If nothing else, John Edwards is a trooper. Hours after a press conference announcing his wife's cancer recurrence, Edwards made scheduled appearance in NYC as part of DL21C's "Road to the White House" series. Though he was obviously and quite understandably tired, he soldiered on and gave what appeared to be an only slightly modified stump speech. He did touch on the events of the previous 48 hours a few times and the capacity crowd received him very, very warmly. Much of the chatter before his arrival was simply about how amazed many folks were that this event was still happening.
The contrast between last night's event and last week's appearance by Wes Clark was pretty stark in some ways. First, while Clark's event was certainly very well attended, there was virtually no press present. Every TV outlet in town had satellite trucks out front of the venue last night. There was also quite a line of folks waiting to get in to see Edwards. It seemed everyone in town wanted to be a part of this event.