John Edwards confesses; so what?

By ROB CHRISTENSEN

After more than two years of spin, half-truths and outright lies, John Edwards came clean.

He admitted to fathering a child out of wedlock, the result of a campaign-trail affair with Rielle Hunter, a videographer, while Elizabeth Edwards was back home battling cancer.

Andrew Young, Edwards’ former campaign aide, is giving national television interviews to promote publication of his tell-all book, “The Politician.” Young presumably will explain Plan A — how the Edwards inner circle decided that Young would take responsibility for fathering the child.

Harrison Hickman, an Edwards spokesman, has said that the timing of Edwards’ confession was not prompted by the Young appearance or book. Given Edwards’ track record on truthfulness, there is no reason to believe this.

Edwards has been in a free fall so long that it’s hard to remember that just three years ago many people believed he had a decent chance of sitting in the White House today. The Clintons considered Edwards, the former U.S. senator and vice-presidential candidate, as their chief rival for the Democratic nomination before the emergence of Barack Obama.

Sex appeal

Thousands of people would drive for miles across icy roads to see Edwards in packed gyms, stadiums and arenas in industrial towns in Iowa, Wisconsin and Ohio, where he would tell them that Washington no longer cared whether their plant closed, whether they lost their health insurance or whether they were forced to give up their house. Some compared him to the second coming of Bobby Kennedy. His sex appeal was obvious.

When you are treated as a rock star, it is hard to keep grounded.

Many thought the son of a North Carolina textile family had got above his raisin’ — that the cheering crowds, the Secret Service protection, the fawning campaign staff had gone to his head. The famous YouTube video of Edwards spending so much time combing his hair before preparing for a television interview told you something about who Edwards had become. I’m pretty sure Edwards didn’t get $400 haircuts when he was a Raleigh lawyer.

In truth, there are a lot Democrats — yes, Democrats — in Washington and Raleigh who were glad to see Edwards fail. They viewed Edwards as arrogant, egotistical and callow. Even some former campaign aides were considering ways to sabotage his campaign and were relieved when he lost, according to anonymously sourced accounts in the insider campaign book “Game Change.”

Edwards now is known only for his messy personal life.

Recently, the National Enquirer quoted a beach bartender by name saying that Edwards had hit on her. Usually I don’t pay a lot of attention to supermarket tabloids, but the Enquirer — using paid, anonymous sources — has been way out in front of this story.

Early last month, “Game Change” portrayed the Edwards marriage as a deeply troubled one with hair-raising scenes that could have been right out of the Edward Albee play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

Edwards is not the first politician to be undone or damaged by a sex scandal. But Edwards was particularly hurt by the scandal because much of his appeal was based on an image as a clean-cut family man from humble textile-town roots who stood by his wife as she battled cancer. Unlike Clinton in Little Rock, Edwards never had a reputation as a skirt-chaser.

Nearly everyone who cheats on a spouse lies. It comes with the territory. Edwards’ lies were more than a spouse covering his tracks. They had far broader consequences.

Edwards began his second run for the presidency in December 2006 with a secret that could sink his candidacy; an affair with Hunter. According to Elizabeth Edwards’ account, he told her of the affair soon after announcing his candidacy and she reluctantly agreed to allow his campaign to go forward.

Edwards had the perfect excuse to gracefully withdraw from the campaign in March 2007 when the couple revealed that Elizabeth Edwards’ breast cancer had spread. Instead, Edwards continued the campaign and the affair with Hunter.

If Edwards had captured the Democratic nomination for president, the Hunter affair could have been revealed in the general election and cost the Democrats the election. If he had won the presidency, and the affair had been disclosed after the election, we could now be facing an impeachment fight. The whole nation would have been sucked into the mess.

In August 2008, Edwards went on national television to acknowledge his affair with Hunter. He denied that he was the father of the child.

Why admit the affair, but deny paternity, when hardly anyone believed the denial anyway?

According to an account in “Game Change,” Edwards didn’t want to confess to paternity because he didn’t want to jeopardize his chance of being attorney general in an Obama administration or give up a chance to give a speech at the Democratic convention in Denver.

Politically radioactive

Those chances had long since passed. Edwards had become politically radioactive. He just hadn’t grasped it.

Now he has told so many lies, hardly anybody cares when he tells the truth.

X Rob Christensen is a columnist for the Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.