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Every possible nominee has his or her flaws. Every one of them. It's just that each one's flaws are unique to him or her. If Hillary is the nominee, she'll be trashed in a way quite different from Edwards, if he's the nominee. And so on.
I also believe it's a dangerous fallacy to think that someone who's run before (Gore and Kerry) is immune because they've already had the worst thrown at them. Not so. New lies will be told along with the old ones, if either becomes the nominee. It's also wrong to think that we're better off deciding the nominee real early and so get all the hateful stuff out of the way. Again, it won't work that way. They'll come up with new crap every day of the campaign. In fact, it might possibly be better if a true unknown were to come out of a deadlocked convention -- and I realize there is zero chance of that happening -- because then there'd be so little time to mount a campaign against that new, relatively unknown nominee.
In the end, in my opinion, what will matter much more than who exactly is that nominee (and yes, I have ones I'd prefer and ones I'd really hate to see as the president) is that we make sure there really is a free, fair, and honest election this time. In the final analysis Gore and Kerry lost not because of any particular flaws on their part or mistakes in campaigning, but because we did not have a free, fair, and honest election either time.
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