It would be out of keeping with the role of this blog as Unofficial Edwards Central if I didn't point you to Shakes' post on John Edwards' decision to announce his campaign from the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, probably at the end of this month. It's the same place that he went over Spring Break (see the John Edwards Gone Wild photos, one of which I've posted below) with hundreds of college students to repair Hurricane Katrina damage.
We've been talking recently on this blog about how the media covers presidential candidates. I'm convinced that effectively working the media is mostly a matter of constructing an appealing narrative about your candidate and feeding that narrative relentlessly. People talk about "Teflon candidates" to whom no smears stick, and a big part of that is defining your candidate so strongly that attacks which seek to define your candidate otherwise can't get traction. While it would've been entirely justified to attack Bush for his complete refusal to do anything about North Korea in 2004, he had already defined himself as the candidate of bold foreign policy action with the Iraq War, which made it challenging to tag him with a contrary label.
