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Jerry Pfohl’s opinion piece “Edwards too inexperienced” (July 12) is a case of the Republican Party’s simple-minded rhetoric dirtying the record of a credible vice presidential candidate.

Sen. John Edwards has spent the past six years in the U.S. Senate and has served on the Intelligence Committee. In particular, he has played an instrumental role in the reform of the No Child Left Behind Act and the passage of the Patients’ Bill of Rights.

Conservatives are quick to criticize his background as the son of a mill worker who became a successful trial lawyer. Edwards lived a rags-to-riches American dream, working his way through public universities both as an undergraduate and as a law student.

The Republicans call him an ambulance chaser but won’t tell you about the type of people he defended when he became a lawyer.

He won medical malpractice lawsuits for people – mostly children – who will need a lifetime of expensive medical attention because of doctors’ negligence in drug overdoses or oxygen deprivation cases. He won a wrongful death suit against a psychiatric hospital that released a 16-year-old boy who committed suicide on the same day. In his largest monetary victory he won a lawsuit against a swimming pool manufacturer whose faulty drains left a young girl permanently on feeding tubes when her intestines were pulled from her body.

People are quick to criticize lawyers until they need one. Edwards has fought for the common people of the United States and should be commended, not condemned.

Now let’s talk about Vice President Dick Cheney’s so-called experience. Admittedly, Cheney has a great deal of federal defense experience under former Presidents Ford and Bush. Yet what about his experience with Halliburton Co. in Iraq?

In a case of selective memory, the White House Web site likes to leave holes in Cheney’s resume, never mentioning his too-close-for-comfort ties with our nation’s energy giants. Yes, Cheney has experience. But is it the kind of experience we want our leaders to have?

Conservatives also like to pretend that only Democrats run candidates who are relative newcomers for high-profile office. I do not recall hearing the Republican Party complaining about Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s inexperience in California’s gubernatorial recall election. Instead it was jumping at the chance for an action movie star with no political experience at all to run the sixth-largest economy in the world at the time of an enormous fiscal crisis.

And what about current President Bush himself? He ran in 2000 after serving only six years as governor of Texas (the same amount of time Edwards has been in the Senate). Bush had no federal government experience and no foreign policy experience whatsoever.

The Senate voting records for Sen. John Kerry that conservatives like to pull out have absolutely no comparison to Bush’s because while Kerry was working on political crises, Bush owned a baseball team. So what made Bush qualified to run for president in 2000 but Edwards unqualified for vice president in 2004?

Anyone who knows a thing about politics would recognize that Pfohl’s statement, “No matter how right-leaning voters may feel the Bush-Cheney ticket is, they are clearly not as partisan as the Kerry-Edwards team,” is at the very least a stretch and at most an outright lie.

Do you honestly think Cheney moves the Republican ticket to the center more than Edwards moves the Democratic ticket center? The reason Republicans worry about keeping Cheney on the ticket rather than replacing him with a moderate such as Rudy Giuliani is that Cheney only appeals to the most conservative members of the Republican Party.

Edwards clearly brings a more centrist position to the Democratic ticket, especially with his more moderate views on the war in Iraq and his concerns with free trade, by which rural America feels threatened.

Pfohl’s column was a cheap shot at a good man who ultimately won’t be the decisive factor in this election.

We should be talking about Kerry’s experience. Let’s talk about a man who could have spent his life making millions at an energy company but instead has spent his entire life helping people in the public sector as a criminal prosecutor, lieutenant governor and U.S. senator.

Cheney has proven a vice president is good for two things – whispering the answers to tough questions in committee hearings and hiding in a bunker. I’m sure Edwards is just as qualified as Cheney to hide in a bunker, and Kerry is a formidable enough politician not to need someone to whisper the answers to him.

Miller is a fourth-year political science student and the publicity director for Bruin Democrats.