Jerry Pfohl’s opinion piece “Edwards too
inexperienced” (July 12) is a case of the Republican
Party’s simple-minded rhetoric dirtying the record of a
credible vice presidential candidate.
Sen. John Edwards has spent the past six years in the U.S.
Senate and has served on the Intelligence Committee. In particular,
he has played an instrumental role in the reform of the No Child
Left Behind Act and the passage of the Patients’ Bill of
Rights.
Conservatives are quick to criticize his background as the son
of a mill worker who became a successful trial lawyer. Edwards
lived a rags-to-riches American dream, working his way through
public universities both as an undergraduate and as a law
student.
The Republicans call him an ambulance chaser but won’t
tell you about the type of people he defended when he became a
lawyer.
He won medical malpractice lawsuits for people ““ mostly
children ““ who will need a lifetime of expensive medical
attention because of doctors’ negligence in drug overdoses or
oxygen deprivation cases. He won a wrongful death suit against a
psychiatric hospital that released a 16-year-old boy who committed
suicide on the same day. In his largest monetary victory he won a
lawsuit against a swimming pool manufacturer whose faulty drains
left a young girl permanently on feeding tubes when her intestines
were pulled from her body.
People are quick to criticize lawyers until they need one.
Edwards has fought for the common people of the United States and
should be commended, not condemned.
Now let’s talk about Vice President Dick Cheney’s
so-called experience. Admittedly, Cheney has a great deal of
federal defense experience under former Presidents Ford and Bush.
Yet what about his experience with Halliburton Co. in Iraq?
In a case of selective memory, the White House Web site likes to
leave holes in Cheney’s resume, never mentioning his
too-close-for-comfort ties with our nation’s energy giants.
Yes, Cheney has experience. But is it the kind of experience we
want our leaders to have?
Conservatives also like to pretend that only Democrats run
candidates who are relative newcomers for high-profile office. I do
not recall hearing the Republican Party complaining about Gov.
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s inexperience in California’s
gubernatorial recall election. Instead it was jumping at the chance
for an action movie star with no political experience at all to run
the sixth-largest economy in the world at the time of an enormous
fiscal crisis.
And what about current President Bush himself? He ran in 2000
after serving only six years as governor of Texas (the same amount
of time Edwards has been in the Senate). Bush had no federal
government experience and no foreign policy experience
whatsoever.
The Senate voting records for Sen. John Kerry that conservatives
like to pull out have absolutely no comparison to Bush’s
because while Kerry was working on political crises, Bush owned a
baseball team. So what made Bush qualified to run for president in
2000 but Edwards unqualified for vice president in 2004?
Anyone who knows a thing about politics would recognize that
Pfohl’s statement, “No matter how right-leaning voters
may feel the Bush-Cheney ticket is, they are clearly not as
partisan as the Kerry-Edwards team,” is at the very least a
stretch and at most an outright lie.
Do you honestly think Cheney moves the Republican ticket to the
center more than Edwards moves the Democratic ticket center? The
reason Republicans worry about keeping Cheney on the ticket rather
than replacing him with a moderate such as Rudy Giuliani is that
Cheney only appeals to the most conservative members of the
Republican Party.
Edwards clearly brings a more centrist position to the
Democratic ticket, especially with his more moderate views on the
war in Iraq and his concerns with free trade, by which rural
America feels threatened.
Pfohl’s column was a cheap shot at a good man who
ultimately won’t be the decisive factor in this election.
We should be talking about Kerry’s experience. Let’s
talk about a man who could have spent his life making millions at
an energy company but instead has spent his entire life helping
people in the public sector as a criminal prosecutor, lieutenant
governor and U.S. senator.
Cheney has proven a vice president is good for two things
““ whispering the answers to tough questions in committee
hearings and hiding in a bunker. I’m sure Edwards is just as
qualified as Cheney to hide in a bunker, and Kerry is a formidable
enough politician not to need someone to whisper the answers to
him.
Miller is a fourth-year political science student and the
publicity director for Bruin Democrats.