I don’t see political ambition as a bad thing.
I’d easily vote for Hillary before Edwards. She’s got more experience, more of a proven ability to work with both sides of the aisle and is less prone to economic populism. You don’t get to be president without a lot of naked ambition, but so far that’s all that Edwards seem to have.
Oh honestly. Who in politics cannot be said to be politically ambitious? It’s an awful job; lousy hours, pay usually worse than you can make in private industry, and people want to kill you. You have to be a publicity slut to get into it. So pretending that some people running for President aren’t politically ambitious bespeaks an impressive amount of self-delusion.
The first and last points first.
No, of course there are no studies and there could not be. We have no objective gold standard of with or without merit. I am left with anecdotal evidence. I’ve been sued, was told that we had a 90% plus chance of winning on the facts, but a verdict for the plaintiff might go way above my policy limits, and settled within policy limits rather than roll the dice. Not proud of it but I could not risk my family’s financial future. The defense experts tell me that nuisance suits are common. My brother, a trial lawyer himself (who prides himself on only taking meritorious cases) bemoans the many of his collegues who he says make their livings off of nuisance suits.
As to gaudy lifestyle, I’m talking Edwards only here.
I’ll avoid otherwise hijacking the thread.
Again the point is not that he is scum because he is a trial attorney. He is a phony for holding that UP as evidence of his fighting for the common man.
It sounds to me like your complaint is not with the trial lawyers or with Edwards, but with the law itself.
You claim that enforcement of the tort system doesn’t make medicine better. This is an extraordinary claim, since this is one of the main purposes of the tort system. It also flies in the face of the common sense notion that doctors are more careful when they face some legal penalty for not being careful. Do you have any support for this claim?
Malpractice claims generally don’t succeed just because something bad happened, or there was an innocent mistake. There has to be some actual malpractice–as in, the doctor did not meet the standard of care he/she should have met.
[If people consider this a hijack of the thread, let me know. I find it quite relevant to the reasons people dislike Edwards.]
Actually, there have been studies on the relative merits of settled cases. Tort reform is a hot topic, and many aspects of the issue have been investigated. You’re right that there is no way to determine whether a case would have won if it didn’t go to trial, but experts can look at the evidence after settlement and say whether the case had some merit or not. In terms of million-dollar cases, the cases that settle most frequently are actually cases that clearly have the most merit. Some cases also settle because the cost of litigation outweighs the cost of settlement, but these are less frequent. Most of the cases that go to trial are the vague, gray area cases that both sides think are winnable.
If, as you say, you’re only limiting yourself to Edwards, then show us which cases he took that were without merit.
No more support than you have that doctors are careful because their insurance company may have to pay out a malpractice claim, as opposed to being careful because they want to avoid hurting someone or avoid losing their medical license.
Threat of tort doesn’t often change people’s actions. Drivers don’t stop drunk driving because they can be sued, they stop because the state will take away their license and throw them in jail. Personally, I can only think of one action I’ve ever taken in response to the threat of tort, getting a high level of insurance coverage.
This is becoming a bit of a hijack, so I’m going to end my contributions here with one last remark. There are better ways to ensure a high quality of medicine than suing the pants off of doctors, and we have organizations in place to handle it, so I don’t see the tort lawyer as playing an important role in making medicine better.
It seems that you’re setting up a situation where if someone doesn’t like a candidate for a reason you don’t consider good enough, you’ll just accuse them of being a conservative. That’s how your post read to me, though I’m certainly willing to accept that you didn’t mean it that way.
Yes, a major hijack and one that has had long threads before. Why the million dollar limit? My case was not just a nusiance case. The settlement was not chump change though well less than a million. Your response has little to do with the claim. And your respone to my
statement, that I should
is bizzare.
If you want to claim that the current tort system makes doctors “better” then please open a separate thread. To me that is an extraordinary claim. But that discussion will inappropriately take over this thread if it continues here.
I don’t particularly have a dog in this fight, but this bothered me:
Edwards has sufficiently humble beginnings, which I seem to recall him pointing to regularly in the '04 campaign. The following clip from his Wikipedia bio :
Edwards was born on June 10, 1953 to Wallace R. Edwards and Kathryn Juanita Wade in Seneca, South Carolina. The family moved several times during Edwards’ childhood, eventually settling in Robbins, North Carolina, where his father worked in a textile mill and his mother was a postal employee. Edwards was the first person in his family to attend college. He first attended Clemson University and later transferred to North Carolina State University.
So, the textile workers boy went to school, became a lawyer, and got rich.
I say we string him up. :rolleyes:
I disagree that this a hijack because this is one of the central arguments used against Edwards, but I’ll cease the general tort reform debate anyway. On the specific topic of the OP, my response seems bizarre to you because you’ve misunderstood me. I was responding to this:
This implies that Edwards is the sort of trial attorney that takes meritless cases. Or did you not mean to imply that? If you did, what cases?
I get it. The hypocrisy comes from voting for Hillary. Well, I said I might vote for Edwards, so I’m not sure how hypocritical that is. At any rate, she served a full Senate term, and was re-elected, presumably by people who suspected she might run for president. That is far from the case with Edwards. Just my WAG, but he would never have been elected if his constituency believed he would effectively bail after two years. **John ****Mace **sums up my position well.
If you can find where I said I wanted to vote for her I will cop to the charge. Why don’t you get back to me either way? In the interest of fairness and all.
I’ve never understood the argument about political ambition being a bad thing. We don’t want to vote for the people who most want the job. That’s kooky.
Yep. Who was the most populist President ever? Franklin Delano Roosevelt, perhaps?
The wealthy do seem to come in different strains - the “I got mines, and let everybody else just take care of themselves” strain, the “I got mine but don’t want anybody else to get theirs” strain, and the “Noblesse Oblige” strain. Edwards seems to fit more in the latter category, along with the Roosevelts and Kennedys and Rockefellers, than either of the first 2, but there’s certainly room for discussion.
But then, somebody thrashing around for a presentable reason to dislike somebody they already naturally hate out of simple blind partisanship will always be able to find one. Acolytes of the “party of Lincoln”, who was *himself * a rich trial lawyer, somehow find no irony in that.
Oh yeah, there’s a more cynical argument available, that the wealthy make better public servants because they can’t be bribed. Depends on the individual, ISTM - that’s how some got wealthy in the first place.
I don’t know where you’re getting that I said this makes them conservative. I said conservatives in particular do this. There were many posts around the last election of conservatives claiming that they did not want to vote for Bush but they just couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Kerry. Typically they gave some lame ass reason for doing this.
I could very easily see liberals doing this, but it just hasn’t been an issue lately. I remember back before it was evident that McCain is the opposite of a straight talker that I said myself that I liked his personality and could see voting for him. Except of course, for the fact that his beliefs and legislative history are pretty much the opposite of what I believe.
For example, Warren Buffett, as far as I know, supports fairly progressive tax policy. I don’t see why that is particularly hypocritical.
Why I won’t vote for John Edwards:
- His grown-in-a-lab phoniness. It’s not that I really care about his personality, but I fear giving power to a man who thinks we are stupid enough to fall for his “regular guy” BS. I fell for it once (2000) and I still feel ashamed and ill-used.
2a. He indicates that America is divided into poor, rich, and middle-class, which is absurdly reductionist; how can three bullet-point categories adequately sum up the variety of economic and social circumstances found in the nation?
2b. He has not (to my knowledge, please correct me) defined poor, rich, and middle-class in any concrete terms. I understand that in rhetorical terms, Poor=people who need our help, Rich=people who have more than they need, and Middle-Class=us. But without real definitions, I foresee Rich=whoever we are screwing this week and Middle-Class=nonexistent.
- He owns a large house on Figure Eight Island. In and of itself, this destroys any credibility he has on environmental issues. As a former coastal Carolinian and geologist, I can bore us all to tears by describing passive margin systems, I won’t. Suffice it to say that barrier islands (and its associated wetlands) are fragile and ecologically important places in addition to being and one of the stupidest possible locations to build permanent structures (right up there with ‘the side of a volcano’ and ‘below sea level on the Mississippi delta’). That he chose to buy a house there strongly indicates that he is either too stupid or too arrogant to care.
And read The Beaches are Moving by Orrin Pilkey if you want the whole story on barrier islands.
Wait. So anyone who owns a beachfront house can’t be President now?