the National Enquirer is to be believed, John Edwards is the father of Frances, the baby born to Rielle Hunter back in February ‘08. The Enquirer is not, evidently, everyone’s first measure for sound and goal news exploration, but in this particular case, it’s possibly wisest to take their word for it. For they have been consistently on top of this story, while most of the rest of the media adopted a “who farted at the dinner table?”-type embarrassed silence through the whole affaire.
And affaire it, indeed, was. As a rough outline: John Edwards was doing the horizontal dance act with Rielle Hunter for at least a period of lots months if not years. When allegations first surfaced in late 2007 (and the gossip had started about it all in August in the Enquirer), Edwards denied everything. He didn’t in truth come clean about having had the affaire until summer 2008 … by which time his bid for the Democratic nomination was through. That’s maybe the most startling component of the whole thing, that he seemed to sincerely believe that his sex life was going to hold on private (as it arguably should, of course), when he was running to try and become the most strong man in the world. The days of not observing such things, as with JFK and FDR, are long gone, and even Bill Clinton would find it complicated to overcome bimbo eruptions in these more censorious times.
But there’s more to it than just the lying through the bedtime boogie: denial of such is a fairly common strategy after all. No, Edwards went on to tell that it was all terribly brief, a error for which he apologised. Then, when Hunter was for sure pregnant, one of his campaign aides, Andrew Young, claimed to have fathered it, and his campaign manager admitted that he’d been helping both Young and Hunter—but none of the cash was coming from campaign funds, oh no siree. Plus Young moved “his” pregnant girlfriend into his marital home, with his wife’s approval. This rather tangled explanation was greeted with the guffaws it deserved, but no one flatly called them all out on it until the Enquirer, again, broke the following piece of news. Just this past week, in truth.
There had been a DNA test, and Hunter’s child was in truth the product of Edwards’s loins. Now, as I write, this can be considered just a story in the Enquirer, but it’s not everything that much of a surprise to any individual, and the rumor is that Edwards will confirm it soon. The essential point about this paternity is, evidently, not that Edwards has fathered a child out of wedlock. It’s that he’s been, if it is, indeed, true, lying by ways of his teeth all along. Given that Hunter is a member of our species, Homo Sapiens, her pregnancy lasted 9 months or so, and thus the two of them were still going in the groove back in April and or May 2007—much, much later than already claimed, especially and absolutely by both John Edwards and his wife Elizabeth. That politicians have the morals of blowflies, we know; that power, wealth and arrogance can conduct to a somewhat free-wheeling approach to sexuality, ditto. But when we actually catch a politician brazenly, without remorse, lying to us in an attempt to cover things up, we become more than censorious. We do the worst thing we can to a blowhard who only desires our consideration and approbation—we forget about him.
So that’s the closing of John Edward’s political career then; there’s no way he can got back from this. An romance, probably, yes, with sufficient contrition, even an extra baby or two might be dealt with. But not when caught out brazenly lying to everyone for years.
And the closing of that career strikes me as a good thing, too. I’m most unlikely to have much good to tell about any Democratic politician (or about any politician at all most of the time), but Edwards was either more brazenly populist than even I can imagine or dimmer than I can believe. His stump speech was all about poverty in America, how 12 percent live in poverty, 20 percent (the details are fortunately dim at this distance) of children are poor, and how we should raise the Earned revenue Tax Credit, print a mlln. more housing vouchers, ramp up the investing on food stamps, in order to end this national shame.
