I should be your President because...
In the New York Times today are Op-Eds by both Johns (no, sadly not Flansburgh and Linnell): Edwards and Kerry. They are both attempts at connecting on a personal and emotional level, to inform us of their deepest motivations, and to embrace the most potentially controversial aspects of their pre-Senate lives. The fact that you would never know from reading them that they were written by (or for) Presidential candidates is both interesting and a tiny bit disturbing. I'm a little shocked that either would use the precise material they did to make their case.

I also think Kerry's is a sign that my friend Ram is right about this upcoming election, even though I haven't thought so until now: this election will be about Vietnam. It will be a chance really for the first time for the United States to have an electoral referendum on that war, knowing the extent of the deception that kept it going.

Read these if you get a chance. I'm curious what you all think. Personally, I think that--in the case of Edwards--claiming the courage and wisdom it took to turn down a settlement offer of 3/4 of a million dollars, thinking he could get more, and--for Kerry--the way that the deaths of friends in war, amid the assassination of American leaders at home motivated him to fight against that war more than 30 years ago make kind of bizarre cases that one should be elected President in 2004. But maybe it's just me. If Clinton had lived either of their lives, are these the stories he would have told?

A quote from Edwards' piece:

"I was telling this ruined man to turn his back on what must have seemed to him a fortune. I was claiming to know what the jury was thinking. If I was wrong, E. G. would suffer even more for the rest of his life — and I'd go home to my wife and children and on to my next case. I was all he had, and God help him, he trusted me.

That's when I really understood what I was doing. Even though I had written an essay when I was 11 years old titled, "Why I Want to Be a Lawyer," I did not truly understand what I would do as a lawyer until that night. While I had worked my way through law school, clerked for a judge, worked in a law firm, I understood that night how much E. G. and hundreds like him would count on me to make sure that the law protected them..."

and from Kerry's piece:

"It is hard still to explain the clashing feelings. There was the deep and enduring bonds forged among crewmates, brothers in arms from all walks of life fighting each day to keep faith with one another on a tiny boat on the rivers of the Mekong Delta. And there was the anger I felt toward body-counting, face-saving leaders sitting safely in Washington sending to the killing fields troops who were often poor, black or brown. . . .

I found understanding only in the shared experience of those for whom the war was personal, who had lost friends and seen brothers lose arms and legs, who had seen all around them human beings fight and curse, weep and die. At times it seemed that we were the only ones who really understood that the faults in Vietnam were those of the war, not the warriors."