Democratic candidates call Edwards 'a huge help'

The Hill -- Dems see boon to campaigns

Within minutes of Sen. John Kerry’s announcement yesterday, Democrats running for Congress across the country were declaring the number-two pick a huge boon for their campaigns.

In North Carolina, Democrat Erskine Bowles’s campaign touted the selection of Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) as “a huge help” that would get out Democratic and swing voters and put North Carolina issues like trade policy and the tobacco buyout front and center. Edwards is retiring from the Senate.

Officials at state Democratic Party headquarters in North Carolina and Georgia, as well as at the Sierra Club and the AFL-CIO, said Edwards would help raise money and campaign in conservative bastions the Bush campaign might otherwise have taken for granted.

Doug Heye, press secretary for Rep. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), Bowles’s Senate opponent, said yesterday that since Kerry had made his vice-presidential announcement several hours before, at least 10 or 15 people had called in to volunteer for Burr.

Slate - Who was the better candidate? Edwards.

That's how I saw it, and plenty of exit polls backed me up. Liberals were voting for Kerry because they thought he was electable. But the people whose ballots would actually determine which candidate got elected—independents, conservative Democrats, and self-identified Republicans sufficiently open-minded to participate in Democratic primaries—were voting for Edwards.

More clearly than any Democratic presidential nominee in 20 years, Kerry was chosen not to represent himself but to represent his party. And what Democrats wanted, as polls and crowds made clear, was Edwards—because they like him, and because they want to win.