Democratic Establishment Whisperings

Democratic campaign strategist Bob Shrum is out pushing his new book and an excerpt appears in Time this week.

While we don't know yet whose side the man with the scarf is on, we know who he's against.

He's no fan of John Edwards. Shrum relates the "chilling" story from when John Kerry picked him to be his running mate in 2004 and Edwards told him how he crawled up on the slab with his dead child, embraced him, and promised to do everything in his power to make the world a better place.

The scary part of the story was Edwards' preface that he'd 'never told anyone else before.' Problem is that Kerry recalled Edwards telling him the same story, word-for-word a year earlier.

The Washington Times ran this item last week and it was linked up here at that time, too.

Shrum, a Kerry campaign honcho, also drops in a bit of a jab against current New Mexico governor, candidate and former Clintonista Bill Richardson. Offering a reason why Billy was not picked as Kerry's running mate, he mentions, "Richardson's prospects were shadowed by alleged womanizing. Publicly reluctant, he coveted the publicity of being considered, but withdrew before the process was finished."

Stay tuned.

Interesting John Edwards Item

As I admired the Clintons for never trotting Chelsea out as a campaign prop when she was growing up, I held at least equal admiration for John Edwards for refusing to publicly make much of his son's death before Edwards was elected to the Senate.

It would seem, at the very least, in bad taste to do so and his choice to keep this tragic episode in his life private was a breath of fresh air for me.

(Compare this to Al Gore's hypocrtical speech about the tobacco lobby at the 1996 Democratic Convention.)

However, an item in yesterday's Washington Times about a new Bob Shrum book makes Edwards out to be...downright creepy!  As Shrum tells it, Edwards had a little bit of a penchant for making several people 'one of the only people' he told about how he embraced his dead son's corpse on a slab and gave him a posthumous promise to make the world a better place.

He tried this on John Kerry, telling him the same story, with the same "you're one of the only people I've told this to" schtick twice.  It stunned even him!