John Edwards’ acceptance speech for his vice presidential nomination on Wednesday night revealed the difficulties and perils of the balancing act. The surface seemed smooth, glistening and crystalline. Edwards’ talent is that of the consummate lawyer making a summation to a jury of ordinary citizens. He rehearses until his long speech flows from him like a natural river. His particular skill in the primary campaign was to fashion a message of traditional Democratic economic and social grievance that manifested as a paean to optimism. Before the convention delegates, Edwards enveloped his tried-and-true “two Americas” speech with a tribute to Kerry’s leadership qualities, incorporating them as new elements of brightness.

Edwards’ manner is more that of the motivational speaker than the minister. He establishes through his personal autobiography that he is the common person he is addressing, creating a unity between himself and the crowd. His language is anecdotal but utterly unadorned. He makes no literary allusions. Unlike Bill Clinton, another Southerner, he borrows no references from biblical scripture. His talk is without political liturgy of any kind. It is stripped to plainness, a Protestant cross without any figure on it.

But there is a tension behind his accessibility. Edwards tells of the trials and tribulations of those falling behind no matter how hard they work, who need better education, health insurance and job security. “You don’t need me to explain this to you, do you? You know exactly what I’m talking about. Can’t save any money, can you? Takes every dime you make just to pay your bills. And you know what happens if something goes wrong, if you have a child that gets sick, a financial problem, a layoff in the family — you go right off the cliff. And when that happens, what’s the first thing that goes? Your dreams. It doesn’t have to be that way.”

But Edwards doesn’t explain why it is that way. He offers a tale without a plot, describes effects without causes. It is a mystery play about George W. Bush.

Republicans, of course, charge him and other Democrats universally as possessed by little but visceral anger. They dread his negative numbers being run up, so they try to deflect the Democrats from doing so by projecting onto them the negative campaign the Republican themselves are mercilessly running.

Edwards’ response is to cast the contest as a cosmic battle of the forces of darkness and light, poles of positive and negative, optimism and gloom. “John’s been traveling around the country,” he said of his running mate, “talking about his positive, optimistic vision for America … But what have we seen? Relentless negative attacks against John. So in the weeks ahead, we know what’s coming, don’t we? Yes, more negative attacks. Aren’t you sick of it? They are doing all they can to take the campaign for the highest office in the land down the lowest possible road.”

Edwards vouched for John Kerry the war hero and presented his own senatorial credentials on national security, but his subliminal appeal is to a crucial swing constituency: the kind of women he went to high school with in North Carolina, working and lower middle class, too busy to pay close attention to the news, but anxious about almost everything.

He breathed life into this ideal woman, who wants someone to express her desire for empathy and rescue. “Tonight, as we celebrate in this hall, somewhere in America a mother sits at the kitchen table. She can’t sleep because she’s worried she can’t pay her bills. She’s working hard trying to pay her rent, trying to feed her kids, but she just can’t catch up. It didn’t used to be that way in her house.” Now, Edwards created a man for the woman. “Her husband was called up in the Guard. Now he’s been in Iraq for over a year. They thought he was going to come home last month, but now he’s got to stay longer.” With that stroke, Edwards turned the turmoil and trepidation of Iraq into a quiet crisis of the middle class. “She thinks she’s alone,” Edwards continued. “But tonight in this hall and in your homes, you know what? She’s got a lot of friends … Hope is on the way.”

Edwards has sidestepped being the vice presidential candidate as relentless attacker. With his friendliness he has homed in on the swing female voter. But the heart of the election remains Bush’s trust and credibility.

It all seemed very serious to me at the time, which is why I was astonished when the charges finally emerged. It seemed that federal prosecutors desperately wanted to find a way to legally punish Edwards for adultery, and their only hope of doing that was to reclassify hush money paid by private Edwards supporters directly to Rielle Hunter and Andrew Young as a campaign contributions, even though the money didn’t go to the campaign and “hush money for mistresses” has never before been treated like a traditional campaign expense. Luckily, the jury seems to have seen through the ruse, finding Edwards not guilty of one charge, and drawing a mistrial on the rest.

With the news of Karl Rove crowing about how he intends to spend $1 billion in untraceable funds to beat Obama in 2012, it looks particularly ridiculous for the government to waste resources on a showboat prosecution. Even the conservative news magazine National Review had to denounce the prosecution as a waste. John Edwards has been disgraced, humiliated and run out of politics. Bringing the full force of the law down on him on top of it all just seems greedy.

It’s become customary in politically obsessed circles for observers to preen about how they knew that Edwards was bad news all along. His lawyerly ways! His sentimental stories about growing up working class! His hair! How could his silly supporters not see him for the philandering phony he so clearly was?

Of course, a quick perusal of the John Edwards of 2007 demonstrates that this sort of hindsight owes more to revisionist wishful thinking than a correct assessment of the evidence at the time. Back then, the other potential Democratic nominees, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, were widely and correctly perceived as timid centrists who had a knee-jerk tendency to run from conflict the second conservatives ruffled their feathers. Edwards, on the other hand, spoke convincingly of how change couldn’t come from  “negotiation and compromise,” arguing that the idea that corporate interests would voluntarily give away their power is “a fantasy.” Long before the economic crash and Occupy Wall Street forced major Democratic politicians to address the question of growing inequality, Edwards’s famous “two Americas” rhetoric helped force the issue onto the table. Occupy boiled it down to the 1 Percent vs. the 99 Percent, but back in 2007, Edwards was taking cracks at “the very rich vs. everyone else.”

In the rush of headlines about Edwards’s despicable sexual behavior, what’s forgotten is how much his campaign haunted the primary contest between Clinton and Obama long after he dropped out. An early push in the campaign season from Edwards on healthcare reform set the tone for the rest of the election season on this issue. Edwards put out a plan for healthcare reform before the other candidates, forcing the other candidates to release competing plans that were likelier farther to the left than they were comfortable promising. It’s arguable that without the primary season pressure from the Edwards campaign, the initial gambit of the Democrats in the healthcare reform battle — one that included a public option — wouldn’t have been as strong, which would have meant an even weaker bill than the one that eventually was pushed past conservative Democratic opposition.

Because of this, no one was hurt worse by the revelation that Edwards was cheating on his well-loved wife than his most ardent supporters. If he’d been outed sooner, he would have destroyed not just his own candidacy but all the hard work in getting income inequality and progressive health care reform into the 2008 campaign. For those who take those issues very seriously, this felt less like a boneheaded mistake and more like a betrayal.

But being weak-willed and disappointing your supporters can’t be treated like a crime, or else most of D.C. should be yanked from their cocktail parties and tossed into the clink. Even those who’ll never be able to forgive Edwards for nearly destroying his legacy should be grateful for the good sense shown by the jury today. Let’s hope the Justice Department takes their lead and lets this one go.

Count three, the only one the jury ruled on, alleged that Edwards received excessive campaign donations from billionaire Bunny Mellon. Edwards will walk away as a free man.

The news of the verdict was bungled when, in a highly unusual move, the jury announced they had reached a verdict on the one count, which was misunderstood as a verdict on all counts. The initial announcement unleashed a tide of breaking news alerts and blaring chyrons on cable news outlets, only for it to be revealed minutes later that the jury was actually deadlocked on most of the counts and had only reached a verdict on one out of six. The jury had deliberated for eight days without a verdict in the case that experts had said would be difficult for the federal government to prove.

Such audits are required by law for federal campaigns that accept public financing, several of the commissioners noted.

“It is not at all unusual for a campaign to have a discrepancy,” said Ellen Weintraub, a commissioner. “It’s just a math problem and that’s how the math worked out.”

Federal auditors said about $2 million of the amount to be repayed was due to federal matching funds the Edwards campaign received but did not deserve. Auditors said the repayment also should include $141,808 in uncashed checks the campaign issued to donors that were never cashed, according to the audit.

The campaign got nearly $13 million in matching funds after it was approved by the Federal Election Commission in December 2007. Edwards dropped out of the race Jan. 30, 2008.

The Federal Election Commission’s ruling is the latest problem for Edwards, who was indicted last month on federal charges that he accepted illegal campaign contributions to hide an affair during his unsuccessful 2008 White House bid. Edwards, who was the 2004 vice presidential nominee, has pleaded not guilty to six felony charges that include allegations he filed false campaign reports to cover up the payments.

The Edwards campaign has continued to spend down its cash. It had about $2.6 million in cash on hand on June 30 after spending $183,000 during the previous three months.