Mark Steyn takes down John Edwards

And it ain't pretty!

You would have to have a heart of stone not to be weeping with laughter at that line. But Democratic primary voters are not that rude. So they looked thoughtful and engaged, and they nodded and they applauded. And then they went out and voted for somebody else. After you've heard the speech a couple of times, you realise that John Edwards is perhaps the most condescending candidate in America. But the voters condescended right back, smiling politely at the clean-cut charmer, and then going away and forgetting about him.

In New Hampshire, he came a poor fourth. Likewise, New Mexico and North Dakota. In Delaware, he came third, with 11 per cent of the vote. In Oklahoma, he came second, managing to lose to loopy General Wesley Clark. The only place he won was the state of his birth, South Carolina. In Florida, he pulled 10 per cent of the vote; Maine, 8 per cent; Mississippi, Arizona, 7 per cent.

Edwards is a lawyer, and supposedly his great strength is his ability to make an argument and sell it to a jury. But the more the primary jurors heard his argument, the less they were sold on it. "There are two Americas," said Conan O'Brien on CBS. "Unfortunately for Edwards, neither one voted for him."[...]

In the meantime, Edwards has nothing to say on foreign policy except a pledge to end "war profiteering by Halliburton". Once he discovered that you can't sue al-Qaeda, he seems to have lost interest in the subject, and his shallowness was embarrassing in some of the primary debates. As I wrote here in February, "His basic pitch is that the entire electorate are victims, and his candidacy is the all-time biggest class-action suit on your behalf." John Edwards's approach - the American people are helpless children - is the wrong message for dangerous times.

Back when his maudlin 'twas-Christmas-Day-in-the-workhouse shtick was still new, I offered to buy a brand new coat for every 10-year-old coatless girl the Edwards campaign could produce if in return he included one substantive passage on foreign policy in his stump speech. I'm still waiting on both counts.
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