President questions experience

Bush won Edwards' home state of North Carolina in the 2000 election.
DALLAS MORNING NEWS
RALEIGH, N.C. -- President Bush dropped by John Edwards' back yard Wednesday with a message: Vice President Dick Cheney is ready to be president. Edwards is not.
Visiting North Carolina a day after John Kerry chose the senator as his running mate, Bush was confronted with the new political reality that a Southern state he won handily four years ago was now a battleground.
"Bush stuck in the Tar Heel State?" the Democratic National Committee wondered in an e-mail that greeted the president.
Bush defeated Al Gore by 13 points in North Carolina in 2000. And he vowed Wednesday to do well again, declaring that he shared the values of the South that Kerry did not.
Democrats, however, were buying none of it.
Hoping for at least an early boost from Edwards' selection, the Kerry campaign moved quickly to bolster its efforts in the South, particularly in Edwards' home state.
"North Carolina is now a place where I know we can compete, where we are competing as of today," said Kerry strategist Tad Devine, announcing that the campaign was expanding its television advertising to North Carolina.
Cheney vs. Edwards
In a brief question-and-answer session with the president, one reporter noted that Edwards has been described in recent days as "charming, engaging, a nimble campaigner, a populist -- and even sexy," and then asked, "How does he stack up against Dick Cheney?"
"Dick Cheney can be president," Bush said, quickly looking for another question.
The message was unmistakable: Edwards, a first-term senator who had won in 1998 on his first try ever for public office, is not ready to be president.
A statewide survey last month by the Raleigh News & amp; Observer, WRAL-TV and WUNC radio showed Bush leading Kerry by 5 percentage points, with signs that the race would tighten if Edwards were on the Democratic ticket.
Bush had come to Raleigh to raise money for the Republican Party and to chastise Edwards and other Senate Democrats for blocking several of his judicial nominations.
On Capitol Hill, Edwards' press secretary, Michael Briggs, said the senator was holding up three nominees from his state because they were out of the "mainstream" and the president had not adequately consulted with the Senate.
Edwards, who made his mark and money as a trial lawyer in Raleigh, still has a home here.