Posted on 07/07/2004 4:49:46 PM PDT by Key West Girl
Look for the dirty laundry in Edwards’s closet
July 7, 2004 | Dick Morris | The Political Life
The cheering that surrounds John Kerry’s choice of John Edwards for vice president may fade quickly if the Bush campaign’s negative researchers are on the ball.
Edwards has a real vulnerability in the way he raised campaign money during his abortive presidential bid.
The North Carolina senator and former trial lawyer leaned heavily on his former peers for campaign funding. More than half of his donations came from trial lawyers, and 22 of his top 25 contributions came from his former colleagues at the bar.
While trial lawyers will not win any popularity contests, their support of Edwards, per se, will not do him much harm.
Trial lawyers are no less popular than the oil-company types who fund so much of the Bush campaign. But there is a strong indication that many of these funds may have been contributed illegally.
Trial lawyers are usually quite wealthy men whose firms are often not much more than a collection of secretaries, paralegals and processing personnel.
They sit atop these litigation factories where clerks process cases, computers encode them and low-level attorneys try to settle them out of court. Accustomed to giving large sums to political campaigns, these trial lawyers do not blink at writing six-figure checks for their favorite candidates.
But they are not used to hard-money requirements. Their usual soft-money donations to party committees and the like are easy for them to handle, but donations to a presidential campaign have to be limited to $2,000 per person. And there lies the weakness of the trial bar — finding enough people in their orbits rich enough to give $2,000 to a candidate.
For corporate attorneys, it is not hard to pass the hat around the firm and round up a sizeable sum. But in trial lawyers’ shops, the average clerk cannot usually ante up the funds to donate to a political campaign.
There is evidence that Edwards may have circumvented the campaign-finance law by bundling contributions from law clerks and paralegals who did not actually make the donations from their own funds.
Tab Turner, for example, the eminent Little Rock trial lawyer, donated $200,000 to Edwards’s campaign and his 527 committees. Investigators interviewed the clerks in his firm in whose names many of the donations were made. Slate magazine reported, on Aug. 29, 2003, that “one clerk who gave $2,000 to Edwards said that Turner had ‘asked for people to support Edwards’ and assured them that ‘he would reimburse us.’”
Edwards had to return $10,000 to several Turner employees and attorney Tab claimed that he did not know it was illegal to reimburse his employees for their donations.
One or two illegal contributions will not bring Edwards down, but it is easy to speculate that his donor list may be rife with such tales. The pressure on trial lawyers to come up with funds for the struggling Edwards campaign was intense, and many trial lawyers may have fallen victim to the temptation to use straw donors to make their contributions.
Bush’s negative-research people need to comb through the donor lists and interview each of the contributors to find out how many were putting up their bosses money.
Edwards could blow up in Kerry’s face, just as Geraldine Ferraro did in Walter Mondale’s and Thomas Eagleton did in McGovern’s. People look to the vice-presidential selection as an indicator of what kind of appointments a presidential candidate would make should he win the election. Edwards sends all the right signals — a Southerner, a moderate, a charismatic and caring senator. But should he be tripped up over campaign donations, he could become a big liability very, very quickly.
The Edwards designation opens the door for the Bush negative researchers — and they are really good at exploiting such opportunities. Really good.
Dick Morris is the author of Rewriting History, a rebuttal of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) memoir, Living History.
Ah, let's hope that there's paydirt here.
Go at it, Bushies. You have 3 weeks.
One would hope they have lined up the 234900734 underage women in Boston that Kerry had one-night stands with to come forward the day after the Dim Convention closes.
Bush and co. better not be sitting back and playing clean. He needs to remember their DUI surprise in 2000. This time let it out right as their convention is closing.
For 30 years I've preached, "NEVER VOTE FOR AN ATTORNEY", and the liberals want to elect two more of them AGAIN.
It says something about 527 committees.
I wonder how much Edwards made off his 527s. Leave it to an ambulance chaser to make money without real work.
I love this Toilet Ticket of John/John. They will make undecided voters line up in droves for Bush. Match, game, set. It's over.
I make my living off the evening news
Just give me something-something I can use
People love it when you lose,
They love dirty laundry
Well, I coulda been an actor, but I wound up here
I just have to look good, I don’t have to be clear
Come and whisper in my ear
Give us dirty laundry
Kick ’em when they’re up
Kick ’em when they’re down
Kick ’em when they’re up
Kick ’em when they’re down
Kick ’em when they’re up
Kick ’em when they’re down
Kick ’em when they’re up
Kick ’em all around
We got the bubble-headed-bleach-blonde who
Comes on at five
She can tell you ’bout the plane crash with a gleam
In her eye
It’s interesting when people die-
Give us dirty laundry
Can we film the operation?
Is the head dead yet?
You know, the boys in the newsroom got a
Running bet
Get the widow on the set!
We need dirty laundry
You don’t really need to find out what’s going on
You don’t really want to know just how far it’s gone
Just leave well enough alone
Eat your dirty laundry
Kick ’em when they’re up
Kick ’em when they’re down
Kick ’em when they’re up
Kick ’em when they’re down
Kick ’em when they’re up
Kick ’em when they’re down
Kick ’em when they’re stiff
Kick ’em all around
Dirty little secrets
Dirty little lies
We got our dirty little fingers in everybody’s pie
We love to cut you down to size
We love dirty laundry
We can do the innuendo
We can dance and sing
When it’s said and done we haven’t told you a thing
We all know that crap is king
Give us dirty laundry!
Gezz, I wish I were as confident as ole Dick that there really are such people! These are the folks who would be publishing the Senate Judiciary memos that the dems got so irate about. Where are they and why haven't we seen them? Where is attendence record of both Johns? Where is Kerry's list of household employees? Are they legals? Where is his list of restricted clubs? How about all Kerry's women? Where are thranscripts of Kerry's treason and the Vietnamese praise for that treason? How did Kerry know about 3 PHs and out? How many others got the same free ride?
Kerry is a lazy, wealthy eltiist who has not done an honest or hard day's work in his entire life!! I sure hope Bush has got folks who will dig out Kerry's cowardly, traitorous and lazt life story!! Nor, has he met the basic commitments he agreed to in anything he's done, a year's service in Nam, his marriage and so on!
"Just last week Dick Morris predicted that Hillary would be the VP candidate. A 50/50 bs filter is not big enough for Morris' spew. 95/5 is more in order."
You beat me to it. Is this guy ever right? His predictions have pretty much been wrong from the start....He is interesting though. Especially when he dishes the dirt on Hillary....
Besides, we all know that laws, especially campaign finance laws, don't apply to democrats. Deny, delay, attack, move on.
Does Edwards always have that Howdy-Doody grin on his face?
Even a broken watch is right twice a day. Edwards has not had the spotlight on him as have more seasoned pols like Gephardt. This is a problem--look at what happened to Jack Ryan. We'll know if there's anything to this in a few short weeks.
If the polls look good for the Democrats in October, look for Hillary to be behind the scenes releasing devastating info about Edwards. She is prepared to step in and save the day. I wrote about this four years ago. It is the novel I should have finished.
Thanks for the ping!
I've never seen two men get so 'face to face'!!??
*ping*
hehe . . #1 and #4 running the country . .
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