A Stitch in Haste

An update to my earlier post on John Edwards' backers, courtesy of Walter Olson in the Wall Street Journal (subscription site, sorry, but see here):

What scares the daylights out of his business adversaries isn't just that Mr. Edwards is a seasoned trial lawyer who decided to switch careers, in the manner of Orrin Hatch, Ernest Hollings and others. It's that from day one he's been at pains to construct a tightly organized fund-raising and electoral machine whose dominant figures, with scarcely a known exception, are wealthy plaintiff's lawyers like himself. In fact, most of his key backers are drawn from the tiny handful of tort lawyers even more successful than he, sometimes by orders of magnitude. Mr. Edwards is estimated to have quit with $38 million, but that's pocket change to many veterans of the tobacco and asbestos wars.
...
Famously unapologetic, the Edwards campaign merely shrugged this spring when Sen. Kerry's press secretary assailed the North Carolinian's White House bid as "wholly funded by trial lawyers." More remarkable yet was how Edwards's spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri had earlier responded to similar sniping: "We have no problem if 100% of our money came from trial lawyers." On the relatively few issues on which Mr. Edwards has taken a high profile in the Senate, agenda items for the trial bar (e.g., blocking limits on future post-terrorism lawsuits) have comprised a high share. There's every reason to believe that the men behind Mr. Edwards have a clear expectation of entering Washington next January as victors, and closer to the center of power than they've up to now dared to dream.

I said from the outset that this issue had legs...and now they're being stretched.