strength and honesty in Raleigh/Durham today

Did you see the Edwards press conference today? As you've certainly heard, Elizabeth has bone cancer. It's uncurable, but treatable, and they're going to continue the campaign barring things turning for the worse. Them Edwardses is classy folks.

And how 'bout that Elizabeth? So strong!

I have to say, I've never seen such a humanizing effect on a presidential candidate before. John and Elizabeth looked like the kind of people who live on my street, and the way they corrected each other and finished each other's sentences and riffed off of each other's thoughts was very endearing.

To me, this presser cast the right's attacks on John Edwards as girly in the kind of absurdist, character assassinating light they deserve. The point of the attack is to assault Edwards' "strength," to call him weak and vain compared to strong, by and large ugly Republicans who have no qualms about risking other people's lives for questionable objectives. Sorry guys, but seeing John (not to mention Elizabeth!) at that presser today, I can't think of 2 words that fit him less. It takes incredible fortitude and strength of will to mount an outsider presidential campaign, but to do it while going through this? To get in front of the cameras with the whole country watching, and just lay out your major personal health problems the day after you found out, and then take unscripted questions afterwards?

Folks, that is what strength looks like. That's also, incidentally, what honesty looks like, and it's been a while since we've seen any genuine examples of that, too.

I've dwelled a lot lately on negative traits and how they reinforce each other, particularly corruption and incompetence, or spun another way, secrecy and weakness. One can see without an abundance of imagination how the two have a symbiotic relationship, each feeding off of the other. It's the same, however, with their opposites: personal strength and honesty, or perhaps to put a finer point on it, the trait that stems from personal strength, integrity and honesty. A person with integrity eschews lies and embraces truth, s/he's straight with people, while honesty keeps enough light shining in on them to keep them from slipping. The honesty "keeps them honest," as it were. It's the rationale behind oversight. And there's the point at which the differences between the Bush Administration and an Edwards Administration are most stark: oversight wouldn't pose the same problem for Edwards, because Edwards has a belief system that's amenable to it and a personality that can thrive under it.

In other words, John Edwards is the man George W. Bush pretended to be in 2000.

Bob Shrum: countering sound judgment since 1976

Why does anybody listen to this hack? (via Digby):

WASHINGTON (AP) - Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards was skeptical about voting for the Iraq war resolution and was pushed into it by advisers looking out for his political future, according to an upcoming book by one of his former consultants.
Democratic strategist Bob Shrum writes in his memoir to be published in June that he regrets advising Edwards to give President Bush the authority to go to war in Iraq. He said if Edwards had followed his instincts instead of the advice of political professionals, he would have been a stronger presidential candidate in 2004.
...
Shrum writes that Edwards, then a North Carolina senator, called his foreign policy and political advisers together in his Washington living room in the fall of 2002 to get their advice. Edwards was "skeptical, even exercised" about the idea of voting yes and his wife Elizabeth was forcefully against it, according to Shrum.
But Shrum said the consensus among the advisers was that Edwards, just four years in office, did not have the credibility to vote against the resolution and had to support it to be taken seriously on national security. Shrum said Edwards' facial expressions showed he did not like where he was being pushed to go. [emphasis in Attytood's post, but probably not in original report]

As Digby correctly notes, even without the benefit of hindsight this advice is so patently myopic that it's amazing anyone ever paid this wanker to consult a campaign for the local school board:

The mistake was not only in the rank immorality of voting for this ridiculous war (on the basis of 10 points in the polls, no less.) It was also a huge tactical political error. If the war went well, it was going to be nearly impossible to beat Bush in 2004 and everyone knew it. If the war was going badly, then a vote for it was going to tie these candidates up in knots and make them look weak and irresolute, which is exactly what happened to Kerry. There was no margin in Democratic presidential candidates voting for the war.

Will Bunch points back to a Washington Post article that covers a little of Shrum's history. Folks, this guy has consulted 8 presidential campaigns, including two against George W. Bush, the depth of whose personality flaws is matched only by his intellectual ones ("peeance and freeance," anyone?), and he has never won. Never. His tutelage helped make war hero John Kerry look like less of a man than his draft-dodging opponent. Thanks in part to his advice, the prescient climate change crusader Al Gore looked like a serial liar who had no more to say about the environment than his oilman opponent who's entire public face was a fraud conceived in 1999.

And now we see he convinced John Edwards to sell out on his better judgment to make the biggest mistake of his political career. What would have happened if all of those people looking for a candidate smart enough to see the war for what it was had not only Howard Dean, but also John Edwards? It's hard to see Kerry having survived the primary had Edwards been able to say that he was in the Senate, too, and he had the good sense to vote nay (and that's assuming Edwards wouldn't have poached a lot of Dean's followers in the process!).

This is what when there are no hiring consequences to advising Democrats and losing. This shit doesn't happen in the GOP because if you can't win, they will cut your ass loose without thinking twice. Is it any surprise that they've been more successful campaigners despite being on the wrong side of virtually every major issue lately?

Kos, who devoted part of his book to the consultant problem, distilled his commentary on this revelation in one word: Dumbass.

One slightly more positive note, however: this article sure does make you love Elizabeth Edwards even more, doesn't it?