Edwards' cool levels debate field
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| Tue, 10-05-2004 - 1:56am |
By ROB CHRISTENSEN, Staff Writer
RALEIGH -- If Vice President Dick Cheney thinks he'll be facing the "Breck Girl" - the epithet Republicans like to pin on John Edwards - he may be in for an unpleasant surprise in their debate Tuesday.
Edwards is a canny fighter who outprepares his opponents, according to lawyers who have faced him in the courtroom. He isn't afraid of more experienced adversaries, has a large bag of rhetorical tricks and connects with audiences.
"If I'm going in a knife fight, and I have my choice, I am taking John Edwards," said Jim Cooney of Charlotte. "John doesn't like to lose."
Cooney ought to know. He dueled with Edwards in 10 cases.
Cooney is one of many Tar Heel lawyers who debated Edwards before a jury during the 1980s and 1990s, when Edwards made his fortune as a trial lawyer before being elected to the U.S. Senate.
Their advice for Cheney: Under no circumstances take Edwards lightly.
Edwards' strengths:
* He prepares thoroughly.
* He connects with his listeners in their language.
* He makes complex arguments easy to understand.
* He takes his opponents seriously.
Edwards made a living off more experienced lawyers who saw his mop-haired choirboy looks, small-town charm and wide grin and took him for a lightweight. That's one reason he rarely lost a courtroom debate.
And in some respects, the Cheney-Edwards debate also would seem a mismatch. Cheney is the very image of experience and authority -- a former White House chief of staff, defense secretary, congressman and corporate CEO.
But former rivals say Edwards has a history of besting people like Cheney: white-haired, "pillar of the community" corporate lawyers, respected doctors and all sorts of experts. He also has a history of taking on large institutions -- hospitals, insurance companies, trucking firms -- and coming out on top.
If Cheney goes after Edwards' inexperience in government, several lawyers said, he'll be walking into a trap.
"He's made a career of going up against the experts, leaders in their fields, whether it's medicine or epidemiology or engineering," Cooney said. "The first time Cheney gives him the lecture -- 'Well, young man' -- it will be interesting to see how he handles that. Various experts have tried it before, and it has not worked very well.
"He is well-experienced in going up against people who are experts and who believe very strongly that they know a lot more than he does."
Made-for-TV style
Intense preparation is Edwards' trademark, and few expect him to be stumped or surprised by a question. Nor can he be rattled easily.
"I would be surprised if he is intimidated by Dick Cheney," said Tex Barrow, a Raleigh lawyer who has faced Edwards. "I have never seen him intimidated by anybody. ... He will be very well-prepared and be very passionate about his positions."
Edwards has never been regarded as a great courtroom orator in the Clarence Darrow mold. His style is more conversational. It is a style that is suited for more intimate settings like the courtroom -- or the TV studio -- than a large hall.
Indeed, some say Edwards' vice presidential acceptance speech in Boston in July was a bit flat.
"In many regards the debate will be a more natural setting. ... It's just his background," Barrow said. "It's one on one. The courtroom is a lot more intimate exchange than a speech to several thousand people."
He also rarely hammers home a point, preferring to lay out the evidence and let the jury come to the conclusion where he led it. His style is to distill the major points, removing the jargon, so that everyone understands his points.
"He'll use 25 years of experience in talking to jurors and look into that television camera ... and make every person in the living room think he is talking to them," said Billy Richardson, a lawyer who has worked with Edwards on cases. "He is secure enough to let them form their own conclusions. That is a powerful technique."
One of his favorite techniques, the lawyers say, is to ask the rhetorical question of the type Ronald Reagan asked in his 1980 debate: Are you better off than you were four years ago?
Nor is Edwards afraid to take someone apart. He just does it with Southern charm and a smile.
"It is not John's style to be mean or sarcastic," said his former law partner, David Kirby. "John has the ability to destroy a witness or a witness' position in a polite manner."
Edwards once dismantled an economist -- testifying for the opposition -- whose sons he had coached in soccer and with whom he had been friendly.
The North Carolina lawyers who have watched Edwards in the courtroom say there is no way that he will take Cheney lightly. They also say that Cheney would be foolish to prepare lightly for Edwards.
"Knowing John," Cooney said, "he has played out all the angles that Cheney could launch and his response to Cheney's attack, and how Cheney will respond to that, and how he would respond to that. He plays four or five moves ahead -- like chess."
Staff writer Rob Christensen can be reached at 820-4532 or robc@newsobserver.com.

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The Patriot system was originally developed as an anti-aircraft weapon.
Prior to the first Gulf war, modifications were made to use Patriots against tactical ballistic missles.
The Patriot system got a lot of great press during the first Gulf War.
What wasn't reported at the time were systemic problems with Patriots and their very low success rate (around 10%).
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/02/19/60minutes/main601241.shtml
Fatal error
Patriots went into use in 1981 but came to fame during the 1991 Gulf War - when they had limited success against Iraqi Scud missiles.
28 American soldiers were killed when a Scud hit a barracks in Saudi Arabia, because a software fault in the defending Patriot system meant it could not work properly.
The error meant its tracking system was half a second out - during which time a Scud travels half a kilometre.
Three years ago the US Army set about replacing "hundreds" of Patriots after identifying a problem with some of their components having deteriorated over time.
In March 2003 a Patriot battery in Kuwait mistakenly shot down an RAF Tornado jet returning from a mission over Iraq, killing the two crew.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/2868569.stm
And he has been repeatedly taken out of context. Besides, what do you want him to do, go to Afghanistan and find Bin Laden himself? If he truly HAD lost interest in capturing bin Laden, he obviously failed to inform our armed forces of that, since they are currently diligently searching for him with the help of Pakistani troops. Like I said, he should have worded it differently, but it's just silly to think that he has lost interest in bin Laden. It's obvious that what he's saying is that Bin Laden is not the primary focus-TERRORISM is. Can't understand why so many people just don't get that. At the moment bin Laden is probably the least able terrorist on earth to directly harm us, even if he is actually alive.
Iran and Saudi Arabia did not invade another country, sign a cease fire agreement, and then proceed to ignore the terms of that agreement and defy 12 years of UN resolutions. That's the difference. But we are currently putting lots of pressure on the Saudis for reform and while they have a long way to go, it seems to be working. We are also attempting to solve Iran diplomatically, just as we tried to do with Saddam for twelve years, but if that fails we will probably have to take action.
It makes perfect sense-we've pressured Pakistan to join us in fighting terrorism, to stop being part of the problem and become part of the solution-that's a good thing, not a bad thing. President Musgarraf realized that there was no future for his country in being a rogue nation. I really don't understand how some people who are arguing we never should have gone into Iraq are suggesting we shouldn't exhaust all diplomatic remedies with other potential threats. I believe we should. I believe war SHOULD be a last resort-and in the case of Saddam, it clearly was. If Saddam truly had no WMD's as it is becoming more and more clear he did not (although the recent report also speculates that even Saddam himself may have believed he WMD programs that didn't actually exist), he could have avoided war by cooperating with inspectors. He chose not to, giving us no alternative but to act on what we believed to be true at the time.
It does currently involve all of that.
Actions speak louder than words.
Bush diverted troops from Afghanistan to Iraq.
Bin Laden was and remains at large.
>>At the moment bin Laden is probably the least able terrorist on earth to directly harm us, even if he is actually alive.<<
On what evidence do you base this claim?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13425-2004Oct6.html
Switching Stories
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Thursday, October 7, 2004; Page A39
When you spend so much time torturing the truth, it's hard to keep your story straight -- or even remember what you just said.
The most remarkable moment in Tuesday's debate between Vice President Cheney and Sen. John Edwards came when Cheney issued a blanket denial of the obvious.
Edwards, who proved both his value and his loyalty to Democratic nominee John Kerry, declared that "there is no connection between Saddam Hussein and the attacks of September 11th. Period. The 9/11 Commission has said that's true. Colin Powell has said it's true. But the vice president keeps suggesting that there is."
What Cheney said next was, literally, incredible: "I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11."
This is the same Cheney who, just minutes before, in the very same debate, had defended the attack on Iraq by declaring flatly that Saddam Hussein "had an established relationship with al Qaeda." Hello? If that is not a "suggestion" of a connection, what is?
Well, this: On Sept. 14, 2003, Cheney said Iraq was at the heart of "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11."
If the Cheney-Edwards debate made nothing else clear, it is that the central issue in this presidential election is becoming the administration's lack of credibility and its tendency to say whatever is convenient to make whatever case it is trying to make.
Day by day, we learn more and more about how the administration led the nation into war by distorting intelligence and twisting facts. A president who once condemned a mentality that declared "if it feels good, do it" has now embraced a related principle: "If it sounds good, say it."
On Sunday the New York Times published an extensive report showing that in its public statements before the war, the administration "repeatedly failed to fully disclose" divisions in the intelligence community over the alleged nuclear threat posed by Iraq.
In September 2002, Cheney declared that high-strength aluminum tubes that Saddam Hussein had imported, allegedly to build uranium centrifuges, constituted "irrefutable evidence" that he was reconstituting his nuclear weapons program. It turned out, the Times reported, that "the government's foremost nuclear experts seriously doubted that the tubes were for nuclear weapons." The evidence, in other words, was not "irrefutable."
But nothing -- even our knowledge that Iraq did not have those weapons of mass destruction -- stops Cheney from making the same scary case now that he was making before the war. "The effort that we've mounted with respect to Iraq focused specifically on the possibility that this was the most likely nexus between the terrorists and weapons of mass destruction," he said during the debate. "The biggest threat we face today is the possibility of terrorists smuggling a nuclear weapon or a biological agent into one of our own cities and threatening the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans."
Note the double use of the word possibility and that other phrase, most likely. Quite a contrast to the "irrefutable" certainties the administration was peddling before the war. But we're supposed to ignore the fudge words. The words "nuclear weapon" and "biological agent" are supposed to frighten us into voting for Bush-Cheney -- just as we were frightened into war.
But the administration's lack of trustworthiness is making it ever harder for the president and vice president to shroud their failures behind alarming rhetoric.
Cheney's soliloquy about nukes and bioweapons came in response to a question from moderator Gwen Ifill about former Iraq administrator L. Paul Bremer's statement on Monday that the United States did not have enough troops on the ground to prevent "an atmosphere of lawlessness" from taking hold in Iraq. A Post story quoted an earlier Bremer speech in which he said that "the single most important change -- the one thing that would have improved the situation -- would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout" the occupation.
Not a single word of Cheney's answer was responsive to Ifill's question. He couldn't defend the administration's strategy. He didn't even mention the word "Bremer."
The political take on the debate will see Cheney as a more skillful, more informed debater than Bush, and Edwards as Cheney's equal. But the substantive point is more important: The administration's story is falling apart. Bush and Cheney mercilessly attack their opponents and promote a climate of fear because they are finding it increasingly difficult to defend the choices they made and the words they have spoken.
postchat@aol.com
No, actually it doesn't. Afghanistan is a much smaller country for one. Osama isn't being guarded by a hundred thousand troops. Sending that many into Afganistan will not increase the chances of capturing him. It's a special forces operation, it involves terrain that is impassable by many of the types of equipment we are currently using in Iraq, and the men who are specially trained for using that type of equipment. It involves intelligence gathering and surveillance in rugged areas that are unfamilair to everyone but the Afghanis themselves, which is why we are utilizing their valuable assistance that Kerry has so derided. The number of troops is completely irrelevant to capturing OBL, because the troops we have in Iraq are simply not trained to do the work that is being done in Afganistan. The idea that we have lost focus on OBL by sending greater numbers of infantry men to Iraq is simply a Dem slogan with no basis in fact.
No, they're saying that going to Iraq "took our eye off the ball". I wish Kerry would stop insinuating, to us and to the world, that the US military needs to focus its entire resources on capturing one sickly man hiding in a cave and is incapable of simultaneously dealing with anything else that's going on in the world. That's a dangerous impression for him to give to our enemies.
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