Hillary faced Giuliani in 2004, before Giuliani "got sick" and backed out of the race.  

Is a US Senate seat so uninteresting that no serious Republicans wants to be the Senator from New York.  More likely, no serious Republicans believed s/he could be Hillary, and so they decided not to run at all.

Lazio, who finally ran against Hillary in 2000, was a semi-serious Republican.  He was a lifelong New Yorker and a member of the Legislature, if I remember correctly.  Hillary made him "look" unserious and that's part of why he lost the election.

In 2012 when Hillary is the sitting President, you'll be saying that President Hillary Clinton has never had a serious Republican opponent because she "only" beat Chuck Hagel or Mitt Romney back in 2008, and that didn't count because they weren't serious Republicans.

The yearning for populism ought not be ridiculed, but the suspension of disbelief is of great concern.    Personally, I'm less concerned with what candidates say than with who they are.

Barack Obama worked for three years as a community organizer, which is pretty good resume material for a populist.  John Edwards has never done any community organizing, except perhaps to get himself elected to the US Senate.

John Edwards finished law school and went directly to a private law firm in North Carolina with a Republican reputation, defending large corporations in liability suits.  Barack Obama finished law school and went to work with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights while starting his own civil rights law practice.  

Just those facts tell me who IS the populist as opposed to who talks like a populist.  Anyone can talk like a populist, but actually being one is something very different.

Populism is about a revolutionary redirection of society's resources toward those who have less.  If you want to do that, the first step would be to redirect the presidency toward one of the demographic groups that has NEVER held it, like women or Blacks or Latinos.  That would be a populist step, while electing John Edwards is the greatest possible reaffirmation of the elitist group (in the sense of historical privilege) status quo.

The desire to see Edwards as a populist hero reminds me of the Rocky movies.  Look at the historical context of the Rocky movies:  When Blacks had held the heavy weight championship title for damn near two decades, suddenly the white imagination conjures up "Rocky" who comes along as the white hero who beats the Black man.  

But it really WAS a fantasy, because no white man has held the heavy-weight title for as long as I have been watching television.

And so, instead of facing reality, there is often a white flight into fantasy, and I see the image of Edwards as a populist hero as being just that -  a white flight into fantasyland on the wings of John Edwards, who may himself believe the populist identity that he is daily crafting for himself.  It's a pretty narrative, and we certainly want to believe that there is a populist choice, but let's face it:  John Edwards is a wealthy trial lawyer with no particular history as a fighter for the poor, except when he was receiving 35% of their civil awards as his contingency fee.

How much pro bono work did Edwards and his firm do while Obama was working as a civil rights lawyer?  I certainly would like to know the answer to that question?

John Edwards would be a better president than any of the Republicans, but his election as the 44th white male president is would everywhere be seen primarily as a defeat for the advance of a new equality and a reaffirmation of the status quo.

Is Edwards REALLY a populist or just learning to talk very much like a populist?  If he was a populist, he would have represented some pro bono clients who couldn't pay for his services, right?  Here's what the New York Times says about that,  

"He would pick the cases that had the largest verdict potential," said Dewey W. Wells, a former state court judge who litigated against Mr. Edwards as a defense lawyer. "He had a good eye for those cases. He said he was the champion of the little guy, and it's true that many of the people who are injured are poor and downtrodden. He can say he was championing their interest, but it was only by coincidence. He was picking the cases with the biggest payoffs."

Another former adversary, James P. Cooney III, who defended a dozen medical malpractice cases brought by Mr. Edwards, agreed that "he was very selective about his cases."

"He only took the best cases, and by that I don't mean the ones with the highest damages,'' Mr. Cooney said. "I mean the ones where somebody had done something really bad."

But Mr. Edwards handled no notable pro bono cases, the typical vehicle for lawyers who want to have a larger impact.  http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/14/politi cs/campaign/14career.html?ex=1247544000& amp;en=870846aae154e1d1&ei=5090& partner=rssuserland