Barack Obama says that he wants to "heal" the country while at the same time promoting the idea that all sorts of people are victims for whom he will fight.

Being divisive while proclaiming unity is something you can do only in the world of rhetoric.

Senator Obama has no monopoly on demagoguery, however. Former Senator John Edwards has been playing this game longer, even if not as effectively in the political arena.

John Edwards built his own fortune in the courtroom, depicting babies with birth defects as victims of the doctors who delivered them. The cost of such demagoguery has gone far beyond the tens of millions of dollars that Edwards pocketed for himself from gullible juries.

Such lawsuits based on junk science have driven up the cost of medical care, not only directly but even more so indirectly, by leading to an increase in Caesarean births and other costly "defensive medicine" to protect doctors rather than patients.

The world of John Edwards, like the world of Barack Obama, is a world of victims, whose savior he claims to be.

What is scary is how little interest the public and the media have in the actual track record of political saviors and the cry of generic "change."

America is not czarist Russia or Iran under the shah, so that people might think that any change was bound to be for the better. Yet even in those despotic countries the changes -- to communism and to the ayatollahs -- made them far worse.

The time is long overdue for voters to demand specifics instead of rhetoric that turns their emotions on and their minds off.