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John Edwards — Coming From Behind? Lowell Ponte The man we've seen smiling in recent days, while Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama clashed, is John Edwards. The former North Carolina senator and 2004 Democratic vice presidential standard bearer expects his own stock value as a presidential primary candidate to rise if his top two opponents undercut one another. Sen. Clinton, according to the pundits, appeared to have an unobstructed royal highway to the Democratic nomination and from there back to the White House where she was President Bill Clinton's imperious first lady (if not his first woman). Washington newcomer Sen. Obama of Illinois was supposed to facilitate Hillary's coronation. Too inexperienced to win himself, Obama exudes more than enough charisma and freshness to play the role of Clinton's chief opponent in the dramatic contest stage managed by the mainstream media. As such, Obama was expected to grab a large share of television airtime and campaign money and thereby to suck the air out of the room for any potential third Democratic candidate. Obama thus was supposed to eliminate Hillary's rivals without undermining her, because he hopes to become her vice presidential running mate. (But a Clinton-Obama ticket is highly unlikely, say veteran pundits, because American voters who would vote for either a woman or an African-American would probably find it too extreme to pull the lever for a ticket with both — unless that "both" was neo-conservative Republican Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.) In recent days, however, Obama has shown surprising hints that he might seriously challenge Mrs. Clinton. Hollywood Mogul David Geffen, who gave $18 million to Clinton campaigns in the past, told an interviewer he now supports Obama, in part because the Clintons "lie . . . with such ease, it's troubling."
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The liberal mainstream media was quick to attribute Geffen's pique to Bill Clinton's turndown of Geffen's request for a presidential pardon of Native American radical activist Leonard Peltier, convicted in 1977 of murdering two FBI agents. The Clintons, Geffen noted, during their final hours in power had no trouble pardoning wealthy political contributor Marc Rich. (Geffen neglected to mention that President Clinton pardoned convicted Puerto Rican terrorists to win ethnic votes for Hillary's Senate run in New York. When it's to their political advantage, the Clintons had no qualms about freeing convicted violent criminals.) This defection by a major Clinton financial supporter who slept with them in the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House must be troubling for Hillary, as is radical billionaire George Soros' switch of support to Sen. Obama. If full-blown war breaks out between Clinton and Obama, can John Edwards grab the spoils of that war and come from behind to win the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination?
Weeks ago many might have said Yes. But in recent days Edwards hired two female bloggers for his campaign, both of them radicals with a history of ridiculing Christianity on their Web sites. As details of their backgrounds spread, many church-going Democrats urged Edwards to remove these extremists from his campaign. Under pressure, Edwards fired them. Then, threatened by the loony left wing of his party, Edwards re-hired them. After the Catholic League publicized their profane writings, Edwards then apparently shoved these young ladies out the door. This controversy clearly demonstrates Edwards' unfitness to be president. He showed terrible judgment in hiring these radicals, either out of ignorance of their backgrounds or because he shared their far left views. Under pressure Edwards repeatedly bent like a soggy waffle, spineless and weak and ready to flip-flop with the political winds. What neither right-wing nor dominant leftist media reported is that these campaign bloggers were angels compared to what Edwards has employed in the past. In 2004 the Kerry-Edwards campaign hired its chief Internet propagandist Zack Exley from radical MoveOn.org. Exley was trained by, and worked as, a "workshop facilitator" for The Ruckus Society, which has had links to members of domestic terrorist groups such as Earth Liberation Front and Earth First! and has trained left-wing activists. The head of the Ruckus Society was arrested in 2000 and charged in connection with protestor lawbreaking in a plot to disrupt the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. In 2004, key organizers behind the radical protestors who assaulted that year´s GOP Convention were apparently trained by the Ruckus Society in ways to seize media airtime Republicans needed to get their message to the American people. Zack Exley, born in 1970, worked for seven months "undercover at a Michigan auto parts factory," wrote Los Angeles Times reporter Joseph Menn in May 2004. "The unionization effort there failed, but Exley later used a team of infiltrators to successfully organize large nursing homes in Minnesota." A computer programmer, Exley acquired the domain name GWBush.com and created a web site that mimicked the official 2000 Internet site of then-Texas Governor George W. Bush. Exley's site featured pilfered and doctored images that portrayed Mr. Bush as a drunkard and cocaine user. In 2001 Exley wrote a book about radical labor (and Internet) organizing, Trust the People, published by the small Brooklyn-based left-wing publisher Soft Skull Press. Typical of this publisher´s titles is Confronting Capitalism, a collection of essays by leftwing political cult leader Noam Chomsky, Marxist Alexander Cockburn, socialist Barbara Ehrenreich and other radicals. In 2002 Exley was hired by Wes Boyd, multimillionaire creator of the "Flying Toaster" computer screensaver, to work at Berkeley, California-based MoveOn.org, a vehicle for fund-raising and mobilization on issues ranging from gun control to anti-war and anti-Republican activism. It was pioneering new ways to use the Internet politically to advance the radical left. "In the long run," said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, "MoveOn.org could be our Rush Limbaugh." On April 16, 2004, Sen. John F. Kerry and, later, Kerry-Edwards employed ultra-leftist dirty trickster Zack Exley to run campaign Internet activities. Employing radical Leftists is nothing new to John Edwards. But equally ominous, as a future column here will reveal, are the special interests he serves that provided Lear jets for his 2004 presidential primary campaign. These greedy interests annually cost the average American family more than $2,884.
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