Last month wasn’t kind to North Carolina Sen. John Edwards.

The first-term Democrat and presidential candidate took several PR hits. First, some new poll numbers showed his approval ratings in North Carolina to be mediocre at best, and support for his national campaign lacking in his home state. Media reports also suggested disarray in his campaign organization, with key aides defecting to other candidates and grousing that Edwards didn’t seem to understand what it might take to win.

Given this recent experience, I’m guessing that the senator and his staff are feeling a lot better at the close of this week, which brought some welcome news. Early in the week, various media reported that Edwards’ $7.4 million posting of campaign contributions for the first quarter of 2003 was likely the largest in the field. Sure enough, the John Kerry campaign reported in only $7 million, with much smaller amounts for the other major aspirants.

It’s not really about the money, by the way. Both Edwards and Kerry have sufficient personal wealth to run for president on their own dime if it came to that. The point is that key Democratic strategists and donors apparently believe that the North Carolinian has a real shot at it, despite his relatively low showing in the Iowa and New Hampshire horserace polls. No doubt they figure that if he isn’t skunked in the first two contests, he can win South Carolina and the ensuing Southern primaries and knock the near-favorite sons (like Richard Gerphardt in next-door Iowa and Kerry, Howard Dean, and Joe Lieberman in nearby New Hampshire) for a major loop.

The second piece of good news was Thursday’s announcement that all six Democrats in North Carolina’s delegation to the U.S. House were endorsing John Edwards. Not a huge surprise here, perhaps, but it made for a good round of news reports. And it solidified the support of African-American lawmakers that may help win the next-door primary in South Carolina, where blacks make up a large share of the Democratic electorate.

The third piece of good news was really bad news for John Kerry, who in my mind remains the “frontrunner” if such a thing exists in the field. On Wednesday, Kerry picked up one of the familiar refrains of the increasingly shrill and irrelevant anti-war movement and proclaimed that America needed its own “regime change.” Coming on the heels of a number of other statements suggesting that the Massachusetts senator was at least wishy-washy on the war, if not actively opposed to it, this ill-time and outrageous language was immediately picked up by the news networks and the political talk circuit around the country.

What’s important here isn’t just the possibility that an anti-war candidate might be totally unsalable a year from now to ordinary American voters, though I do think that a McGovern replay would be disastrous for the Democrats. The broader question is one of Kerry’s judgment. As in, does he have any? With troops entering the outskirts of Baghdad, with propaganda and political maneuvers inflaming the resentments and anti-American vitriol of millions in Europe and the Islamic world, with families mourning their honored dead, what was Kerry doing seeming to equate Saddam Hussein and George Bush?

I know, surely the senator didn’t mean to do that. But “regime change” jokes are only (mildly) funny when spoken by immature college students or aging ’60s radicals during peacetime protests. They are not at all funny with Hussein’s fascist death squards still roaming the Iraqi countryside, executing prisoners of war, holding women and children in front of them as human shields, employing rape as a means of controlling key Iraqi tribal sheiks, blowing up bombs in their own cities to simulate U.S. “collateral damage,” and holding hostages to force family members to attack American troops with weapons or truck bombs.

Kerry demonstrated Wednesday an utter lack of the moral seriousness one needs to be a national leader. And he marginally improved the chances of John Edwards, our own improbable presidential candidate.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.