Dead Cat Bounce and the Squirming Democrats

GOPUSA ^ | July.12,2004 | Carol Devine-Molin

[Reagan Man]

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...

[goldwaterlives]

why would there be a bump in the polls because kerry picked some ineffectual middle aged white male lawyer for his running mate? clearly the guy isnt very popular he lost to kerry in the primaries.

[South40]

[andy58-in-nh]

Dead Cat Bounce and the Squirming Democrats

What a GREAT name for a band!!!

[OldFriend]

Scarborough's former colleagues must be so happy he's gone from their midst.

Seemingly no core principles at all.....which makes him perfect for MSNBC.

[Bob J]

What I find interesting is the 53% in the Newsweek poll who found Adwards to be a "strong leader".

How could this posibly be when most people are barely aware of his name, much less his history?

[concerned about politics]

A trial lawyer has no class. Neither does an ancient gigolo.

[SquirrelKing]

The only polls that seem to be showing ANY bpunce are coming from the expected places. Yesterday AM, Sunday Today was touting the Kerry-Edwards boost proven by such polls as, you guessed it, Time and Newsweek!

[justshutupandtakeit]

While not a huge fan of Joe, I cannot deny that he is far better than almost any hosts other than O'Reilly and Dennis Miller. I would rather watch him than an hour of incessant blathering about the Peterson case on Gretta. No contest.

[Reagan Man]

>>>How could this posibly be when most people are barely aware of his name, much less his history?

They hate Dick Cheney. Don'tcha know. ;^)

[Use It Or Lose It]

Scarborough's former colleagues must be so happy he's gone from their midst. Seemingly no core principles at all.....which makes him perfect for MSNBC.

It's notable that Scarborough and John Kasich, two of Gary Condit's closest buds in the House now appear to be in the rancid peanut gallery of politics.

[Rummyfan]

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.

[concerned about politics]

Kerry-Edwards boost proven by such polls as, you guessed it, Time and Newsweek!

According to FOX, they bounced a huge 3 points, and about 24 hours later, Bush pulled into the lead by about 4 points. It was pretty funny.

[Batrachian]

The reason this Edwards pick didn't give Kerry a big bump is mostly because people have expected it for months. It's already been discounted. It also doesn't help that he brings little to the ticket and has a lot of unpleasant baggage, but the main reason is because everyone expected it. I predicted it long before Kerry became the nominee.

[GraceCoolidge]

I saw a Democratic strategist interviewed on Fox (I think it was, cannot remember the host) yesterday. He was asked about the "bounce" shown by internal polls. This guy had the absolute gall to straight facedly say the Democratic party was not doing any polling on the topic, but then referred to national polls. I mean, come on! Who is he kidding? That definitely made me hopeful... their polls must be pretty bad....

[expatpat]

You forgot -- these are Newseak readers, thus mostly knee-jerk liberals.

[ken5050]

Gotta disagree with the knock on Scarborough..He's far and away the best commentator on the tube..It's like "hannity and Colmes" withOUT Colmes..so why did he climb out on this limb..I suspect that this enables him to get the Dems to come on his show...look at O'Reilly, f'instance..he's boycotted totally..which isn't good for him...

[ChewedGum]

I'm not convinced Joe is a bad guy. I think him declaring that there SHOULD be a 10 point bump is good for us. Because it set the expectation which then never happened. It's a morale killer for the other side.

Gum

[Reagan Man]

I saw that Librat politico strategist yesterday too. What a boob!