The Beauty Contest
The half-wits and harridans talk about nothing so much as his hair. But John Edwards has more pressing things on his mind.==It was more than an attack on unchecked executive power and the unreasoning fear that led to its rise -- although it surely was that. It was a call for the country to define itself again, to reassert old values in a new age, and to
reject the notion that "everything changed" on September 11, 2001. It was of a piece with the most memorable tag line in Edwards's stump speech:==
(Note: the line in the stump speech is the one about having a president who asks Americans to be patriotic about something other than war)
==Not to put too fine a point on it, but
the political culture seems to be determined to fag-bait John Edwards out of the race this time around. Channeling the conservative id from the swamps of its birth, as always, Ann Coulter flatly called him a "faggot" at a conference of conservative activists, and Rush Limbaugh regularly chaffs him as "the Breck Girl." From there, apparently, the affair of the haircuts has mainstreamed Coulter's position into more polite precincts. In April, Maureen Dowd wrote a column in The New York Times that speculated that the country was not ready for a "metrosexual in chief," comparing Edwards unfavorably with her dear departed Irish-cop daddy, who used to get his hair cut at the Senate barbershop for fifty cents. You could almost hear the gentle ringing of sputum in the spittoons. Thus are the issues. Thus are the watchdogs. Thus are the politics while people are dying.==
==There was talk, polite talk to be sure, but talk, that his wife's illness would be enough to knock Edwards out of the 2008 campaign. He left the Senate and focused on antipoverty work, most visibly in New Orleans, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when Anderson Cooper told an astonished nation that, yes, there were indeed still poor people in America and that their lives were hard, especially during massive flooding. It was there, in the pestiferous rubble of the city's Ninth Ward, that Edwards announced that he would indeed run for president again. He apologized for his blunder in taking George W. Bush at his word. Not long after that, he hugged his wife and broke her rib. The cancer was back.
But then, within a month, he was back in New Hampshire, working a union crowd at a sprawling forest grove that's used mainly for outdoor weddings.
Edwards stayed a long time, wandering through the picnic tables and spending a great deal of time with the kind of people that Maureen Dowd seems certain will be put off by where he gets his hair cut. One guy got laid off because he got injured. Another woman is telling a seemingly endless story about health care, which has an unhappy ending, because this is America, and stories about health care generally do. He listens to every word. The smile is gone for good. ==
Read the rest at
http://www.esquire.com/features/edwardscontest0807
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