Edwards, after all

The various deceptions of an Edwards matter less for what they are than for what they represent: a mockery of those best qualities that we supposedly share.

Lately, I’ve been thinking back on the neon-lit takeaway point from Joe Klein’s wildly overpraised 1996 novel Primary Colors: our candidates are flawed; whaddya gonna do? In the case of one such candidate, John Edwards of North Carolina, the temptation is to merely shrug. That seems all that is left to us - or to me, at least. I’ve put off writing this obligatory post - obligatory because I threw in my lot with his campaign, and to a fair extent with the man himself, his character - because my reactions to Teh Scandal were so tangled and convoluted that I wasn’t at all certain how I felt, much less how to say it. I found it impossible to distill those emotions, assumptions, conclusions, and various other -ions into a pure and consistent reaction. What I would up with instead was the verbal equivalent of a pool of sick - which seems depressingly appropriate.

“Sick” is not an unfair characterization of how I felt upon hearing of the National Enquirer stories on Edwards and Rielle Hunter - not from the Enquirer directly, but from my beloved Gawker, which kept hammering on a point I couldn’t ignore: the absence of the wider press on the scandal-to-be. I had to face the certain truth of the Enquirer pieces for the same reason the mainstream press should have done so: Edwards’ damning non-response, his weak, evasive, transparent dismissal of the stories as “tabloid trash.”

To which Al Pacino, circa 1979, replied: “The son of a bitch is guilty.”

In the real world, answers to questions like “Have you engaged in an affair?” are not accepted in essay form, nor in multiple choice. You get “true,” you get “false,” full stop. Any other answer means yes. And these rules weren’t written yesterday.

After that all-but-confession by Edwards, the rest was just a series of blows delivered over a seeming eternity, dragged out by his refusal to come forward. In those days, I thought of Primary Colors, yes, and of another pop culture artifact that has weirdly become a kind of touchstone for me: of all things, the film adaptation of Tom Clancy’s Clear and Present Danger. There is a scene in which Harrison Ford advises the president on an impending scandal involving the president’s relationship to a dead businessman. The impulsive response of everyone else in the room is to deny and delay, but Ford disagrees:

…I would go in the other direction. If a reporter asked if you and Hardin were friends, I’d say good friends. If they asked if you were good friends, I’d say lifelong friends. Give them no place to go, nothing to report. No story.

I mean, it’s no sense in defusing a bomb after it’s already…

…it’s already gone off.

I’m guessing that John Edwards has never seen that movie.

But I was talking about being sick, yes, sick at heart. This is how you feel when you have been betrayed in relationships, even the retail relationships that make up politics. The age in which we live now, the culture of which we are a part - hard-eyed, post-ironic, and kind of chickenshit - generally mocks the possibility of betrayal by, you know, a politician. In theory, the point seems unassailable; in actuality, we are encouraged to take these people into our trust, sold on spitshine images and declarations of virtue. We are sold on a politician’s character - so much like our own, or so we are told, our best qualities made manifest in the candidate. And so you buy it, you buy into it, and forget:

Our candidates are flawed; whaddya gonna do?

Until we are reminded. And the various deceptions of an Edwards, or a Craig or Spitzer or Kilpatrick (to name recent rogues), often matter less for what they are than for what they represent: a mockery of those best qualities that we and they supposedly share. And keeping this quote from a far future Mahasamatman on a far distant planet in mind…

As you know, the personal strengths and weaknesses of a leader are no true indication of the merits of his cause.

…is a cold kind of comfort. Still, that’s what we’re left with, and it will just have to be enough as we learn - or relearn - how to split the difference between leading with the heart or the head when it comes to politics. Otherwise, well…

Whaddya gonna do?

Shrug, I guess, and - like Edwards himself - move on.

I can’t guess at what will become of the public life of John Edwards or his wife, Elizabeth, a political figure in her own right who was extravagantly described by Bob Woodruff in The Big Interview as “probably the most admired and beloved person in this country.” Edwards has gone to ground, and that seems the best place for him just now. As his former adviser on rural affairs, David “Mudcat” Saunders, said of Edwards earlier:

He’s just - to be very frank with you - he’s just not doing well. He needs to be concentrating on himself and his family at this point in his life. He’s a good boy. He just made a hell of a mistake.

As someone who has made “a hell of a mistake” more often than he cares to remember, I think that’s an appropriate place to leave this story, and John Edwards.

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