John Edwards, Surprise me

I have stated to a friend a few times that under no circumstances would I vote for either Mitt Romney or John Edwards. Today he asked me what I so disliked about Edwards.

I like much of what Edwards says. But I don't trust him. He seems to have invented himself for the campaign. When asked about his for-the-poor-man message, he said, "The more I talked about it, the more it became internal. I understood pretty quickly after that, this is who I am. This is what I believe" (http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20071213/us_time/johnedwardsdefiningmoment) About a year ago on C-Span, I heard a political analyst, who seemed relatively objective and who is a denizen of Washington and knows Edwards, state that prior to the campaign "the poor" wasn't a word to be found on Edwards' lips. At the beginning of the campaign Edwards was talking about "the poor", but he migrated to talking about "the middle class".

This suggests that Edwards is constructing a candidate to win an election into which he entered as a person who originally didn't care about either the poor or the middle class. If he himself states that he came to care about his issues only after he began to mouth them for the purposes of winning an election, and if his associates say that the pre-campaign Edwards never had the poor or middle class on his radar, then I strongly suspect that the candidate John Edwards is not the real John Edwards.

This is why I think Edwards and Romney are two peas in a pod. They look pretty and craft their rhetoric to win, but at their core they are empty. Yes, Edwards is smart. Too smart. Smart enough to take his trial lawyer skills of persuasion and convince millions of Americans that he is sincere. But who he really is, I suspect, is a brilliant, rich cat whose only anchor is attached to his ego. The fine speech of a candidate who comes to realize "who I am" and "what I believe" only during an election campaign is not trustworthy. A candidate who discovers what his political career stands for only after he starts running for the presidency is likely to be an empty suit. I would much prefer to see people like Kucinich, Clinton, Obama, Paul, McCain, or Richardson, whose private and political careers have demonstrated that they believe in what they are saying and that who they are is who they say they are.

I like much of what Edwards says about lobbyists, the poor, and the middle class. I like his health care plan, which accommodates choice and market forces. If he were to win and turn out to have the substance of his campaign rhetoric, it would be nice to be pleasantly surprised by a president, for a change. I do not rule out the possibility that Edwards had a genuine Damascus Road experience during the campaign trail, but given human nature and history I regard that possibility to be remote. I doubt that Edwards really knows himself or what he believes, other than that he wants to win. A soul-less person like that under the tremendous pressures of the presidency is not likely to surprise me.