Letters to the Editor
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Edwards for Beginners
SocsandTwigs, Edwards has far more relevant experience than Obama. Where would you get any other idea? He was a senator for a full term. Obama has not finished one term. Edwards also campaigned nationally for President and vice-president in 2004 and was an impressive candidate. He did not come late, as you suggest, to realizing that the poor and disenfranchised need our help. In fact, he made "Two Americas" his theme during the 2004 campaign. Where have you been?
Before then Edwards was a trial lawyer who represented injured people against powerful corporations and insurance companies and he did so with tremendous success. But since the 2004 campaign, he has worked for the poor (yes, and was a lawyer for hedge funds) and traveled extensively overseas, meeting with leaders of other countries to fill the gap in his resume concerning foreign policy issues. He also endorsed and promoted a green pledge and a strong environmental program to combat global warming. Compared with Edwards, Obama is very inexperienced. His meager career, until he was elected to the Senate, has been at the local or state level. Edwards, moreover, was the source of the Democratic platform that Clinton and Obama are running on. They were craven and conformist till Edwards broke through the status quo and demanded universal health care. When they saw that his populist ideas were getting popular support, they imitated him. See Paul Krugman's piece on how Hillary and Obama are running on the platform Edwards built.
I hate to say it (again) but Obama is mainly just a cult figure. I find him personally very appealing and likeable but as a President, forget it. He has been shown to be inept, inexperienced and insubstantial. He has no savvy and no connections in Washington. If elected, he stands to become the next Jimmy Carter - nice, decent, idealistic - and totally ineffectual. He has no ideas except "Change" and "Transcending Partisanship" - mere abstractions that are capitalized to make them seem more important than they really are. What substantive idea has Obama ever had that he didn't borrow from Edwards? None.
We cannot afford to entrust the chief executive's role to Obama: it would be like sending Opie Taylor to be the sheriff in "High Noon."