That’s funny. You couldn’t buy a 1 bedroom condo near where I live for $500k. Of course, housing prices in Si Valley are just nuts.
Your world seems kinda shallow to me.
Just sayin’.
FWIW, I grew up in Chapel Hill; there are a few uber-rich areas, sure, but it’s not really in the running for Most Expensive Housing in the country, nor even in the state (Charlotte and Asheville, for starters, are far crazier mansionwise, and the coast has some doozies as well).
Daniel
In that world, we wouldn’t have to worry about campaign expense reports. All the candidates would line up and drop their pants, and we’d pick the next President with a 59-cent ruler. (Or a $1.69 yardstick, for the top contenders.)
Yeah, I think the Pink Sapphire thing is a silly reason to attack the guy.
And to be honest, I think the $400 haircut issue is as well, and I’m the one who brought it up. So I’d like to retract that. Politicians running multi-million dollar campaigns, where every second of on-camera time is scrutinized, have to be presentable. And since they can’t just walk into Joe’s barbershop, they have to hire stylists to come to them. That’s expensive. Hell, it costs a couple of hundred bucks for a plumber to make a house call.
In fact, the haircut thing is exactly the kind of non-issue issue that I hate. I will not mention it again.
RTFirefly: See for yourself what kind of real estate you can find in Orange County: Orange County Real Estate. That’s a 42 page listing of homes worth over $2 million, just in three cities in central Orange County. Edwards has the largest, most expensive home in Orange County, so far as I can tell.
Again, there’s nothing wrong with being wealthy. But there’s something wrong with being wealthy, ostentatiously so, and then to go out on the campaign trail and claim that the rich are screwing the poor and are greedy and don’t help enough. But I guess it’s not inconsistent with his beliefs. He apparently thinks that advocating public charity with tax dollars is more noble and moral than actually being charitable with his own money.
His sort is typical. He’s like Ted Kennedy, advocate for alternative energy until it slightly impedes his view of the Ocean. He’s like Bill Clinton, campaign against the culture of ‘greed and corruption’ in the 80’s, while participating in shady land deals and claiming tax exemptions for his underwear. He’s like the conservative politicians who campaign for ‘morals’ laws and play pious christians by day, while blowing their gay lovers in the evenings and snorting coke. I’m not sure they’re so much hypocrites as they are elitists who believe the rules they advocate are for lesser men than themselves. Whatever they are, I don’t have to like them. Give me Ron Paul or Ralph Nader any day - honest people who, wrong or right, really believe in something and act out their lives in the same way they would ask the rest of us to. I’ll respect any politician on either side who’s willing to do that.
Of the current contenders, the ones that are most true to themselves (other than the fringe candidates, who probably have a better track record of being consistent), are John McCain, Barack Obama, and Fred Thompson. Mitt Romney loses points for flip-flopping on abortion, athough by all accounts his does live according to his faith and behaves in a decent way to his family and friends. Hillary Clinton and John Edwards are the two that really come across as somewhat phony, and I think that’s what gives some people a visceral negative reaction to them. Does anyone know what kind of President Hillary would really be? Would she govern as a conservative southern Democrat, or as a New York Liberal? Who knows? She’s taken both sides as the political winds blew in favor of one or the other.
John Edwards was originally a moderate, DLC type Democrat. This new populist Edwards doesn’t strike me at all as being who he really is. It smells of being an invention. Like he sat around a table with his advisors and said, “Okay, who should I be?” He’s the focus-group candidate.
Well, there’s probably no one more ostentatiously wealthy than Bill Gates (save the sultan of Brunei or maybe that Arab guy that I read somewhere is having an Airbus A380 outfitted for his personal use), voice-controlled house and all, and yet he gives many millions to charity. Of course, this is a small fraction of his overall wealth, so he has a ton yet to spend, and thus he probably still appears to many as a materialistic, uncaring asshole even if that assertion isn’t 100% true anymore.
I mean, I have no idea as to the full extent of John Edwards’ charitable works. I’d assume that he is at least considering donating to cancer research funds now if he isn’t already, since many celebrities who are cancer survivors or relatives thereof seem to do that. And he seemed to want to take up public advocacy cases as a lawyer, representing average people against shady businesses, so he appears to know which people really need help. So it’s sort of a stretch to say that he feels that his personal money has no place in the “helping the lower class” equation simply because he still has a lot of it.
So, you are going to vote against him?
Candidates reinventing themselves isn’t new and it doesn’t necessarily follow that the reinvention is a fake. Perhaps John McCain really has changed into a kiss-ass office seeker.
The only big thing that’s he flip flopped over AFAIK is the Iraqi War.
And I don’t care why he believes what he believes, as long as he follows through with what he proposes. Unless Gore announces this fall what the hell am I supposed to do? I’m obviously not going to vote for Mrs. Clinton, aka Bush in a skirt without the stutter. Obama might be passable if I hold my nose. I could poll higher than Kucinich thanks to the MSM. Sigh…
I respect that. If only the right-wing punditry felt that way.
What makes you think he isn’t charitable with his own money? And even if he did give every penny he had to charitable causes, how much good would it do? He can do a lot more good by advocating changes in the system.
It’s like asking me why I think the government should help find solutions for the 47 million Americans without health insurance, when I could just see them all in my clinic.
I just don’t see how Edwards is the least bit analogous to any of those things. If he were proposing an expanded governmental role in alleviating the problems of the poor, but he was not willing to pay his fair share of the costs, you could call him a hypocrite. If he pretended to be poor to make his point, you could call him a phony. But he hasn’t done either.
McCain? Please. He lost any claim he had to being “true to himself” the day he started kissing Jerry Falwell’s ass. His “maverick” image might have fit at one point, but it’s a joke this time around.
And we’ll see about Thompson. If he runs as an actor, lawyer, lobbyist, and smooth political operator, you’ll be right. If he runs as a pickup-truck-drivin’, shit-kickin’ ol’ country lawyer, not so much.
There are so many reasons to dislike Hillary Clinton.
With Edwards, it doesn’t help with the right-wing noise machine yells “$400 HAIRCUT! BRECK GIRL! PINK SAPPHIRE! FAGGOT FAGGOT FAGGOT!” at the mere mention of his name. You’d think they were trying to create a negative visceral reaction to him.
Frankly, I think this was answered by Little Nemo in Post #2. It’s just how they sound and look. Nothing else.
Edwards is widely regarded as phony not because he IS phony, but because he comes off as phony. It really doesn’t have a lot to do with his big house and his being a product liability lawyer; I thought he seemed phony as hell before I knew about his big house. The average voter doesn’t give a shit about his big house and in many cases probably doesn’t know about it. He looks and sounds like a caricature of a lying politician. He may in fact be as sincere as all hell; I don’t have any reason to question the man’s sincerity, nor do I have any reason to trust it, and his phony appearance might just be an unfortunate combination of his natural speaking habits, his metrosexual visage, and the way he’s been coached.
Thompson is widely regarded as genuine because he looks and sounds genuine. I have no reason to trust or doubt him, personally, but that’s how he looks. As Nemo points out, Thompson is a veteran character actor, and the character he’s paid to play is exactly that; a gruff, no-nonsense Southern-born DA/Navy Captain/Politician/whatever, who’s not going to take any shit from Sam Waterston or Alec Baldwin. His basic skill as an actor is being the exact opposite of John Edwards; if you cast Thompson and John Edwards in a movie, they’d be cast as adversaries, with Thompson playing the no-nonsense Secretary of Defense while Edwards plays the conniving, smarmy Chief of Staff.
If R. Lee Ermey was a politician your immediate impression of him would be that he’s a hardass. R. Lee Ermey is by all accounts a nice guy. But he LOOKS like a hardass, his voice sounds like a hardass’s voice, and he’s a trained actor who does character work as a hardass. So he comes off as a hardass, and he’s made excellent money on that.
It’s purely appearance. It really has nothing to do with their politics, and trying to attach it to politics is just post-hoc rationalization. Appearance matters in politics.
Guin brings up Hillary Clinton’s being cold, and I agree with that too. She may in fact be the nicest person in the Empire State, but she looks and sounds cold and imperious. Again, that may have nothing to do with her personality and her politics - I’ve never met the lady - but the combination of her appearance and poise and voice make her look and sound that way.
Like it or not, appearance matters. Here in Canada, in our last election we had Stephen Harper, who looks and sounds cold and weird, winning the last election against Paul Martin, who looks and sounds panicky and stupid (or at least does when campaigning.) But according to all inside accounts, Harper is in fact a nice, friendly man who loves kids, and Martin is a highly competent, smart man. But that’s not how they sound and look, and Harper constantly fights that impression (and Martin lost an election in part because of the impression he gave, though he doesn’t have to worry about it anymore because he retired.)
It isn’t all the media, though.
People in public life with certain negative personality traits tend to do things to minimize or counteract them in the media. Though this is generally phony, it often works.
John Edwards, bless his heart, does not do this. In the face of perceptions that he is vain and unserious, he does things like this sort of primping in public, and also hired bloggers that should never have been anywhere close to his campaign because of their horrendous comments about people of faith. That sort of action tends to reinforce notions of a campaign that doesn’t know what it is doing.
If he’s not willing to do the work to minimize these impressions people have of him, we shouldn’t wonder that these impressions persist.
I said above I don’t consider him a phony. That doesn’t mean I’m impressed at all by him or his campaign.
I agree with a lot of what is said in Jeff Cohen’s article in Common Dreams. In spite of what the tightie righties say about the “liberal media”, the media serve their corporate masters. Those masters want to maintain the status quo. Just as they torpedoed Howard Dean in 2004, they’ve got Edwards in their sights and aren’t going to stop shooting until the target drops. So Edwards charged $55,000 for a speech. Why is that an outrage when Guiliani commands a higher fee? Where are the aerial photos of Mitt Romney’s mansion? Where is the comdemnation of Thompson over his lobbying days? Or indeed over his rented prop truck? There are going to be two standards of reporting over the next year- one for John Edwards and one for everybody else.
Thanks. Burying that one (at least in the confines of this thread) is a step forward for the discussion.
Edwards lives in North Carolina, not in California. You’ve got the wrong Orange County.
He’s not ‘ostentatiously wealthy’; he’s not been the one flaunting his wealth. (“Ostentation: pretentious display meant to impress others; boastful showiness.” American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition, 1982.)
DoctorJ has already ably responded to this point, so I’ll let his words speak for me too.
I’m waiting on a response to the pickup-truck fraud.
OK, but that is strictly a matter of perception, and doesn’t connect with this:
Oh, bullshit. She’s a DLC Democrat who’s been portrayed by the wingnuts as a wild-eyed liberal. A Hillary Clinton Presidency is eminently predictable - it’ll look domestically like Bill Clinton ca. 1996-97 (small but splashy domestic initiatives aimed at the center, and incrementalism on bigger stuff like health care and climate change) but more hawkish internationally on account of being in a post-9/11 political climate.
What’s so new about it? “Two Americas” was the domestic problem his campaign focused on four years ago. When exactly are you saying he reinvented himself? ISTM that you’re just saying stuff based on impressions, rather than actual knowledge.
Only until Edwards’ campaign is toast. Then they’ll do the same stuff with whoever the Dem nominee is.
That sounds like over-the-top revisionist history to me. John Dean was the media darling in '04 until he suffered defeat at the hands of the Democratic voters in Iowa. The idea that “the media” somehow is in cahoots to maintain the status quo is one of those unprovable assertions that not only leads you into conspiracy theory territory, but also creates a fog over the self-reflection process that is necessary to make sure the same mistakes don’t happen again.
:eek: Now that’s some revisionist history!! Unless you meant to say Howard Dean. 
John Dean was the media darling in 1973. I think you’re thinking of Howard Dean.
While I can’t speak to the coverage of (Howard) Dean in the media generally in 2003-04, my perceptions of him in 2003 were almost entirely based on what I read about him in the Washington Post, back in my pre-blogosphere days, and - trust me on this - he didn’t come across at all positively in the pages of the WaPo.
The media’s coverage of Dean in 2004, of course, was pretty much about one specific moment: the infamous “scream.”
I disagree. The media serves its own corporate masters. Like Murdoch. Just look at the Sun in the U.K.
I have the same recollections, though I can’t remember anything specific other than the scream episode. I do remember having the following conversation with my then roomate as we watched the news.
R: Man, the media’s really got it in for Howard Dean.
Me: Lucky for him it’s a liberal media. 'Cause otherwise he’d really be screwed!
I don’t remember what prompted this exchange.
I respectfully disagree. From the nonpartisan Center for Media and Public Affairs