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Edwards Woos Another Jury

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To assess Tuesday’s vice presidential debate, you must filter out Sen. John Edwards’ superiority at skills that have little relevance to running the country. Edwards is one dynamite debater, and no doubt would be as impressive in a debate against Osama bin Laden as he was against Vice President Dick Cheney.

As in last week’s presidential debate, the Democrat was a clear winner in the atmospherics. As the evening wore on, Cheney’s chin sank down his chest, his gravelly voice turned into an inarticulate rumble and he even started passing up opportunities to talk at all. Handed opportunities on a platter -- Was Edwards, who made a fortune representing plaintiffs suing healthcare providers, part of the healthcare problem? With just four years in public office, was he qualified to be president? -- Cheney waved them aside.

For the record:

12:00 a.m. Oct. 8, 2004 For The Record
Los Angeles Times Friday October 08, 2004 Home Edition California Part B Page 10 Editorial Pages Desk 0 inches; 29 words Type of Material: Correction
Vice presidential debate -- An editorial Wednesday incorrectly said John Edwards (D-N.C.) had been in the U.S. Senate for four years. He has been a senator for six years.

When Edwards, with that boyish smile that worked magic with jurors, stuck a knife in his gut (for example, about his role as CEO of Halliburton), Cheney more than once said he didn’t know where to begin, and then didn’t. Some of his own demagogic thrusts, meanwhile, were bizarre. Surely many GOP small businessmen were alarmed to hear the vice president denounce so-called S corporations (a common tax-favored setup apparently used by Edwards’ law practice).

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On the merits of the campaign’s central theme, however, the debate was a closer call. Cheney mocked John Kerry’s strategy for Iraq as more of an echo than a plan, and indeed Edwards was unpersuasive that his ticket offered a significantly different approach for ensuring a successful endgame there. Cheney skewered Kerry’s shifting positions on Iraq, dating back to the senator’s ill-advised vote against the Gulf War in 1991.

Kerry’s political opportunism, Cheney charged, provides the only plausible explanation why the senator would vote to authorize the use of force against Iraq in 2002 but then vote against funding the occupation when antiwar candidate Howard Dean was in the lead for the Democratic nomination. That led to Cheney’s best line: “Now if they couldn’t stand up to the pressures that Howard Dean represented, how can we expect them to stand up to Al Qaeda?”

Afghanistan triggered a glass-half-empty-versus-half-full exchange, mirroring that nation’s perilous hope on the cusp of elections. Once again, as in last week’s debate, the incumbent failed to respond to the charge that the administration didn’t pursue Bin Laden with U.S. troops when he may have been cornered in the Afghan mountains in late 2001.

It will be easier for voters to forgive the Democrats their inconsistencies on Iraq if Kerry and Edwards convince them that the conflict was a distraction from the war on terror, as opposed to one of its central battles. Cheney was disingenuous in saying he never talked about connections between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 but insisting that Hussein did support terrorism more broadly. Edwards didn’t have a reply.

The Edwards victory was more lopsided when the debate turned to domestic policy. The Bush administration, Edwards noted, is the first since Herbert Hoover’s to preside over a net loss of jobs. Beyond an irrelevant paean to education, the vice president had no response. He seemed similarly at a loss when Edwards proceeded, with Clintonian specificity, to eviscerate President Bush’s record on other domestic fronts.

But as a spectator sport, the second half of the debate was less satisfying, if only because the more skilled litigator had the easier case to make. It would have been fun to watch what Edwards could have done with Cheney’s brief.

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