Bob Schrum, Kerry’s campaign manager, wrote a book in which he describes Kerry’s decision to choose John Edwards as his running mate.

Kerry talked with several potential picks, including Gephardt and Edwards. He was comfortable after his conversations with Gephardt, but even queasier about Edwards after they met.

Edwards had told Kerry he was going to share a story with him that he’d never told anyone else—that after his son Wade had been killed, he climbed onto the slab at the funeral home, laid there and hugged his body, and promised that he’d do all he could to make life better for people, to live up to Wade’s ideals of service. Kerry was stunned, not moved, because, as he told me later, Edwards had recounted the same exact story to him, almost in the exact same words, a year or two before—and with the same preface, that he’d never shared the memory with anyone else.

Kerry found that shocking? Why, he’d been peddling his “Christmas in Cambodia” yarn for years. Remember, it was “seared” in his memory until it wasn’t?

That said, using the memory of your dead son to score points is low even for politicians.

But then again Al Gore spun a weepy tale of  sitting at his sister’s death bed watching her dying of lung cancer, and how it convinced him to tackle the evil tobacco companies.

Nice story, but some years after that “lifechanging” moment, Gore bragged to an audience of tobacco growers:

Throughout most of my life, I raised tobacco. I want you to know that with my own hands, all of my life, I put it in the plant beds and transferred it. I’ve hoed it. I’ve chopped it. I’ve shredded it, spiked it, put it in the barn and stripped it and sold it.