if you're a blogger, there can be no other candidate.  the edwards campaign now has the same importance to the future of the movement as did the lamont campaign did last year.

Get off your bloody high horse already.  There is no blogging "movement", and everyone that thinks there is doesn't understand the very nature of blogs.  We're disparate voices and opinions and while many people may share many views nobody is beholden to any interests (save their own).  

if you're a blogger, there can be no other candidate.

There is a politican out there with one political parallel to HST and I don't mean "Give em hell Howard".

A candidate pulls out a come from behind re-election win in a tight race by driving his opponent's negatives higher than his own and by doing so by completely alianates the oppostion party to the point he cannot govern after winning re-election. What missing is the 4 way race.

I am not going to mention names, cause I don't want to sully Harry. I do recommend you read The Last Campaign.

You note this:

when you run for political office - you must conform your life to your political message as much as you are able. You must be the embodiment of the message that you are selling.

That is what plaintiffs' trial lawyers, which Edwards was, have to do.  Speaking as someone who has spent over a decade primarily on the plaintiff's side of the civil litigation bar, I can tell you two things about it:

- if you don't believe in your case, you shouldn't be there (and you shouldn't have taken the case)
- if you are insincere, a jury will know that within the first five or ten minutes.

Or, as the wise man said:  "what you are screams so loudly, I cannot hear a word you're saying."

To make, as Edwards did, twenty or thirty or fifty million dollars for himself as a plaintiff's PI attorney - and that's after his clients got their two-thirds and the expensive expert witnesses, and the overhead (spelled s-u-p-p-o-r-t s-t-a-f-f, r-e-n-t, e-t-c.) - tells me all I need to know about his sincerity, good sense, business sense, and belief in law.  And all it tells me is good.

The issue too many people appear to have is not that Edwards isn't conforming his life to his political message.  Rather, what they don't (or can't or won't) grasp is that he is conforming his political message to his life and to whom and what he is.  

It's like the vignette from The Gulag Archipelago.  The zeks had rioted and taken over a camp complex, and driven out their guards for a week or so.  It was a complex with some mens' camps and some womens'.  Once order was restored and the guards put back in charge all the women prisoners were forced to undergo OB/GYN exams, which turned up that there had been no hanky-panky going on while the prisoners were in charge and all the gates open.  The guards were shocked that the men and women hadn't taken advantage of the opportunity, to which the women replied (in so many words):  "why do you think we are amoral scum like you are?"  

That it should conform to your conception of what a recreation facility should look like?

Or that a barn should hold horses and not people?

How many other properties are in the area with land that don't have barns, or stables, or offices, workshops, studios?

The total square footage is 28,000 feet with most of that in the barn.  How much square feet do most pools and basketball courts take?  Are you saying he is rich but he should not have a pool? Or that pool must be outside?

His home is about 10,000 square foot, with a significant amount of that in the covered passageway to the barn.  I don't live in South Carolina, does it rain or snow there?

I've seen quite a few 3500 to 5500 square foot homes advertised in the city I live in.  A 10,000 square foot home is big, but not overly big.

And who cares?  What is the big deal?