John-Boy Edwards

"Young men are apt to think themselves wise enough, as drunken men are apt to think themselves sober enough."

    - Lord Chesterfield (1694-1773), English statesman

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mark Steyn shares some of his thoughts about the Dick Cheney/John Edwards debate in this piece titled "Edwards Has a Little Growing Up To Do." He says the two debaters were playing different games:

"But in the clash of the veeps it was as if each contestant was playing his own game: One guy was playing a tennis match, the other football. If you thought you were watching the Super Bowl, the football guy was clearly the winner. If you thought you were at Wimbledon, the tennis guy was serving aces."

Only Steyn would think of the event in this way, but he has a point. As my wife and I watched the two going at it I remember thinking how different the two men are, not only in age and bearing, but in the manner they go about presenting their arguments. Mr. Steyn put it this way:

"I loved Cheney's performance because I think he's in tune with the times: grown-up, unflashy, deadly serious. Edwards, on the other hand, driveling on like a Depression-era sob sister about the 'bright light' of America now 'flickering' is one of the funniest acts I've seen...

I don't care about Edwards' dad and his heartwarming, sepia-hued vignettes any more than I cared about the mythical 'coatless girl' he used to cite in his primary speeches: a wee shivering thing whose coatlessness was supposedly a result of Bush-Cheney reducing her parents to poverty...

So, when John Edwards starts doing his John-Boy Walton routine, I say put a sock in it. If necessary, borrow a sock from the coatless girl, if her dad hasn't sold her socks to raise the trolley-car fare to send her for an interview for the chimney sweep's job at the robber baron's mansion on the other side of town.

I think the Edwards smarmarama is ridiculous. It's all about oil, as the anti-war lefties say, and on Tuesday night the oiliness was practically oozing through the TV screen and all over the floor. If every Democratic candidate was as unctuous and oleaginous as Edwards, gas would be 50 cents a gallon and we could tell the Saudis to go to hell."

Well, I don't know about that, but I do know when the moderator asked these men what qualified them to be commander-in-chief in the event something happened to the president, I hardly listened. I had already made up my mind, perhaps before the debate even started. 

Throughout the 90 minute broadcast as I watched the candidates, I tried to imagine each of them sitting in the Oval Office as the leader of the free world. Try as I might, there was no way I could picture Edwards in that position. Gephardt--yes, Lieberman--yes, but Edwards? Frankly, even if I were inclined to vote for Senator Kerry, having Edwards on his ticket would keep me from doing so.

As Steyn so aptly puts it, "In time of war, free peoples don't stay free if they look to a smooth-talking shyster-president to shelter them in the embrace of the nanny state." I  agree with his assessment. Edwards comes across as the smooth talking trial lawyer who will say anything to win his case, and he's smooth to the point of appearing phony. Vice-president? A heart-beat from the presidency? Perish the thought.

Update: Paul Greenberg weighs in with "The Not-So-Boyish Charm of Dick Cheney."  Thanks to Townhall.com for the link.