DemNom's Content of Character

When the NYTimes asked John Edwards and John Kerry to write about an incident early in their life which shaped their character, John Edwards wrote about how we won $3.7M jury award instead of accepting $0.75M settlement from a doctor who had prescribed Antabuse to a patient well over the normal quantity, apparenly putting him into a coma and debilitating him for life. This is either a shrewd attempt to get what would be a point of criticism in an Edwards-Bush contest in front of people in advance -- but which should have happened before now -- or a tin-ear description of an episode which Edwards apparently might not realize that, while emotional, few voters are likely to identify with.

John Kerry described -- in a completely impersonal way -- learning about the deaths of two friends in Vietnam, and subsequently deciding to campaign against the war.
It's a bizarre article. The sequence of events is clear, but by failing to reflect on the roots of his emotional attachments to these friends, the motivations of his transition are opaque.

This is a fearsome situation. Kerry failed to make the emotional connections between what he had witnessed and his decision to fight against the Vietnam war. I must presume this is a studied failure -- he is, after all, a successful politician by most standards, and he must know that he cannot simply jump up on the soap box of anti-Vietnam and the bad time of the 60's, and be guaranteed to take the crowd with him; more likely, they would see it as anachronistic prostyletising. Instead, we come away understanding that, gosh, bad things both personal and public seemed to be involved in his decision to turn against the war, but it's completely unclear to what degree any of them do. Kerry presents the information of the situations, as if the appropriate emotional responses were self-evident -- and while they can be inferred, leaving emotional responses as self-evident instead of describing them robs the reader of the opporunity to identify with the writer. Kerry is, again, a cold fish.

On the other hand, we have a bit more of emotional insight into Edward's predicament -- should he accept the $0.75M on behalf of his first client, who commuinicated via computer "Take it, I trust you.". It was the latter half of that message which stuck in his craw; Edwards seems to respond, "Well, if I'm to live up to that trust, I have to tell you to do something which appears against your short-term well-being. If I'm to be worthy, I have to give you my best advice." The message is that if you trust him, you'll get the payoff in the end. Even so, the payoff lawsuit does not ring quite as easily as good vs. evil, and it's unclear what Edwards accomplished other than winning a liability lottery for his client -- the derived moral of the story is "I'll get you the payoff."

These are both tin-ear stories. Neither connects traditional democrats to larger themes.