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Yet Edwards had a late surge in the primaries, and although Kerry won nearly all of them, Edwards was close behind. (Objects in your mirror are bigger than they seem, as he warned Kerry.)
He won in the two Carolinas, IIRC, and was tied with Clark in a third state.
And I still don't understand why Kerry picked this one-term senator and pretty boy for a running mate, but he must have had his reasons.
Near as I can figure from reading their nasty websites, lefties don't regard the '04 loss as Edwards' fault, only Kerry's. They LIKE the Breck girl, and phoniness doesn't bother them. Wesley Clark wasn't even a Democrat until just before the election, but they idolize him. Does any rational person think Clark became a Dem on principle?
And then there's my 16-year-cycle theory. Since 1960, every 16 years they go with a youthful "new broom" type with a good head of hair and a young daughter hanging onto his young wife. And every 16 years they cash in on Republican fatigue---8 to 12 years of Republican presidency preceding them. Add to this the low immunity against populism, plus the lib media behind him, and I see Edwards sweeping the '08 primaries. I hope I'm wrong, but the voters fell for a fraud like Bill Clinton, so anything's possible.

Edwards won South Carolina because that was his home state. He won North Carolina because that's where he lived, and because he represented North Carolina in the U.S. Senate. On a national level, I don't think Edwards was ever getting poll numbers higher than 20% among the Democrats. In fact, his candidacy will go down as one of the most over-hyped, overrated stories in the history of U.S. presidential elections -- and I predict that his abject mediocrity will be confirmed by the fact that he never shows his face in national politics again.

I think Kerry picked him as his running mate in the hopes that having a Southerner on the ticket gave him a chance to win one or two Southern states that would otherwise be won overwhelmingly by the GOP. Times certainly have changed, and voters obviously aren't fooled by this kind of nonsense. Having Edwards on the ticket gave the Democrats the same results in North Carolina in 2004 as they got from Tennessee in 2000 with Al Gore on the national ticket.

I hope I'm wrong, but the voters fell for a fraud like Bill Clinton.

No, they didn't. Clinton was elected with 43% of the vote in 1992, and re-elected at the height of his popularity in 1996 with less than 50% of the vote. Both of the losing candidates in the two elections since then have exceeded Clinton's highest vote total by a minimum of 3 million votes.