Monty Johnson was heading home Monday with a cooler full of catfish when he learned his new neighbor had turned him into a minor celebrity.
The first calls on his cell phone came from two lawyers asking to represent him in a slander case. Elizabeth Edwards, they told him, had called him a “rabid, rabid Republican.” That wasn’t all. The Democratic presidential candidate’s wife also told The Associated Press she didn’t want her children near Johnson because, she said, he once pulled a gun on workers investigating a right of way on his property.
Johnson, a 55-year-old retired landscaper with arthritic knees, said he’s not interested in suing.
“I’d just like to know why she has such hard feelings to me,” he said. “They say they’re for poor people.” . . .
Johnson thinks the Edwardses don’t like him because he put up a sign along Old Greensboro Road that reads: “Go Rudy Giuliani 2008.” The couple has to read it every time they pull into their winding driveway.
He also left an abandoned house facing their property. But he said he was born there and doesn’t have the money to fix it up or the heart to tear it down. . . . “I think she owes me an apology,” he said. “And I won’t feel right until I get it. If this is how they treat people in the White House, America is in for a helluva time.”
Another not-so-smooth PR move from the Edwards operation.