Friend of this blog, AlexC from pstupidonymous, warns me not to misunderestimate a Kerry-Edwards ticket. I ain't. My sanguine-and-hubris-generator is turned off until December. This will be a tough election whomever Senator Kerry picks (well, maybe not if he actually picked Osama bin Laden, but that would get the Democrat base fired up...)
Here is an interesting anti-Edwards thought from Holman Jenkins in OpinionJournal's Political Diary:
One more thought on trial lawyers: Among those Democrats crowing for John Edwards to be John Kerry's veep at a New York event this week was strike-suit plutocrat Mel Weiss, founder of the Milberg Weiss law firm. Yes, that's the firm that accounts for nearly two-thirds of all class-action lawsuits alleging fraud against companies when their stock price falls. Mr. Edwards was effusively introduced by Mr. Weiss, who said of the North Carolina trial lawyer and one-term senator: "He deserves to be up there in national office with Senator Kerry and I hope he will be second on that ticket because he's remarkable."Mr. Edwards has managed to keep the trial lawyer issue from rising up and biting him so far in his fervent campaign for the vice presidential nod. But the Weiss encomium is a potent reminder to business-oriented voters that, with Mr. Edwards in the White House, the lawsuit lobby would be sitting pretty. Mr. Edwards, as every news report mentions, is increasingly the "favorite" of Democratic Senators too. That's no accident: Fred Baron, the asbestos lawyer who was a key Edwards' donor and is now a chief Kerry fundraiser, has been known to joke about how Senate Democrats are a wholly-owned subsidiary of the trial bar.
Mr. Baron and other Edwards supporters have opened their wallets to Mr. Kerry since he nailed down the nomination to the tune of $7 million. Meanwhile, George Bush's support has wavered among Fortune 500 types who haven't been keen on his rock-the-boat foreign policy. But nothing would be better calculated to drive business back into the Bush camp than the opposition putting a representative of the trial bar on the Democratic ticket. In all the boomlet fuss over Mr. Edwards the last few days, there's been zero discussion of this downside. Maybe nobody cares anymore about brazen abuse of the tort system -- or maybe it's the sleeping dog that would get up and start yapping loudly if Mr. Edwards is named as John Kerry's No. 2.
I too have been intersted in this angle on John Edwards since he first hit the national stage. I liked his message and his style but wondered about his past and his beliefs. Could it be that there is not anything damning in his trial lawyer past, or has nobody cared enough to do the digging yet?
Posted by: Silence Dogood at June 29, 2004 03:53 AMI imagine that there's been significant oppo research on a U.S.Senator and Presidential Candidate. Maybe not as intense as he would see on a major-party ticket.
The question seems to be: is his trial lawyer background enough by itself to turn thebusiness community against him?
Posted by: jk at June 29, 2004 09:26 AM