{"id":2404,"date":"2004-08-24T13:23:48","date_gmt":"2004-08-24T18:23:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/2404.html"},"modified":"2004-08-24T13:23:48","modified_gmt":"2004-08-24T18:23:48","slug":"be-careful-what-you-wish-for-redux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/be-careful-what-you-wish-for-redux\/","title":{"rendered":"Be careful what you wish for, redux"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of those “shadowy” 527 groups that Bush likes<\/a> except when he doesn’t<\/a>, has decided to launch an expensive national campaign<\/a> against John Edwards’ pre-political legal career. I have a hunch the Republicans haven’t thought this one through.<\/p>\n

The United States Chamber of Commerce and other business groups plan to spend roughly $10 million attacking trial lawyers, including Senator John Edwards, by financing a new organization that will run television and mail advertisements in critical swing states.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The group is called the “November Fund,” which was created this month by a bunch of Republicans from the Reagan-Bush era. If it sounds to you like Bush is once again relying on his dad’s friends to do his dirty work for him, then we’re on the same page.<\/p>\n

But the more important question is whether these attacks are likely to have any effect. When Kerry first announced that Edwards will be his running mate, Bush surrogates sputtered “trial lawyer!” at every microphone they could find.<\/p>\n

The problem, as the Bush campaign quickly discovered, is that people don’t resent Edwards’ legal career; they actually kind of like it.
\n
\nLast month, for example, a Gallup poll<\/a> showed that 67% of Americans believe Edwards success as personal injury lawyer is a strength for his candidacy, while only 27% saw it as a weakness. A Time magazine poll produced similar results<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Thirty-five percent say [Edwards’ trial-lawyer experience] would make them more favorable toward him, while 28 percent say it would make them less favorable. Fifty-five percent say his days as a lawyer demonstrates a “willingness to fight for the average person against big companies,” while only 26 percent echo the Bush campaign line that “it contributed to the problem of frivolous lawsuits.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Republicans may not have a lot of experience running against Edwards, but those who do already know that the trial-lawyer attacks tend to be a useless<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Many [Republican strategists] remember Mr. Edwards’ first campaign, in which he toppled a sitting senator — Lauch Faircloth, a Republican hog farmer from North Carolina — who spent a lot of money attacking Mr. Edwards for making millions from personal-injury lawsuits.<\/p>\n

“Every time we talked about it, he’d bring out one of his clients who was some victim in a terrible tragedy,” said one Republican who worked on that 1998 campaign. Many of those clients are children or the parents of children who were horribly maimed or killed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In fact, history has already repeated itself. When Bush traveled to North Carolina’s High Point to deliver a speech about how lawyers like Edwards were ruining the system, Edwards already had a powerful response ready.<\/p>\n

Mr. Edwards arranged a conference call for reporters with the parents of Bailey Griffin, who eventually died after suffering from cerebral palsy. <\/p>\n

“What I heard was in some ways we’re considered to be lottery winners,” Christopher Griffin said. “Every time I go to my daughter’s grave, it’s hard to feel that way.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hey, if Bush’s buddies want to waste $10 million on ineffectual attack ads, more power to ’em; I certainly won’t complain. But no one should be surprised when they fail.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of those “shadowy” 527 groups that Bush likes except when he doesn’t, has decided to launch an expensive national campaign against John Edwards’ pre-political legal career. I have a hunch the Republicans haven’t thought this one through. The United States Chamber of Commerce and other business groups plan to spend roughly $10 million attacking […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2404"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2404\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}