Edwards' bumper sticker brain

Salena Zito:

Last month he was the poster boy for hair bling and offshore fund-dumping.

Last week he was spanked for receiving $55,000 to speak to a group of students at a public college about poverty and getting a cut of the booty from the recovery of $500 million in sunken treasure.

But this Memorial Day weekend, after holding steady to his lead in the polls in Iowa, John Edwards will try to make himself over as the anti-war candidate and then never look back.

Through ads and a newly launched Web site -- www.supporthetroopsendthewar.com -- Edwards asks Americans to "call on our government to support our troops in the most important way it can, by ending this war and bringing them home."

"Watch out for John Edwards," says Democrat political strategist Steve McMahon. "The position he is staking out on the war is far more popular with a much bigger group of Democratic primary voters than anyone currently understands."

And if he can just stop being associated with copious amounts of cash and hair gel, and get on with the business of being a serious in-your-face anti-war candidate, he just might be successful.

Edwards' position -- which he staked out by rapping the Bush administration's use of the phrase "war on terror" as a Republican bumper sticker -- is in a position that many Democrats wanted their primary candidates to occupy.

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It is a pretty bad position to take. It looks like Edwards has been getting his education of warfare from the "fetuses" he used to channel in the court room in winning large verdicts for dubious claims. He certainly is not demonstrating any comprehension of warfare and what it takes to beat an enemy using insurgency strategies. He is also showing a profound ignorance of the enemy that is trying to destroy us. His retreat from the battlefields of the Middle East and Afghanistan will not end the war, but it will give the enemy a respite and the resources with which to continue his attacks on us.