Bob Herbert: Campaign Candor

[babylonsister]

http://welcome-to-pottersville.blogspot.com/2007/03/bob-herbert-campaign-candor.html

Bob Herbert: Campaign Candor


John and Elizabeth Edwards managed to keep smiling last week as their lives once again took a terrible turn. The former senator talked about the importance of staying tough. Mrs. Edwards, whose breast cancer has metastasized, said, “We’re going to always look for the silver lining.”

The public looked on, wondering what to make of the inexplicable. Fate seems to have toyed with the Edwardses, throwing the cruelest of twists into lives otherwise filled with so much good fortune.

“We’ve been confronted with these kinds of traumas and struggles already in our lives,” Mr. Edwards said, referring to the loss of their 16-year-old son Wade, who was killed in a car accident in 1996, and Mrs. Edwards’s initial fight against the cancer that was discovered at the end of the 2004 campaign.

This latest setback, he said, would not stop his current run for the presidency.

Since presidential campaigns are covered like sporting events, the speculation immediately centered on whether Mrs. Edwards’s illness would harm her husband’s fund-raising ability, or cause him to go up or down in the polls, or in some other way hamper or enhance his ability to compete.

The pack is obsessed with the horse race, which is regrettable. It would be far more constructive and interesting if this heightened attention to Mr. Edwards’s campaign resulted in the media and the public taking a closer look at the issues he has been pushing, not just in the campaign but ever since his unsuccessful run for vice president in 2004.


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[Rydz777]

1. Herbert is right

Press coverage of the campaign is nothing more than coverage of process, barely anything about issues and content. What are the differences between Hillary, Obama, and Edwards on health care? You might catch it on C-SPAN, nowhere else.