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July
16, 2003, 8:45 a.m. |
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t
the NAACP presidential candidates' forum Monday, Sen. John
Edwards offered a diagnosis of what's wrong with his party: They're
not reminding voters about Bill Clinton.
"I am tired of Democrats walking away from President Bill Clinton, who did an extraordinary job of lifting up and reaching out to all of the American people," Edwards said.
Campaign strategists (some of Edwards's campaign staff, by the way, are Clinton/Gore vets) can debate whether reminding voters of the former president will help the fortunes of Edwards's party. But what's fairly clear from the senator's record is that he was once one of those Democrats walking away from Clinton as quickly as possible.
When Edwards was running for the Senate seat of Republican Lauch Faircloth in 1998 in culturally conservative North Carolina, he was singing a different tune. According to the Charlotte Observer, Edwards did not mention Clinton on the campaign trail through mid-October.
Clinton attended a fundraiser in Raleigh for Edwards in July, but throughout his campaign, the senatorial candidate said he didn't believe the tactic of tying him to the president would work.
"There's plenty of issues on which [Clinton] and I disagree," Edwards told the Raleigh News & Observer on Oct. 25. "As a political outsider, I'm able to be independent of everybody."
He finally told the Associated Press on Oct. 26 that he disapproved of the president's lies and behavior in the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
"I've said all along what the president did was wrong and he made a bad situation worse by not telling the truth," Edwards said. "But I don't think it will make any difference (in my campaign). The voters will evaluate me on my merits."
Edwards told Cox News Service on Oct. 29 that he probably wouldn't have invited Clinton down to raise funds after the Lewinsky disclosures, but, "at the time, it was the right thing to do."
Jonathan Karl of CNN alluded to Edwards's strategy of distancing himself from Clinton during his Election Day coverage that year.
"Republican, national, and state committees spent more than a million dollars in the closing two weeks on ads echoing Faircloth's attack's on President Clinton," Karl said. "Democrat John Edwards sought to deflect the attacks by insisting he is different than Clinton — more conservative, and more friendly to tobacco. In fact, right up to Election Day, he mocked Faircloth's attack's by tying the Republican to Clinton."
— Jim Geraghty, a reporter for States News Service, is a regular contributor to NRO.