John Edwards: I’m really, really sorry
While the Democrats are working on unity in Denver, there’s at least one politician they’re agreeing to despise—and it isn’t John McCain.
The New York Daily News reported earlier this week that former-Democratic-vice-presidential-nominee-turned-person-non-grata John Edwards is reaching out to his former aides and financial supporters, “begging” them “to forgive him for lying about his affair” and “trying to rebuild bridges through dozens of remorseful phone calls.”
It’s not going so well.
The Daily News reports that Edwards’ efforts are being rebuffed – sometimes angrily – at almost every turn.
Many are bitter and disillusioned after swallowing his lies about his affair with a campaign staffer and vouching for his credibility with friends and journalists.
Some ignore his plaintive phone entreaties and don’t call back - even when Edwards leaves follow-up messages. A few return his calls - and give him a piece of their angry minds.
When Edwards reached one longtime confidant asking for advice, he was cut off with a terse: “I don’t want you to call me again.“
The conversation ended abruptly.
One ex-aide who received an “I-let-you-down-and-I’m-sorry” call describes Edwards’ plea for forgiveness as “kind of pathetic, to tell you the truth.“
It’s a common reaction to Edwards’ admission of his affair with Rielle Hunter – and that he repeatedly lied about it.
Longtime political reporter and pundit Walter Shapiro began covering Edwards in the spring of 2001; three years later, he made the senator and his wife the focal point of his book on the 2004 Democratic primary campaign. Shapiro and his wife developed friendships with the Edwardses, but he adds, “Without overstating these bonds, I naively believed that I knew Edwards as well as I understood anyone in the political center ring. Yet I never saw this sex scandal coming—partly because I accepted the mythology that surrounded the Edwardses’ marriage and partly because I assumed that any hint of a wandering eye would have come out during the 2004 campaign.
“But then Rielle Hunter and the National Enquirer brought us all into the real world,” Shapiro writes.
Shapiro goes on to tick off seven -– seven -– separate moments “when judgment was called for, and Edwards made the wrong choice.”
“Five days after Edwards flat-lined on ‘Nightline,’ I am still embarrassed by how badly I misjudged him both in print and in my personal feelings,” Shapiro confesses.
As for how the revelation of the scandal is reverberating through the journalism world:
Sharon Waxman shares with us the simple reason why mainstream media shouldn’t be expected to unearth stories like Edwards’ scandal.
The Palm Beach Post’s Jose Lambiet explains (second item) why you never read any scandalous stuff about Hillary Clinton in the National Enquirer during the campaign.
In discussing the scandal, New York Times columnists David Brooks and Gail Collins debate whether this is news at all: Collins seems to believe that such stories are only worth reporting in some (of course, subjective) circumstances, while Brooks thinks we should ignore them even if the candidate is making his moral fiber the very basis for his campaign.
Especially noteworthy is Brooks’s four-point, “semi-facetious” analysis of why people “were quick to excuse and chuckle at Bill Clinton’s many, many affairs” but are “treating Edwards like the devil incarnate for his one:”
First, Democrats only defend adulterers as long as they are still useful for the party politically.
Second, people are much harsher toward those who cheat on an ailing Elizabeth Edwards than they are toward those who cheat on Hillary Clinton.
Third, after defending Bill Clinton many people were eager to realign themselves with the forces of marital rectitude.
Fourth, men are scum and male politicians are generally the worst kind. Edwards didn’t just cheat on his wife, he cheated on his kids. Any man who can commit adultery while the images of his small son and daughter dance before his mind is capable of narcissism beyond imagining.
Finally, perhaps the most pitiful explanation for why the mainstream media didn’t get the story comes from John Drescher, the editor of Edwards’ hometown paper, the Raleigh News & Observer. Drescher explains the case Edwards made to him in asking him not to print anything on the National Enquirer’s initial story about Edwards’ then-alleged-but-now-admitted affair: “Edwards told me that the allegations were not true,” Drescher writes.
Oh, well, if he said it wasn’t true, then by all means, there’s no need to investigate! After all, we all know that politicians never lie, especially in circumstances like these. If Edwards said it, then it must be true!
Drescher continues:
He said The N&O was the paper that arrived on his doorstep every day, the one read by friends of him and his wife, Elizabeth.
He said he’d never called before to complain or state his case. Given Elizabeth’s health—she has cancer—he said it was especially important to him that the story not run in The N&O.
Did you catch that?
Edwards sought political cover by using his wife’s terminal cancer as leverage.
What an insufferable pig.
But even Elizabeth Edwards is finding a changed landscape, too; far from finding the sympathy normally afforded to jilted political wives, she’s coming under fire for helping her husband promulgate the lies about it throughout his campaign:
“I think she’s complicit,“ said Brad Crone, a Raleigh-based Democratic consultant. “Obviously, she knew. While she’s the victim, she clearly didn’t stand in the way of the cover-up.“
One Daily Kos poster wrote that Elizabeth Edwards “knew [he was running for] president with this bomb waiting to go off. She did. She kinda loses my sympathy.”
“I believe we are all owed a huge apology, not self-serving claims for pity by both John and Elizabeth Edwards, who both knew about the affair and both decided to go forward and seek the Democratic candidacy, regardless of the Titanic risk,“ someone else added.
But Eliabeth Edwards’s brother and a close friend defend her, arguing that a devastating situation was further complicated by her medical condition.
They said she decided not to leave her husband in part because she is a mother of two young children fighting a cancer that has spread to her bone and cannot be cured.
“There was anguish—excruciating anguish—for her in dealing with this,“ Hargrave McElroy, a friend, told the magazine. “She was angry and furious and everything, but at one point she had to make a choice: Do I kick him out, or do we have a 30-year marriage that can be rebuilt?“
John Edwards would do well to hang up the phone and focus on rebuilding his bridges at home before he worries any more about salvaging his political career.
At least the former may be able to be saved.
