Exploiting Cancer For Votes

Elizabeth Edwards looks into the camera and intones:

"It's unbelievably important that in our president we have someone who can stare the worst in the face and not blink."

I agree. George Bush looked Islamic terror in the face and didn't blink. John Edwards looked it in the face and didn't blink, then looked at the polls and blinked, saying his support of the war against terror was a mistake, that he was fooled by a bumper sticker.

John Edwards also looked at this wife's cancer and the death of a son. Perhaps that's what Elizabeth was alluding to, perhaps not. Slate writer John Dickerson asked Edwards' staff what the line meant and ...

... got a strange laundry list. It's supposed to refer to Sen. Edwards and his wife's personal suffering, plus all kinds of other talking-point items that fall laughably short of "staring the worst in the face": his career as a trial lawyer, the fact he admitted his Iraq vote was a mistake, the poverty tour, and his universal health-care plan.

Being a trial lawyer and seeing poverty is staring the worst in the face? Maybe the former; not the latter. Of the family's loss of a son and their current fight against Elizabeth's cancer, I don't know whether blinking was involved or not, but on my list of background I'd like my president to have, this is midrange stuff at best. Certainly, a person can be seasoned by such experiences and can view life with deeper perspective, so they're not to be discounted, but they're not to be over-glorified, either.

Given the campaign's inability to come up with anything else that's an eye-blinker, it really seems like Elizabeth is exploiting her cancer in the ad. That's pretty low politics: Vote for my husband because I have cancer and Obama's wife and Hillary's husband don't.

I wish I could blink and the entire transparent, pandering, ridiculous Edwards campaign would disappear, but he's not only here, he's on top in Iowa. I thought the people of Iowa were a common sense bunch, capable of seeing through phonies, but they're disappointing me.