[Mb-civic] EDITORIAL Edwards Woos Another Jury LATimes

[Michael Butler]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-debate6oct06.story

EDITORIAL

Edwards Woos Another Jury

 October 6, 2004

 To assess Tuesday's vice presidential debate, you must filter out Sen. John
Edwards' superiority at skills that have little relevance to running the
country. Edwards is one dynamite debater, and no doubt would be as
impressive in a debate against Osama bin Laden as he was against Vice
President Dick Cheney.

 As in last week's presidential debate, the Democrat was a clear winner in
the atmospherics. As the evening wore on, Cheney's chin sank down his chest,
his gravelly voice turned into an inarticulate rumble and he even started
passing up opportunities to talk at all. Handed opportunities on a platter ‹
Was Edwards, who made a fortune representing plaintiffs suing healthcare
providers, part of the healthcare problem? With just four years in public
office, was he qualified to be president? ‹ Cheney waved them aside.

 When Edwards, with that boyish smile that worked magic with jurors, stuck a
knife in his gut (for example, about his role as CEO of Halliburton), Cheney
more than once said he didn't know where to begin, and then didn't. Some of
his own demagogic thrusts, meanwhile, were bizarre. Surely many GOP small
businessmen were alarmed to hear the vice president denounce so-called S
corporations (a common tax-favored setup apparently used by Edwards' law
practice). 

 On the merits of the campaign's central theme, however, the debate was a
closer call. Cheney mocked John Kerry's strategy for Iraq as more of an echo
than a plan, and indeed Edwards was unpersuasive that his ticket offered a
significantly different approach for ensuring a successful endgame there.
Cheney skewered Kerry's shifting positions on Iraq, dating back to the
senator's ill-advised vote against the Gulf War in 1991.

 Kerry's political opportunism, Cheney charged, provides the only plausible
explanation why the senator would vote to authorize the use of force against
Iraq in 2002 but then vote against funding the occupation when antiwar
candidate Howard Dean was in the lead for the Democratic nomination. That
led to Cheney's best line: "Now if they couldn't stand up to the pressures
that Howard Dean represented, how can we expect them to stand up to Al
Qaeda?"



 Afghanistan triggered a glass-half-empty-versus-half-full exchange,
mirroring that nation's perilous hope on the cusp of elections. Once again,
as in last week's debate, the incumbent failed to respond to the charge that
the administration didn't pursue Bin Laden with U.S. troops when he may have
been cornered in the Afghan mountains in late 2001.

 It will be easier for voters to forgive the Democrats their inconsistencies
on Iraq if Kerry and Edwards convince them that the conflict was a
distraction from the war on terror, as opposed to one of its central
battles. Cheney was disingenuous in saying he never talked about connections
between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 but insisting that Hussein did support
terrorism more broadly. Edwards didn't have a reply.

 The Edwards victory was more lopsided when the debate turned to domestic
policy. The Bush administration, Edwards noted, is the first since Herbert
Hoover's to preside over a net loss of jobs. Beyond an irrelevant paean to
education, the vice president had no response. He seemed similarly at a loss
when Edwards proceeded, with Clintonian specificity, to eviscerate President
Bush's record on other domestic fronts.

 But as a spectator sport, the second half of the debate was less
satisfying, if only because the more skilled litigator had the easier case
to make. It would have been fun to watch what Edwards could have done with
Cheney's brief. 




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