What are you looking at?

Although her husband has slipped in some polls--or maybe because he has slipped--you probably don't want to take on Elizabeth Edwards these days.

You remember how she went after Ann Coulter during a TV call-in show for the conservative commentator's comments about her husband and then turned that counter-attack into a nifty last-minute fundraising ploy for the Edwards campaign last month.

Well, yesterday Mrs. Edwards lit into Hillary Clinton. In a Salon.com interview she said:

"Look, I'm sympathetic, because when I worked as a lawyer, I was the only woman in these rooms, too, and you want to reassure them you're as good as a man. And sometimes you feel you have to behave as a man and not talk about women's issues. I'm sympathetic. She wants to be commander-in-chief. But she's just not as vocal a women's advocate as I want to see. John is.

"And then she says, or maybe her supporters say, 'Support me because I'm a woman,' and I want to say to her, 'Well, then support me because I'm a woman.' The question is not so much...

how she campaigns. That's theater. The question is, what does her campaign tell you about how she'll govern? And I'm not convinced she'd be as good an advocate for women. She needs a rationale greater for her campaign than I've heard.

"When she announced her candidacy, she said, 'I'm in it to win it.' What is that?

"That's not a rationale. Same with Senator Obama--I've yet to hear a rationale. John is extremely clear about what he can accomplish and why he's the one to do it."

Is it too late for another Edwards to declare her candidacy?

--Andrew Malcolm

Comments

[Bruce Gruber]

Once again it appears that the messenger IS the news and deserves the focus. The message is to be ignored and subverted from becoming the news. Elizabeth Edwards' observations regarding the differences between Hillary and John re: women was incisive.

Hillary straddles issues that might impact the financial power structure and status quo of government involvement in social needs in America. John has focussed on Health care, poverty and job security and pay, and ending the invasion of Iraq - issues that disproportionately impact women, particularly single mothers with children, more than men ... ergo John's campaign is designed so that it impacts women more than Hillary's which reassures Wall Street and the military/industrial complex that she is NO populist and changes can be expected to be 'studied' and unrevolutionary - SAFE.

Your selection of excerpts from her statement possibly (deliberately?) misses the whole point of what she said.