I find it fascinating that Senator Kerry will be speaking at the University of Colorado Hospital today, given his choice of running mate. John Edwards' name was enough to inspire fear and trembling (and large out-of-court settlements) in his home state when he was still practicing law; now, his name on the Democratic party ticket is enough to have vast swaths of upper-middle-class Americans running screaming in the opposite direction. While the Kerry campaign may have written off the upper middle class (since the upper middle class is more likely to benifit from President Bush's tax cuts for the rich), they're also screwing their chances with middle-class voters who think that malpractice lawsuits with absurdly high payouts are forcing high medical costs even higher.

If the election were held today, I couldn't vote in good concious for President Bush because of his apparent belief that civil liberties are only for Christians. (Not terrorists, and not gays.) I couldn't vote in good concious for Senator Kerry, either, for the reasons above. This leaves me with the option of finding a suitable third-party candidate, which might be interesting.

(Obviously, I'm buying into the Bush Administration's anti-Edwards propagenda. That's because it makes sense to me and I haven't heard any counter-arguments from the Kerry campaign. I would love to be proved wrong.)

This Salon article takes a good look at it.

In case you don't feel like sitting through the ad, the essential point is that the clients represented by Edwards had ligitimate grievances. They were cases where gross negligence had really occurred. One example was a five year old girl whose intestines had been sucked out by a poorly designed drain in a swimming pool. Edwards represented her in a lawsuit against the company that had manufactured the drain, and the jury awarded her $25 million.

This and other anecdotal evidence would suggest that he wasn't the stereotypical ambulence chasing lawyer, but deliberately chose cases in which the "little guys" who had been harmed sought justice against the massive goliaths of the corporate world. He grew up poor as the son of a mill worker, and thus sympathizes with those on the bottom, and will fight for them out of principle. This would be the Demecratic propaganda side.

His occupation aside, I can say from what I've seen of him (mostly during democratic primary debates last year) that he does have tremendous charisma. When we went to see them live today, every person in the group I was with agreed that Edwards had given the best speech of the day. (His wife said some very good things too.)

His populist platform, added to Kerry's otherwise ho-hum campaign, makes the ticket more attractive to many people, myself included. I've heard political analysists also say that Edwards was a smart choice because he's "from the south", and thus gives Kerry a much better chance in several southern states. (As to why people might consider candidates' geographic origins more important than their qualifications and stances on isses, I don't understand it either. But I guess it's common in that part of the country.)

Oh, and another thing a lot of people like about Edwards: He doesn't go negative when he campaigns. He talks about what he's for, how he would improve things, and his vision for a better America. No smearing. He's mosly avoided even attacking Bush, except to say he has disagreements with many of the President's policies.

While it does often seem like lawyers are overrepresented in Washington, from what I've seen, I'd take Edwards over most of them.

Recently Oklahoma had a legislative battle over a measure called tort reform. The law being considered was modeled after a Texas law passed under that state's Bush administration. The law essentially says that you can't sue any medical entity for anything but compensatory damages. In other words, if a doctor cuts of the wrong leg, he's liable to pay for the cost of the corrective surgery of re-attaching the leg, but nothing more. No punitive damages.

Not surprisingly, this was a Republican-sponsored effort.

On the other side of the issue are 40 million dollar lawsuits for items of minor consequence that do drive up the cost of health care. But before we jump to conclusions about driving down costs by ending punitive damages (and therefor, many trial lawyers), I would like to know just how big a chunk of my insurance payment goes to punitive damages as opposed to the overhead of excessive paperwork or executive compensation.