Matt Bai: "Edwards Surprisingly Joyless About All that Poverty in America"

And yet, even taking that personal ordeal into account, there is something surprisingly arduous, even joyless at times, about Edwards’s second bid for the White House. Modern presidential campaigns tend to be aggressively upbeat and personality-driven; sure, every candidate has his favorite issues, but those issues generally exist mostly to color the candidate’s driving ambition with some shade of higher purpose. Edwards’s campaign feels oddly inverted. There’s no doubt he wants very badly to win, and yet there are times when the entire campaign seems little more than an excuse for him to talk about the issue with which he is now most closely identified: the case for the 37 million Americans living in poverty.

I think Matt Bai should realize that a normal person can feel no real joy with the current state of America...

I want to read it {Bai's article} more carefully because I am trying to get a real handle on what Edwards is about now. But, so far, I find that the attitude of Matt Bai is standing in the way.