This is a fantastic article I first read in 2003. It is one of the reasons I have supported John Edwards ever since.
I will post a snip, but PLEASE take the time to read the entire article. It is well worth your time.
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Republicans believe that Americans will never elect a trial lawyer president. They're wrong.
Despite Edwards' Atticus Finch-like background, North Carolina Senator Lauch Faircloth set about targeting him on the basis of his profession when he campaigned for reelection in 1998, no doubt encouraged by GOP consultants such as Luntz, who'd been successfully pushing tort reform since the early 1990s. "It's almost impossible to go too far when it comes to demonizing lawyers," Luntz wrote that year in a memorandum to Republicans running for reelection. "Make the lawyer your villain by contrasting him with the Œlittle guy,' the innocent hard-working American who he takes to the cleaners."
But Luntz had it backwards. Edwards hadn't cleaned out Mom and Pop. He'd targeted corporations like Sta-Rite and negligent hospitals that had injured small children, and he'd won the unanimous jury decisions state law requires. What's more, he responded to Faircloth's criticism by inviting the public to scrutinize his legal record. Faircloth's campaign strategists considered making a commercial featuring a doctor whom Edwards had put out of business, but thought better of it when they realized Edwards would retaliate by putting forward the little girl who'd suffered at the doctor's hands. As it was, Faircloth never delved into specifics about his opponent's record. Nor should he have, says former ATLA president Twiggs: "Johnny, in that situation, can put on the patient, can put on the jury foreman, and can absolutely destroy that tactic if it's used. It would be a unique opportunity to show who he represented and why, and to show why the jury found in his favor."
By sheer virtue of his skill as a lawyer, Edwards had been able to avoid taking the kinds of cases the public detests. During the campaign, opponents tried unsuccessfully to criticize him for turning away 35 to 40 cases for each one he accepted. But such was the demand for his service that it was impossible to accommodate everyone. Even so, a close friend and fellow attorney says that, before running for Senate, Edwards had a team of doctors and nurses privately screen his record to make sure that no case he'd brought to trial could be considered frivolous: "When they got significantly into
, they decided he'd never come close to violating the standard."
Yet Faircloth pressed ahead with a lawyer-baiting campaign which at times appeared comically inept. Even before Edwards had won the Democratic primary, Faircloth ran his first television ad attacking his opponent's career. "Lauch tried to the tune of millions of dollars to make the case that because John was a trial lawyer, and because of the public's conception of trial lawyers, therefore you shouldn't vote for him," says a top official of the Edwards campaign. "After a month and a couple million, Faircloth realized he wasn't getting anywhere." But this did not stop his campaign from following the ad with another, smearing Edwards as a trial lawyer who was also a liar. It didn't get much traction. Next came an ad vilifying Edwards as both a trial lawyer and a liberal. No luck there, either. Faircloth's final ad featured side-by-side photographs of Edwards and Bill Clinton sporting Pinocchio-style noses while a voiceover linked them as "two tobacco-taxing liberal lawyers who are well known for stretching the truth."
The Faircloth campaign spent $2 million in the last three weeks of the campaign on television ads that ultimately backlashed. "Their negative stuff worked, Faircloth's stuff worked against him," a Faircloth aide concedes. In the waning days of the campaign, one local newspaper grew so fed up with the lawyer-baiting commercials that it editorialized: "Faircloth's ads use Œlawyer' as an epithet, as if Edwards' profession was somehow less honorable than the way Faircloth makes his money---politics, hog feeding, land speculation."
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0110.green.html
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