Edwards Profile

I posted yesterday about how I support John Edwards at this point in his presidential bid, but I didn't post much about the why. Suffice to say, I believe he's genuine, as far as these kind of people go. He's accomplished big things for little people. He's endured humbling tragedy and he faces the uncertain possibility of more, in his wife's illness, with admirable courage and strong dedication to his family. John Edwards is the one candidate who really is self-made man (the kind of man the Republicans are always claiming to be, even when they aren't.)

It is a muted version of the Edwards stump speech, given to a group of young New Hampshire Democrats -- or, more specifically, to the New Hampshire Young Democrats. In fact, he himself seems a muted version of the golden child he once was. Only four years ago, there was an ineluctable sense of packaging about him. He was more than half slick, and it was enough to obscure the theme he'd copped from John Dos Passos, who looked at the country at the beginning of the last century, staggering veterans and the Dust Bowl poor, and wrote:




"All right we are two nations."




The sheen is off him now. It's as though the shinier parts of him have been cored and refilled, ounce by ounce, with something dark and gravid. He voted to authorize an incompetent president to go to war, and he's paying a price for it in his eyes. In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in late May, Edwards boldly rejected the very concept of a "war on terror" as having at its heart profoundly antidemocratic impulses.




"As president," he said, "I will close Guantánamo Bay, restore habeas corpus, and ban torture. Measures like these will help America once again achieve its historic moral stature -- and lead the world toward democracy and peace."

Esquire has more here.