To the tune of $125 Billion dollars a year in what he has proposed so far (apparently over a trillion if he gets what he REALLY wants. He says he will ignore deficits. From the article “Edwards says fixing the country’s problems takes precedence over eliminating the deficit or offering middle-class tax relief like he proposed when running for president in the last election.”

Edwards of course had this to say during the Vice Presidential debate in 2004:

EDWARDS: Because we will do what they’ve not done. You know, if you look at what’s happened over the last four years, we have gone from a $5 trillion projected surplus when George Bush took office to a $3 trillion projected deficit.

They promised they were going to put $2 trillion of the surplus aside from Social Security. Not done.

Not only that, it’s the biggest fiscal turnaround in American history.

And there’s no end in sight. The Washington Post just reported they have several trillion dollars of additional tax cuts and spending, no suggestion of what they’re going to do about it.

John Kerry and I believe we have a moral responsibility not to leave trillions of debt to our children and our grandchildren.

It seems like the moral responsibility is now to create massive social programs & raise taxes rather than pay down debt. I am not trying to attack Edwards but I do hear him use the words “moral responsibility” an awful lot and in an awful lot of contexts. There are a lot of moral & ethical responsibilities in life & unfortunately a lot of them compete and some conflict with one another. They also don’t all add up to votes in the heartland, in the south, on Wall Street etc. and what is “right” in someone’s mind isn’t always what is “right for the country” or “right for every situation”.

Especially when what was moral four years ago suddenly isn’t moral today.

So what is Edward’s political agenda, his real economic objectives, & foreign policy and not what he believes his moral responsibility is at any given second? Unfortunately for Edwards it is raising taxes which is going to open him up to a LOT of criticism.

Sen. John McCain hit YouTube popularity when he gave his answer to a question about Iran being responsible for many deaths as “bomb, bomb, bomb… bomb, bomb Iran” set to the music of the Beach Boys. Critics piled on. McCain’s response?

“Please, I was talking to some of my old veterans friends,” he told reporters. “My response is, Lighten up and get a life.”

A story from the Boston Herald cites some people from the Kerry-Edwards ‘04 race that shows the candidate, who has been running far from his vote to authorize War in Iraq today, wasn’t so eager to do the same while running for VP.

Yet as John Kerry’s 2004 ticketmate, the former North Carolina senator was anything but eager to acknowledge error on Iraq. Instead, according to several Kerry-Edwards campaign aides, Edwards argued repeatedly that the two should stand by their votes, even after it had become apparent that Iraq had neither weapons of mass destruction nor collaborative ties with Al Qaeda.

I don’t entirely know how accurate this information is but I do find it interesting for other reasons. Kerry-Edwards seemed like a happy couple in 2004 but losing the election seems to have had some pretty harsh effects on that relationship as well as the relationships amongst their staffs. There have been plenty of little leaks of information about Edwards during this campaign that don’t paint him in the best light as a strategist. Most of these accounts have been coming from former staffers and potentially some high level people from the Kerry camp which makes you wonder what went on behind the scenes and what John Kerry is up to.

The media seem to be on a pummel Edwards week with plenty of bad stories coming out about the former Senator. Is this from a concentrated effort by people leaking information or just something coming out of the wake of fundraising news?

I thought I would throw in some personal thoughts about the recent developments surrounding John Edwards candidacy and the disclosure that his wife’s cancer has returned.

First to the topic of a recent interview with Katie Couric on this weekends 60 Minutes program on CBS. Couric, whose husband died of cancer and left her with two children whose ages are similar to the Edwards children, asked very frank and difficult questions of both John & Elizabeth Edwards over whether their decision to continue the campaign was putting politics above family.

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In the National Review.