Greetings from Manchester, New Hampshire where, bleary-eyed, the Edwards caravan arrived this morning. At a rally Elizabeth Edwards likened her husband to Seabiscuit — the famed Depression-era race horse who overcame all kinds of handicaps to win race after race. “You saw how much attention some candidates got, how much money,” she said. “Well, it seems to me that the perfect metaphor is Seabiscuit.”
But, she warned, rivals “can’t count on any broken legs, this man doesn’t make mistakes.”
Edwards picked up on the metaphor, saying the New Hampshire primary “will not be about celebrity. It will not be about glitz. It will be about who can galvanize this movement because that’s what this is, a movement for change. We are Seabiscuit.”
“I am not the candidate or glitz; I am not the candidate of glamour,” Edwards said. “I am the candidate who will fight with every fiber of my being every step of the way… I am the candidate for president of the United States that is the people’s candidate.”
We journalists are all for racing analogies. But just who is War Admiral in this scenario? And doesn’t the Seabiscuit mantle require, um, winning something first?