Edwards Cheated. So?
By Kay Steiger - Aug 8th, 2008 at 3:37 pmJesse posted that the news about John Edwards having an affair is disappointing. I’m not so sure it is. In fact, I’m not so sure why we should care about Edwards’ extramarital affair (I had the same attitude about the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal). He’s a politician and his life is public, but his sex life is none of my concern. Making this public certainly doesn’t help his family, which is already dealing with a difficult situation. Millions and millions of people have affairs every year. Why do we care about Edwards? Him cheating on his wife doesn’t diminish the work he has done on poverty and health care.
Certainly his cheating doesn’t diminish the work he has done for the public. But it does diminish my perception of him. The integrity of people, in their personal lives or in their public lives, is something that concerns me.
Does this mean he isn’t a progressive crusader? No. But it does mean he’s a bastard, and that sucks…
August 8th, 2008 at 3:47 pmI know the gut reaction is to say “It’s his private life; leave him alone,” but I would be remiss if I didn’t suggest that there are a number of people on the left who definitely did not feel that way about Vito Fossella, Newt Gingrich, John McCain, Larry Craig, David Vitters, etc. I’ll be somewhat disappointed if I see partisan news outfits which gleefully covered each of those scandals suddenly become staunch defenders of privacy.
August 8th, 2008 at 3:50 pmi think this post over at slate sums up why the story is important:
http://www.slate.com/id/2196758/
August 8th, 2008 at 3:59 pmHere’s a huge problem.
He had this affair in 2006, and still ran for president. That’s an incredibly selfish thing to do. Had he been nominated, this could have come out in october and McCain would almost certianly win.
There’s also an element of hypocrisy at play. As John Dickerson put it, “They throw that family in our face every fucking second“ For Edwards to make such a public issue of how great his family is and how much he loved his wife, all the while cheating on her. It’s just sleazy, bastard like behavior. And it would be nice if we had a public sanction against powerful men being total dicks.
August 8th, 2008 at 4:04 pmAmen to Zeitlin.
August 8th, 2008 at 4:11 pmTo be more specific about Kay’s final point, “cheating on his wife doesn’t diminish the work he has done on poverty and health care.” Well, yes it does. When he was running for president, he said it was to help out people who had been ignored and marginalized. All of which was well and good. But he knew about the affair, and he should have known that it would come out and doom his campaign. How could he have sought the nomination under those circumstances? Isn’t that a betrayal to the very people he claims to advocate for? To put his own vanity and hubris above them?
I must say, I’m absolutely disgusted with John Edwards right now.
August 8th, 2008 at 4:31 pmI think Kay is absolutely right. He’s obviously a tortured guy who isn’t a good husband but I think it’s crucial to remember that personal foibles don’t mitigate public deeds. Life is very contradictory and if we limited political office to people with pure personal lives we’d lose a lot of great leaders.
August 8th, 2008 at 4:37 pmMatt, I think your comments have some legitimate points, but your tone reads like someone who just realized Santa Claus isn’t real. Edwards always had a certain persona and now we’ve discovered that it wasn’t real. That matters little in terms of the work he has done.
In response to how he could have pursued the presidency when he knew he had had and affair seems quite simple to me. He wanted to put progressive policies in place and thought he would be the best man for the job. Didn’t Clinton — and for that matter Kennedy — prove that you can still be a successful politician and have infidelity?
I won’t even get into the fact that monogamous marriages are relatively new in a historical context …
August 8th, 2008 at 5:21 pmAs my friend Jesus would say: “Let the person who has never broken God’s Law throw the first stone at her.”
I think it is just despicable how these common failings of humanity are publicized as a disgrace, especially when it is just a distraction from the real pressing issues that we are facing these days.
I totally agree with Kay, he cheated, so what? He had way better policies on climate change, health care, Iraq and many other issue than any other candidates in this election cycle. The one thing I am disappointed about is that he publicly admitted his guilt. He doesn’t have to be accountable to the media or to the public for his private flaws.
And responding to Nick, the reason that we bash those idiots when they are caught with their pants down is that they are the ones that claim moral purity and try to pass laws against the same acts they commit. Despite having a strong backing from his family (which he had even after this story first broke), he never claimed to be morally superior to anyone, he always stuck to the issues and stayed above personality politics.
John Edwards is a patriot and one that has done more to push our current candidates to the left than any of our ‘think tanks’ and progressive publications ever could.
August 8th, 2008 at 5:39 pmThe problem isn’t so much that he cheated (although, keep in mind that when he campaigned it was built around his moral values) but that upon being caught, he lied. That is what people take offense to- being lied to; in fact, isn’t that the same thing that most of us are complaining about our current administration? That they lied? If a political figure (and don’t say he isn’t- his name was still being thrown around as a potential candidate for VP) lies and gets caught, they need to admit their mistake and deal with the consequences like an adult.
We (the American people) keep saying we want politicians we can trust, so maybe it’s time that we stop excusing the liars when they get caught- that goes for both the Dem’s and the Repub’s.
Tommaso- his public admission is the only thing that saves him from being complete pondscum. He is doing what an adult who makes a mistake should do- deal with the consequences. Unfortunately, the price of celebrity (whether political or enterainment wise) is that your private life becomes public.
The only sympathy this man deserves is for the loss of his son many years ago and for the illness that has stricken his poor wife. May she be blessed with a miraculous recovery so she can beat the you-know-what out of him!
August 8th, 2008 at 6:39 pmHis cheating sucks for him and his wife, but he’s human; people frequently suck at things like being in monogamous relationships. That part of the story is between him and his wife, although since they’re public figures, so I guess not really.
What gets me though is that he was actively seeking the Democratic nomination. Imagine if he’d gotten the nomination! What would be happening now? We’d be seeing McCain’s popularity rising. Perhaps not by a huge amount, but probably enough that by the time the election rolled around, it’d be a real challenge to beat him.
That Edwards was presumptuous enough to seek the nomination while endangering the prospect of a Democratic presidency is enough to make me angry at him.
August 8th, 2008 at 7:28 pmAbraham Lincoln…CHEATED. Thanks for helping save the Union, Abe.
Thomas Jefferson…CHEATED. Thanks for that Declaration of Independence, Tom.
FDR…CHEATED. Thanks for that New Deal and the GI Bill, Frank.
JFK…CHEATED. I love how you kept your cool over the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Clinton…CHEATED. $1.39 a gallon for gas, was great.
If you comb through the past, you’ll probably find that most of our Presidents have cheated, and probably almost every one of them who ran this time has cheated.
I’ve seen that 60% of married men cheat and 40% of married women cheat. It’s probably higher among married male politicians.
August 8th, 2008 at 10:43 pmDoesn’t make it acceptable.
Competence is more important than character, but one can’t be competent if they’re running for president knowing they have this in their closet.
He put his party and his country at supreme risk. That’s why he’s dead to me.
Of course, I never liked Senator Edwards so this wasn’t much of a leap for me.
August 9th, 2008 at 1:11 pmSince the media loves covering a politician’s sex life, why don’t they INVESTIGATE the past of all of the candidates who ran for President this year.
Let the public know…show them how PERVASIVE this issue is.
60% of married men cheat, and it’s even higher among successful wealthy men.
40% of married women cheat, and that number has increased as women have become more financially independent.
Infidelity is RAMPANT species-wide, and it’s bound to be even greater in the halls of POWER.
If you must cover Edwards’ affair…then INVESTIGATE all of them.
August 9th, 2008 at 6:25 pmI agree, especially since McDick dumped his first wife when he returned from Vietnam because she was crippled in a car accident, then married Cindy, a woman from a very well-connected Arizonian family (who he was seeing while still acting like he gave a s**t about his crippled wife).
Who is the asshole now? Instead of focusing our attention on politically-dead-Edwards, why don’t progressives start talking about poor Carol McCain and how her ex-husband is a d***k.
August 9th, 2008 at 7:41 pmAgreed. If Edwards’ infidelity would have been so damaging to a presidential bid, why does McCain get to get away without that accusation of irresponsibility?
August 10th, 2008 at 3:35 pmUnfortunately, Senator Edwards has for a very long time spent more time, money, and effort on self-centered exploits than working on “poverty and healthcare.”
Has he himself admits in his official explanation, he let his own narcissism get to him.
I would already say I wrote him off as an honest politician as he sat on the intelligence committee of the Senate and authorized the President to invade Iraq if he so chooses - a country virtually devastated by a dozen years of sanctions and bombings - and then made sure Kerry made no apology for doing the same thing. He was too driven by cynical, short-term power.
My dad, too, was poor when he came to this country. Much poorer than Edwards’ who was a manager of two mill plants. He worked his butt off, and now we’re comfortably upper middle class thanks to it.
But he never gets a haircut for more than 10 dollars. When you lavish yourself like that, it says something. His failure to back single payer healthcare (joining 70% of Americans), or stand up for Palestinians (the number 1 thing we can do to tackle the terrorism issue) or a living wage or real criticism of hedge funds (he disingenuosly reminde us in 2006 that he joined a hedge fund after the VP run “to learn about poverty”) shows a very high level of self-centered narcissism.
My dad never trusted Edwards, as someone who really did do the rags-to-riches thing and truly DIDN’T forget where he came from. I voted for the real version of what Edwards claimed he was, Kucinich, and I never regretted it one bit, but I just got a bit prouder for it, because I’ve met Elizabeth, and only a real SOB could do that to her.
August 10th, 2008 at 8:49 pmThe folks over at Harpers’ also have seen through his toted “poverty” work:
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/08/hbc-90003382
August 11th, 2008 at 5:24 pm