John Edwards Cares about YOU! The candidate feels your pain, even if you don't.

Edwards is just playing to the lowest level of Freud's structural model of personality. We all have that timeless, primitive Id that seeks only it's own satisfaction, to the exclusion of everything else. It is always there, hopefully held in reasonable check by the ego and superego, but all it takes is some pretty boy, slick-talking demagogue to rile it up. So by appealing to people on the basis of "I'll take care of you" (he really won't, in the end), the message Edwards sends to the Id is satisfactory in two ways. First, it gets something, a sense of security, that it is cared for. Second, it doesn't have to do any work on its own, so as far as the primitive instinct is concerned, we're getting something for nothing.

Those who are able to restrain their selfish longings by force of will and intellect will know that the real world presents a different picture. There are things that go beyond the Id, and so simply appealing to that leaves one unsatisfied. Will such thinking be enough to overcome the "get something for nothing" mentality? We can only hope, but the performance of the electorate in the last three elections (remember more people voted for Gore than Bush in 2000) makes me wonder.

"John Edwards cares about me." Who in their right mind would believe that. I reminds me of a picture that was on the front page of the NY Times in '92, right before the NH primary: Bill Clinton looking deeply, pleadingly into the eyes of an old guy at a lunch counter. The only thing about that old guy that Bill Clinton cared about was his vote.

John Edwards' success is an indictment of Democratic primary voters. They are suckers for this stuff, every time.

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