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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Is John Edwards an economy-draining, ambulance-chasing social pariah, as Republicans and big business claim? Ask his clients, like 5-year-old Valerie Lakey.
Jul 13, 2004 | On a summer evening in 1993, David Lakey took his little girl swimming at a recreation center in Raleigh, N.C. Valerie Lakey was 5 years old, a good swimmer, and she and her friends liked to splash around in the children's wading pool that stayed open a little later than the big pool where they usually swam.
That's what Valerie was doing when a nearby mom heard her call out for help. Valerie was sitting on the bottom of the shallow pool, and the suction from the drain was holding her down. David Lakey raced to free his daughter but couldn't. Other parents jumped in the water to help, but they couldn't get Valerie loose. Valerie was scared, and she began to say that her stomach hurt.
Time passed, and somebody figured out how to turn off the pool's pump. The suction broke, and Valerie was released from its grip. But as David Lakey pulled his daughter from the water, blood and tissue filled the pool. Valerie's intestines had been sucked out.
David Lakey slumped to the ground on the side of the pool. He held his daughter on his chest, praying as they waited for an ambulance. Over and over, he told Valerie, "Daddy loves you. Daddy loves you. Daddy loves you."
This account of what happened to Valerie Lakey comes from "Four Trials," the book John Edwards wrote last year as he prepared to run for the presidency. Edwards represented Valerie in a lawsuit against the company that made the drain cover in that swimming pool. A jury awarded her $25 million, compensation for a life of intravenous feedings and colostomy bags.
Tucker Carlson has heard about Valerie's case. It's the one, apparently, that causes him to dismiss John Edwards as a "personal-injury lawyer specializing in Jacuzzi cases."
For six years now, Republicans have tried to minimize and demonize John Edwards as the worst kind of societal parasite: a personal-injury lawyer. North Carolina Sen. Lauch Faircloth ran anti-lawyer TV spots when Edwards ran against him in 1998. When Edwards began pondering a presidential campaign, then-White House spokesman Ari Fleischer was quoted as saying, "Bring on the ambulance chaser."
And now that Edwards is officially on the Democratic ticket -- or will be, when the Democrats get to Boston later this month -- the anti-attorney attack has exploded with a new intensity. Minutes after John Kerry announced that Edwards would be his running mate, the Republican National Committee launched an opposition research site that catalogs Edwards' many sins. Chief among them: He is a "personal injury trial lawyer" and a "friend to personal injury trial lawyers" with little experience in government because "politics took a back seat to [his] legal career."
It's an odd argument coming from the Republicans -- remember 2000, when they ran George W. Bush as the businessman's alternative to that "career politician" Al Gore? -- but they see some advantage in it. Bush himself jumped on the bandwagon late last week. "You cannot be pro-small business and pro-trial lawyer at the same time," he said at a campaign stop in York, Pa. "You have to choose. My opponent has made his choice, and he put him on the ticket."
