Senator Edwards, who is playing Robin to John Kerry's Batman this electoral season, is a congressional non-entity who nevertheless has made a fortune extorting vast sums of money from hapless medical practitioners and insurance companies. He has, hearsay has it, almost single-handedly driven ob-gyn practitioners out of the state of North Carolina.
Jean Pearce lays out the history of this man who would, if elected, be a heartbeat from the presidency, and the picture she paints for us is deeply disturbing. Here are some excerpts:
The real story of Edwards' short political career is one of hypocrisy, cheap rip-offs, flip-flops and boneheaded moves. But in the media's version of the story, Edwards is the political prodigy who is going get John Kerry elected president, forgetting that had Kerry not picked him as his running mate last month, the tattered thread by which Edwards' political career had long been hanging would have snapped.
Much of Edwards' career has been based on bashing President George Bush for things that he himself voted for and advocated. Edwards voted for the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, and then spent the next three years bashing Bush for the law.
"This 'No Child Left Behind'? This President is leaving millions of kids behind every single day," Edwards said at the Baltimore debate in 2003.
Like Kerry, Edwards came out against the war in Iraq after he had voted for it. But Edwards took it a step further. In the fall of 2002, Edwards was one of the most vocal members of Congress on the need to remove Saddam Hussein. In the hours after Bush's famous speech before the U.N., Edwards gave an impassioned oration on the Senate floor, demanding the president take unilateral military action to remove Hussein from power.
Then, just three weeks later, after voting to authorize the war, Edwards trashed Bush for taking unilateral military action in Iraq, referring to Bush's actions in a CBS interview as "gratuitous unilateralism, a determination to act alone for the sake of acting alone."
Edwards voted in 2001 to kill an amendment that would ensure that patients receive the majority of benefits from any new lawsuit allowed in the McCain-Kennedy-Edwards "Patient's Bill of Rights." He also led the fight against a liability exemption for doctors providing pro-bono services and helped kill medical malpractice reform in 2002 and 2003 that would have saved the federal government at least $6 billion in healthcare costs.
Edwards' campaign against the interests of the "little guy" didn't stop there. He also voted to kill a bill in committee that ensured that class action members receive the majority of the benefits of settlements instead of personal injury lawyers. Moreover, in 1999, he voted against a bill to limit lawsuits and damages from potential Y2K computer failures.
Edwards was also the only Democrat missing from debates on asbestos litigation reform. Perhaps that's because the co-finance chairman of Edwards' campaign was Fred Baron, who pioneered the practice of suing companies on behalf of supposed asbestos victims that resulted in the bankruptcy of 67 companies, $57 billion in economic losses and the loss of 60,000 jobs.
There's much more in Pearce's article to give us pause about this candidate. He strikes us as the sort of man that should be treated like a pariah rather than a messiah, but for reasons that Viewpoint finds excruciatingly perverse, millions of Americans will nevertheless vote for him.
It'll be interesting to see how much of Edwards' Senate record and professional history as a legal shake-down artist comes out in the vice-presidential debates. The elite media certainly can't be expected to trouble themselves to inform us about it. They'll be too busy trying to prove the really important stuff like that Bush did too say that we can't win the war on terror and searching under every rock to show some tenuous connection between Bush and the Swiftees. No wonder they're becoming increasingly irrelevant.
Meanwhile Viewpoint will be spending the evening reassessing the confidence we had placed in John O'Neill's judgment and integrity. O'Neill, the reader will recall, is the author of the Kerry expose Unfit For Command. There's nothing in the book which calls O'Neill's judgment into question, but he did make the statement a couple of weeks ago, while trying to explain that he was not working on behalf of Bush or the Republicans, that he would have indeed voted for John Edwards for president had he won his party's nomination.
We're flabbergasted.