With last week’s presidential debate, the political winds began to shift. Tonight, as Vice President Cheney faces off against Senator Edwards, a strong performance by Mr. Edwards could help the Democrats build momentum.

Something of a John Grisham character come to life, Mr. Edwards has built his personal fortune on the persuasiveness of his public speaking. As a trial lawyer for 20 years, Mr. Edwards gained his clients more than $150 million in judgments against doctors and corporations. His campaigns to date have accepted two-thirds of their total contributions from lawyers and law firms. As Kerry spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter told the New York Times during the primary campaign, “His campaign is wholly funded by trial lawyers, which are widely recognized as special-interests.”

This is Mr. Edwards’s Achilles’ heel, and Mr. Cheney will no doubt be aiming at it tonight. How can the senator from North Carolina defend himself? If Mr. Edwards is smart, he’ll pull a Nixon-in-China and prominently push forward his own version of tort reform.

A 2003 Gallup poll found 74% of Americans think the issue of medical malpractice insurance in health care is a “major problem” or “crisis,” while 57% believe that patients initiate too many lawsuits. There is a rising consensus that opportunistic lawsuits and sky-high damage judgments are hurting the average American and are counter to the common good.

In New York, the average compensation in personal injury lawsuits is now $300,000, and more than one-quarter of the damage awards exceed $1 million. Our cash-strapped local government spends more than $500 million a year settling frivolous lawsuits it fears it might lose in court at even greater expense. In 2002, American tort costs climbed to $233 billion, or 2.23% of the GDP.

In the face of these and other facts, Mr. Edwards steadfast defense of trial lawyers cannot be separated from self-interest or special interest politics. In order to prove that he can rise above pressure groups and be a statesman, Mr. Edwards needs to step up and propose a comprehensive tort reform policy that addresses these concerns.

In a May 2003 Op-Ed piece in the Washington Post, Mr. Edwards attempted to stake out this ground with an essay generously titled “Let’s Keep Doctors in Business.” In it, he places primary blame for the spike in insurance premiums not on lawsuits but on the insurance companies themselves, accusing them of “price gouging.” Mr. Edwards steadfastly defends the integrity of his chosen profession, but he does make a welcome specific proposal: “Lawyers who file three frivolous cases should be forbidden to bring another suit for the next 10 years – in other words, three strikes and you’re out.”

However, this early action has seen little sunlight in the subsequent campaign – with no major policy addresses or issue advertisements. On the Kerry-Edwards campaign Web site, no prominent mention of tort reform can be found. Instead the issue is folded into a medical malpractice reform proposal. The invisibility of tort reform in the Democratic campaign can perhaps be traced to the prominent role that the former president of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, Fred Baron – a longtime Edwards friend and Dallas attorney who made much of his $21 million fortune in asbestos litigation – plays as cochair of Kerry Victory ’04, a joint fund-raising partnership between the Democratic National Committee and the Kerry campaign.

Just as Richard Nixon’s anti-communist credentials gave him the political capital necessary to open diplomatic relations with communist China, Mr. Edwards’s own courtroom experience would give him the authority to address this issue. In the process, he may alienate a few allies such as Mr. Baron, but he would gain new credibility with the majority of Americans.

There have been bipartisan bills that aimed for tort reform in the recent past, notably the narrowly rejected Class Action Fairness Act, which would stop lawyers’ shopping for sympathetic local juries by making it easier for large lawsuits to be moved from state to federal courts. In an election year sidestep, neither Mr. Kerry nor Mr. Edwards voted on the bill when it came to the Senate floor. A billionaire Texas trial attorney named John O’Quinn – who reached his biggest payday with the breast-implant lawsuit that bankrupted Dow-Corning – now advocates a “loser-pays” system that would discourage frivolous lawsuits by making attorneys pay the defense team’s court costs in the event of a loss.

Some restraints could help restore the integrity of a grievance system that has too often been abused. Only 20 cents out of every dollar in tort awards is paid to victims, and this share has fallen considerably over the past 15 years. It is difficult not to conclude that a professional class of grief hustlers have exploited the misfortune of others for personal gain.

When Mr. Kerry selected Mr. Edwards as his running mate, it seemed likely to guarantee that an overdue debate about tort reform would take center stage in the election. But besides a few isolated campaign volleys, this has not happened: perhaps because trial lawyers have craftily covered their bases by giving Mr. Bush’s campaign even more money ($9.4 million as of July) than the insurgent Kerry-Edwards ticket ($9.3 million).

It would be a purposeful act of political judo for Senator Edwards to seize the offensive on this issue. In the tradition of Nixon in China and southern Democrat Lyndon Johnson shepherding civil rights legislation through Congress, Mr. Edwards is paradoxically in the best place to reshape the debate on tort reform. Tonight’s debate would be a fine time to begin.