All the below leads to three words, actually 4. Slick Snake Oil Salesman

• Democratic Senator from North Carolina from 1998 to 2004
• 2004 Democratic Vice Presidential nominee
• Successful trial lawyer
• Rated as fourth most liberal Senator by National Journal

John Edwards was born in 1953 in Seneca, South Carolina.  The first in his family to attend college, he earned an undergraduate degree from North Carolina State University in 1974 and a Juris Doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1977. He began his career as a lawyer by defending record companies accused of selling illegal copies of Elvis Presley recordings.

After moving to Raleigh in 1981, Edwards became a plaintiff’s personal injury lawyer, eventually specializing in cerebral palsy patient lawsuits that blamed their mothers’ doctors for causing this medical condition by waiting too long before performing caesarian sections to give birth to his clients. In one famous case Edwards swayed a jury and won a multimillion-dollar judgment by dramatically playing the part of the unborn child struggling in the womb.

During 20 years as a trial lawyer, Edwards was involved in 63 cases and secured more than $152 million in verdicts and settlements, pocketing a third or more of that money himself and amassing a fortune of as much as $70 million.  Edwards was welcomed into the Inner Circle of Advocates, a society of 100 personal injury lawyers who had won cases of over $1 million. Most call themselves advocates for the poor, injured and powerless. Critics call them ambulance chasers who use their injured clients to persuade empathetic juries to render million-dollar judgments against doctors and companies, up to half the money from which goes not to the injured but to these lawyers.

In 1998 Inner Circle and other trial lawyers, including Edwards himself, put up 86 percent of the more than $9 million this political neophyte used to narrowly defeat incumbent Republican U.S. Senator Lauch Faircloth, a 70-year-old hog farmer, by 52 to 48 percent. Prior to his election Edwards had shown little interest in politics, not even bothering to vote in many elections. As a U.S. Senator, Edwards’ disinterest continued. Although assigned to the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, for example, he seldom attended its meetings unless some important witness brought out network television cameras or an issue before the committee was of special interest to the Association of Trial Lawyers of America (ATLA).

Democratic Party bosses understood that John Edwards was not the Senator from North Carolina so much as the Senator from America’s trial lawyers, a special interest group eager to block any tort reform that might limit lawyer income and to enact rules and regulations that would open new realms for lawsuits. According to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, since the 1990 election cycle lawyers have made political contributions of more than $470 million, with more than 71 percent of this money going to Democratic campaigns and committees.

Trial lawyers have become the Daddy Warbucks of the Democratic Party and among the biggest players at its table of power. Their Senator, John Edwards, has from the outset been groomed to become the first trial lawyer President. In 2000, despite having only two years’ experience in any political office, this fledgling Senator was on the short list and was almost chosen to be the Vice Presidential running mate of Al Gore. People Magazine of the leftwing Time-Warner-CNN media empire declared Edwards “the sexiest politician” in the country.

In 2001 Edwards launched his New American Optimists political action committee, a 527 Leadership PAC to aid “Democratic candidates who support a reform agenda for giving people a greater control over their futures,” i.e., who might support an Edwards presidential bid in 2004. More than 70 percent of its contributions came from trial lawyers, their law firms or family members.

In fact, with rare exceptions such as Hollywood impresarios Steve Bing and Haim Saban and the investment firm Goldman Sachs, virtually every penny of Edwards’ political contributions from 1998 into 2004 has come from trial lawyer-linked sources. (Contributors have included low-paid staffers in law firms, one of whom admitted that she had been promised a $2,000 reimbursement for her donation to Edwards, an apparent laundering of an illegal campaign contribution by her bosses.)

Edwards’ presidential run in 2003 and 2004 flew via “Learjet Lawyers Airlines,” almost every day using the private corporate jets of six wealthy trial lawyer law firms. The campaign laws that politicians wrote for themselves required Edwards to reimburse this customized luxury travel at only the cost of a first class airline ticket for each flight. But even at this absurdly low bargain-basement price, his campaign reimbursed a single law firm $138,000 for the use of its jet aircraft.

That law firm is Baron & Budd P.C. of Dallas, Texas. Its controversial founder Fred Baron, who in 2001-2002 was President of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America (ATLA), chaired the finance committee for Edwards’ campaign. (Baron is now co-chair of the Kerry-Edwards Victory ’04 Committee.)

Among other trial lawyers who have bankrolled Senator Edwards is Bill Lerach, founder of San Diego-based Milberg, Weiss, Bershad, Hynes & Lerach L.L.P., who has been called “the Fred Baron of California.”  During three decades as a lawyer, Lerach “has successfully sued and intimidated over 600 companies in class action litigation.” By one estimate his law firm “initiates more than half of all the shareholder lawsuits in the country, and eighty percent of the class action lawsuits in California.” He is so identified with securities class-action litigation that in corporate America to be hit with such a legal action (or “legal extortion,” as its critics call it) is called getting “Lerached.”

“I’m the Willy Horton of securities law,” boasted Lerach to one audience in 1995. “They say I make too much money doing this….so I make a sh-t pile of money – so what?” he was quoted saying in Buzz magazine that same year. The money that he, Fred Baron, John Edwards and other trial lawyers make, of course, gets passed on to consumers as higher prices in a host of ways. Businesses must carry more insurance and can afford to hire fewer people. Doctors are forced to order unnecessary tests in order to practice defensive medicine. Inventions do not get marketed because of fears of lawsuits.

As the late Robert Heinlein used to say, TANSTAAFL – an acronym for “There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch.” You might be given a sandwich for free at a picnic, but somebody had to pay the cost of growing the wheat, baking the bread, making the baloney and mustard, and shipping it to you.

“People try to pretend the law is not a business. Baloney. It’s big business,” said Lerach. The billions pocketed by trial lawyers and shared with their Democratic Party tort-reform-opposing allies get paid in the end by you at an average cost of $2,884 for every family of four every year. God help America if candidates owned by trial lawyers, now greedy for power as well as money, are able to take control of the White House and to remove the last checks-and-balances that restrain trial lawyer ambitions.

John Edwards is a “perfect messenger” for trial lawyers, said Baron. He comes across as warm, honest, caring, smiling and to many female voters boyish and sexy. He preaches compassion for the little people he has “defended against giant HMOs” and other corporations (while pocketing himself up to half of what juries awarded to his clients). But as the Washington Post’s David Broder wrote in 2002, Edwards “almost has to take a populist stance as a way of putting a favorable gloss on his long career as a trial lawyer.”

Hollywood actors such as Dennis Hopper have embraced Edwards in part for his warmth, cuteness and theatrical skills for eliciting empathy that could have made him a successful soap opera star or the next Brad Pitt.

As Wall Street Journal writer David Robinson recently noted, John Edwards in his book Four Trials and in his speeches exhibits an unforgiving us-versus-them dualism, a world of victims and villains in which capitalists are almost always portrayed as bad guys. Such is the mentality of this tort lawyer who uses the same polarizing, hypnotic rhetoric on voters that he learned to use on juries to make himself very, very rich.

One judges a tree by its fruits and a lawmaker by his votes, not his words. John Edwards talks like an optimistic moderate, but according to the highly regarded National Journal his voting record is the fourth most left-wing in the entire U.S. Senate and is to the left of reputed liberals such as Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D.-New York) and Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D.-Massachusetts).  Edwards also has a perfect 100 percent record according to NARAL, the National Abortion Rights Action League, for his support even of the partial-birth abortion procedure.

In September 2007 Edwards unveiled a universal health care proposal which would mandate that all Americans visit their doctors for preventive care. “It requires that everybody be covered,” said Edwards. “It requires that everybody get preventive care. If you are going to be in the system, you can't choose not to go to the doctor for 20 years. You have to go in and be checked and make sure that you are OK.” Edwards said his plan would cover preventive, chronic and long-term health care, as well as mental health care, dental care, and vision coverage for all Americans. “The whole idea is a continuum of care, basically from birth to death,” he said.

According to Edwards, his plan would cost up to $120 billion annually. He proposed to fund the initiative by with tax revenues derived from putting an end to President Bush's tax cuts to people who earn more than $200,000 per year.