President Edwards?

John Edwards recently declared his candidacy for the 2008 Democratic nomination. Edwards won the 2004 Iowa caucuses, and has leaped to the top of Iowa polls again, ahead of all Democratic candidates except Obama, who he is tied with.
In 2004, I was disappointed by Edward's weakness in the Vice-Presidential Candidates Debate. Edwards seemed reluctant to abandon his nice-boy persona and rip into Cheney as, for example, Bill Clinton might have done. Now, however, as I re-read the debate, it seems that Edwards certainly held his own. It seems that in text, Edwards did well, while on camera, Cheney was quite strong. Cheney tried to appear as an experienced elder scolding and shaming Edwards as a mediocre politician who rarely even bothered to attend the Senate. As with Cheney's "Go F*ç% Yourself" remark to Patrick Leahy, the subject of Halliburton was the topic that set off the counterattack:

CHENEY: Gwen, I want to go back to the last comment, and then I'll come back to Israel-Palestine.
The reason they keep trying to attack Halliburton is because they want to obscure their own record.
And Senator, frankly, you have a record in the Senate that's not very distinguished. You've missed 33 out of 36 meetings in the Judiciary Committee, almost 70 percent of the meetings of the Intelligence Committee. You've missed a lot of key votes: on tax policy, on energy, on Medicare reform.
Your hometown newspaper has taken to calling you "Senator Gone." You've got one of the worst attendance records in the United States Senate. Now, in my capacity as vice president, I am the president of Senate, the presiding officer. I'm up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they're in session. The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight.

Edwards responded with, "That was a complete distortion of my record. I know that won't come as a shock."

It later came out that Edwards in fact had an excellent voting record, although his attendance had dropped off during the presidential campaign. At least three pictures of Cheney with Edwards surfaced, proving that Cheney's claim to have met Edwards for the first time during the debate was a bald-faced lie, and it was shown that Cheney had presided over the Senate twice, not "most Tuesdays".

Looking back at the TV and text experiences of the debate, Mr Cheney appealed to the Reptilian brainstem, while Edwards was a soft fuzzy Mammalian thinker.

In the 2008 campaign, voters will face a very real, even surreal choice, between the Reptilian Party platform, calling for the immediate extermination of all mammalian life on Earth, and the Demagogic Party platform, which seeks the establishment of a one-world utopian hive-mind cyber-dictatorship. Choose wisely. If you vote for a third party, you are just helping the greater of two evils to win.