There are two Americas, and, as a successful plaintiff's attorney, Edwards spent 20 years exaggerating the gulf between them. "Plaintiff's attorney" is American for the kind of lawyer who specialises in those suits that Britons find so fascinating - you spill the coffee on your lap, so you sue McDonald's for a gazillion dollars, etc. Edwards worked an ostensibly less ridiculous seam: suing doctors and hospitals when babies were born with brain defects. He made his name with a 1985 cerebral palsy case, where he channelled the words of the unborn child as she waited in the womb, hour after hour.

"She said at 3, 'I'm fine.' She said at 4, 'I'm having a little trouble, but I'm doing OK.' Five, she said, 'I'm having problems.' At 5.30, she said, 'I need out'," Edwards told his hushed jury. "She speaks to you through me. And I have to tell you right now - I didn't plan to talk about this - right now I feel her. I feel her presence. She's inside me."

The jury came back with a $6.5 million award, and Edwards was the hottest trial lawyer in North Carolina. His line, in that and other cases, was that there would have been no brain damage if the doctor, instead of the breech delivery, had performed a caesarean. Thanks in part to lawyers like Edwards, there are now far more caesarean sections than ever before, yet without any reduction in birth defects. The correlation between C-sections and birth defects is non-existent. But Edwards sold junk-science to jury after jury, for big bucks.

In his "two Americas" routine, he talks about his commitment to "bringing down the cost of healthcare". One reason it costs more than it did is because of Edwards and his fellow ambulance-chasers. Nonetheless, if the Bush campaign is figuring on tarring Edwards as a fancypants trial lawyer, they should rethink. He spent much of his life defending kids against corporations, and, whatever the fine print, the basic outline of that terrain is not favourable to Republicans.

For another, his own son died in a car accident at the age of 16 - the one stark tragedy in Edwards's effortless career rise and happy home life with his college sweetheart. Today, John and Elizabeth Edwards have three children - a daughter at college, and two youngsters born since the death of their first son. What the Republicans see as a shyster the media will paint as a champion of defenceless children driven by a heart-rending twist of fate.

It is standard on the Left now to insist that Bush's "war" is a fiction cooked up by Dick Cheney to enrich his pals. But Edwards's two Americas are the real fantasy. Take that 10-year old girl, hungry and coatless. In America, poverty doesn't mean hunger, it means fat - it's harassed moms shovelling 99-cent cheeseburgers into their kids because it's cheap and quick. Nor does poverty mean coatlessness. Edwards's shivering 10-year-old can get a brand-new quilted winter coat for $9.99 at JC Penney, or secondhand for three bucks at my local thrift shop - at least until Edwards and Kerry crack down on the cheap textile imports they've been attacking these past two years. There may be two Americas, but Edwards's America doesn't exist anywhere from Maine to Hawaii. Even as a lurid Victorian melodrama designed to frighten prosperous soccer moms into voting against hard-hearted Republicans, it sounds ridiculous.

In the meantime, Edwards has nothing to say on foreign policy except a pledge to end "war profiteering by Halliburton". Once he discovered that you can't sue al-Qaeda, he seems to have lost interest in the subject, and his shallowness was embarrassing in some of the primary debates.

As I wrote here in February, "His basic pitch is that the entire electorate are victims, and his candidacy is the all-time biggest class-action suit on your behalf." John Edwards's approach - the American people are helpless children - is the wrong message for dangerous times.

Back when his maudlin 'twas-Christmas-Day-in-the-workhouse shtick was still new, I offered to buy a brand new coat for every 10-year-old coatless girl the Edwards campaign could produce if in return he included one substantive passage on foreign policy in his stump speech. I'm still waiting on both counts.

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