Obama and Edwards in men's magazine cover face-off (photo)

Media Bistro: Monday, Aug 20
Who Will Win This Month's Magazine Candidate-Off?

When it comes to the covers of men's magazines, it's Obama v. Edwards this month.

A reader sends in this picture from a Detroit airport:



http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlDC/magazines/who_will_win_this_months_magazine_candidateoff_65335.asp

who are being treated by the media as contestants in a beauty pageant rather than aspirants for the role of president of the U.S. I can hardly wait for the talent segment.

I have become more cynical than ever before about everything. Sometimes I just want to go back to bed, cover my head and stay there. The water in my always half-full glass is beginning the stagnate.

http://www.esquire.com/features/edwardscontest0807

The Beauty Contest

The half-wits and harridans talk about nothing so much as his hair. But John Edwards has more pressing things on his mind.

SNIP

It is an odd campaign. By most accounts, Edwards is running third, behind a woman and a black man. Hillary Clinton has a bigger name and a higher profile. Barack Obama is what Edwards once was -- the out-of-the-blue rookie senator with the intriguing biography, an apparent purchase on the future, and the crowd in his pocket. For the moment, at least, young John Edwards is a throwback -- the white man out, talking about issues that hearken back to the days when a woman president or a black president were gauzy, aspirational fantasies.

He finishes his talk, and the jacket goes back on, and he goes to the front of the restaurant to pose for pictures. The smile is the same. The smile, and the huckleberry accent that used to bend Carolina juries to his will. That's what remains of the John Edwards who hit national politics in 2001, who ran for president before his first term in the Senate was done, and who ran with John Kerry in 2004. The confident way the arm gets thrown around the shoulders of the college students who come up to him, the nice-to-meet-you-darlin's for the younger girls. Then the cell phone rings. His aide hands him the phone. It is his wife, Elizabeth, calling from back home.

"Honey," Edwards says, "I got to finish up this thing, and then I'll call you from the car, okay? Love you."

He hands the phone back to the aide, and there is a moment when he freezes, as though he's misplaced himself. Not for long, but for just long enough that you can see through the surface of his confidence and his enthusiasm, down to those other elements that have darkened and strengthened them. He is learning how to bleed in public, and that is a brave thing to do. He ducks out of the restaurant and down an alley to his car, but that moment lingers, like something that came down with the rain. In the weak and insubstantial light of the evening, there's nothing about John Edwards that seems weakened or insubstantial, not even the things that look so very much like pain.

SNIP

http://hotlineblog.nationaljournal.com/archives/2007/01/obama_spotting.html

From People Magazine:

What a nice find, love that Obama picture