Hotline Looks At Edwards Campaign and gives Him some advise [View All]

[illinoisprogressive]

I don't know about the Edwards supporters and how they will view this. It is like an op ed on Edwards campaign. They look at how and why there was a few trip ups and the ongoing look at the haircut.
They give an unvarnished view of some of the mistakes he has made but, at the end they say it did not damage his standing with democrats.
I hope you guys read this in a good frame as it is just meant to answer why the focus on some things by the media and not on the serious stuff. it is something he will work out of as he has in the past.
Read this with common sense involved and not an attempt by them to be mean and that it is basically a good article on him.



John Edwards is a rich guy, owns a big house, dresses nicely, got a $400 haircut, earned lots of money at a hedge fund, runs a poverty center and focuses his political energies on pushing the idea that poverty in America is a scandal and ought to be eradicated.

The volume of press coverage directed at proving that, yes, Edwards is a rich guy and invests his money like a rich guy suggests that the media senses hypocrisy. And that's a very, very dangerous sensation, so far as John Edwards is concerned. A large number of national and local editors and reporters -- think of the AP's Mike Glover in Iowa -- can't get enough of the story.

The truth is that the media seems to be confusing “hypocrisy” -- doing what one says one must not do -- with bad optics and a few cases of ill-considered judgment. (This Newsday headline: "Poverty Campaigner And Spouse Earned $29M") is pregnant with meaning, and yet logically suspect.)

The fact is, if you're in politics and you talk about poverty, extra attention will be paid to the manner in which you display your personal wealth -- whether, by dint of expensive haircuts and mammoth homes, you spend the money you earn and don't care about "what it looks like."

Edwards has been uncautiously ostentatious. That's the basic mistake. He's set himself up for questions about the work his poverty center did, the Cayman Islands, why he joined Fortress, Sudan holdings, etc, not because he held himself to a different moral standard, but because he didn't hold himself to a high enough political standard. The press reads this as arrogance.

Knowing he was going to focus on poverty, he probably should have dialed back his displays of wealth. The optics would look better. Roger Simon wrote that the problem with Edwards's $400 haircut was not the haircut itself; it was the fact that it slipped into his campaign finance report. Wrong. The problem was the haircut -- or, more precisely, the shrug of the shoulders that accompanied his decision to get it. The press pays attention to these things. It -- we -- have a fetish for the discrepant, the unseemly, the showy. You just don't get a $400 haircut during a campaign to eradicate poverty. Your credibility as a messenger suffers.

Think of what would happen if Rudy Giuliani profited off of 9/11. (Uh... that's for another post. We won't want Katie Levinson to get mad at us today.)

At the end of the day, the standards may not be fair. Who faults Bill Gates for having a tremendo-mungus home and a zillion cars? (The riposte might be: has Edwards actually helped the world's poor, yet?)

The good news for Edwards is that, per public polls and private polls done for Democrats, the haircut/hedge fund coverage hasn't cut into Edwards's lead in Iowa, the only state that really matters right now to that campaign. Unions still love him. He's still the only guy who's running on poverty. But a few more weeks of coverage like this might begin to do some damage.