With both parties to the alleged affair flatly denying the
Drudge Report rumor that dogged John Kerry last week, we must
assume, absent evidence to the contrary, that the infidelity never
took place. I must admit this disappoints me greatly. If John
Edwards has Bill Clinton’s charm without his moral pathology, then
Kerry has the pathology without the charm; the philandering would
complete the parallel, when combined with Kerry’s endless waffling.
Liberal punch-pulling and comics-page standards of good taste led
Garry Trudeau to illustrate Clinton’s failings by drawing him as a
waffle, but Clinton’s straddles were never as dizzying as
Kerry’s.
On pretty much every important issue facing the country — war
and peace, trade, education, anti-terrorism laws, gay marriage,
etc. — Kerry not only waffles, but waffles ineptly. Edwards can
explain his votes for the Iraq war but against funding the
occupation and sound somewhat convincing; Kerry cannot. In the
debate in Wisconsin Sunday night, when Kerry was asked whether he
felt any responsibility for the war he voted to authorize, he gave
a long and meandering answer, invoking his Vietnam service, bashing
Bush for being insufficiently beholden to the UN, saying that Bush
could have gone to war without Congress so the vote didn’t really
matter, among other nonsense. This was when Edwards delivered the
coup de grace in a debate he won hands down: “That’s the longest
answer I ever heard to a yes or no question. The answer to your
question is yes, of course.”
Zogby showed Kerry ahead of Edwards by 27 points in Wisconsin
over the weekend; as I write, with 99% of precincts reporting,
Kerry’s margin of victory has been pared down to 6. Four out of ten
voters were non-Democrats, and Edwards won among them, suggesting
that the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel was surely right to
argue, in its editorial endorsement of Edwards, that Edwards is the
more electable candidate. Note that South Carolina, the one state
that Edwards has won, has an open primary like Wisconsin.
Endorsements from the Journal-Sentinel and the Madison
Capital Times, along with the debate, clearly contributed
to Kerry’s slide; Edwards overwhelmingly won voters who decided
whom to vote for in the final days. (I suspect the Drudge story
played a small role at most; it appears to have gotten very little
play in the Wisconsin media, and one of the mentions was in the
middle of a Capital Times puff-piece on Teresa Heinz-Kerry
preposterously titled “Would-be first lady likened to Jackie
O.”)
The bounce that Edwards got at the end of the race, and his
clear victory in the media primary — the talking heads swooned all
night over the exceeded expectations — suggest how Edwards could
conceivably catch up to John Kerry. The media, generally suckers
for a tight race, are likely to play up the Edwards vs. Kerry
story; if Kerry turns in a few more bad performances as more voters
start paying attention, or better yet faces a scandal that actually
has legs, then Edwards could get some traction heading into Super
Tuesday on March 2. He can’t afford to campaign as widely as Kerry,
and Kerry maintains his solid frontrunner status; he’s still only
lost two states. Edwards is still a long shot. Then again, a month
ago, so was John Kerry.
