By portraying John Edwards as an ambulance-chasing, playground-closing personal-injury lawyer, the Bush-Cheney team hopes to turn off swing voters who might otherwise be attracted to Edwards' populist image while simultaneously shoring up Bush's support from big business. As a spokesman for the National Association of Manufacturers told the New York Times last week, "Trial lawyers are the pariahs of the business community, which is more frightened by them than terrorists, China or higher energy prices."

But there's a problem for the Republicans: Lawyers like John Edwards, and clients like Valerie Lakey. The GOP and its allies in business and the media can articulate broad economic policy reasons for tort reform, for cracking down on lawyers who file frivolous lawsuits, for reining in the forum shopping and other abuses that sometimes accompany big class-action lawsuits. But it's tough to pin any of those problems on Edwards -- no one has charged that he filed frivolous lawsuits -- and it's hard to trump stories like Valerie Lakey's with statistics about what Republicans call the "tort tax."

Edwards practiced law in North Carolina for nearly two decades. He spent the first two years of his legal career as a junior associate in a law firm that represented corporate defendants, then moved on to the plaintiff's work for which he became famous. He represented children who developed cerebral palsy in lawsuits against their mothers' doctors and hospitals; a woman who underwent a double mastectomy based on a false diagnosis of cancer; he represented a child whose parents were killed when their car was smashed by a big rig; he represented Valerie Lakey.

"The Republicans want to put Edwards out there as a 'trial lawyer,' but I don't think it cuts deeply as an issue because he's not your stereotypical, caricaturable ambulance chaser," says Ferrel Guillory, director of the University of North Carolina's Program on Southern Politics, Media and Public Life. "The kind of clients that Edwards represented are everyday folks, folks like you and me, people who feel aggrieved by powerful forces out there, whether it's an HMO or a hospital or something else."

Mike Dayton, who watched Edwards' career while working as the editor of the North Carolina Lawyers Weekly, said that Edwards' clients "were almost to a person these catastrophically injured or killed plaintiffs. They're certainly sympathetic in their own right, and it's hard not to feel the pain of those people and want to do right by them."

Not surprisingly, the Republicans have generally steered clear of discussion about the clients Edwards represented. It's easy to make hay over million-dollar recoveries for spilled coffee at McDonald's -- especially if you ignore the fact that the woman who spilled the coffee was seriously injured, that McDonald's refused an offer to settle the case for $20,000, and that a judge later reduced the jury's award of $2.7 million in punitive damages to just $480,000. It's harder to say much -- at least, not without sounding as crass as Tucker Carlson -- about the sort of cases Edwards handled.

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