Opinion: When did the Edwards campaign go tone deaf?
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There’s a story this morning in John Edwards’ hometown paper, the Raleigh News & Observer, about his campaign’s apparent attempt to squelch a University of North Carolina student journalist’s video report on a student volunteer at Edwards’ headquarters.
But the journalist, Carla Babb, instead focused on an apparent disconnect between Edwards’ rhetoric of his ‘two Americas’ drive to improve the lives of the poor and his decision to house the headquarters in an upscale shopping center. So the story shifted, but is far from a hit piece. It comes across as balanced and focuses on a persistent image problem for the former trial lawyer.
The campaign apparently did not react well, demanding the piece be withdrawn and threatening to limit UNC journalism students’ access to the campaign, the newspaper reported.
The result of all this? First of all, you wouldn’t have been reading about Babb’s video here, or seeing the embedded video below, had it not been for the campaign’s reaction to a pretty basic bit of reporting. And you wouldn’t have had us reminding you about Edwards’ expensive taste in haircuts, or his 28,000-square-foot bungalow.
There’s nothing wrong in this go-get-’em culture of ours with getting rich -- some of our biggest heroes are rich. What does catch people up, though, are sniffs of hypocrisy and fair play.
Voters will decide whether Edwards’ decisions are out of step with his policies, though as one of the folks in Babb’s piece points out, poor people tend not to get far in presidential campaigns. And it’s not like rich folks haven’t done the poor a good turn before.
But from a strategic standpoint, one has to wonder where the image folks, and crisis management people, are in the Edwards campaign. Instead of focusing on poverty, the focus is now on wealth. Talk about not getting your message across.
-- Scott Martelle
