"It's easy to get caught up in the distractions and the silliness and the tit-for-tat that consumes our politics; the bickering that none of us are immune to, and that trivializes the profound issues -- two wars, an economy in recession, a planet in peril," then-Sen. Barack Obama said last April, on the night he lost Pennsylvania's Democratic presidential primary to Hillary Clinton.
That sort of thing has been a consistent theme from Obama, both on the trail and while he's been in the White House, the message being that people should stop focusing on the small, silly things that characterize so much of politics, preventing actual substance from being part of the discussion.
In some ways, Obama and his team have tried to live up to that. In others, well, they're just as guilty as everyone else.
One of the sillier, more trivial stories from the presidential campaign, and perhaps the one that got people on the left most consistently riled, was what started out as a pretty short blog post by Politico's Ben Smith, who reported that John Edwards had been getting $400 haircuts. Though other scandals have since overshadowed memories of Edwards' 2008 campaign, it was a big deal at the time, and it stuck around for quite a while.
Well, now we know who was responsible for the distraction and the silliness that emanated from that story: Obama's campaign. Campaign Manager David Plouffe revealed the truth in his new book, writing, "We did much less of this [opposition research] than other campaigns did, but there were times we indulged -- it was our researchers who found John Edwards's infamous $400 hair cut expenditures."
Smith has posted the quote on his blog, and has acknowledged that the Obama campaign was the source of his information.
If there's one good thing to come out of the bottomlessly tawdry ongoing revelations about John Edwards, it's the way they’ve put our jaded, seen-it-all psyches right back in touch with their capacity to be genuinely skeeved out.
The man who there but for the grace of God might have been our Democratic presidential contender made a sex tape with his mistress Rielle Hunter? He allegedly was mixed up in domestic altercations? It's enough to make one beg for fresh revelations from Charlie Sheen and Tila Tequila.
So perhaps we'd selectively ignored this choice revelation from his former aide Andrew Young's turncoat blabfest "The Politician": "Whenever Rielle called me, she tried to talk explicitly about her relationship with the senator ... When the details about specific sexual acts, love bites, or the condition of her vagina got too graphic, I cut her off, but my attempts to set limits on Rielle were only partly effective."
Clapping our hands over our ears and singing "La la la! I can't hear you!" proved to no avail last night, when Young was a guest on Joy Behar's HLN talk show. After tossing him a few softballs about the sex tape – and in the process proving that the former senatorial aide is unclear on the difference between "corroborating" and "collaborating" evidence – she went for the gold. Rielle Hunter's "relationship with you is kind of weird, I think … She confided in you about so many details, even about the condition of her vagina," she said. "That is so strange. What was up with that? And what was the condition of her vagina?"
In response, Young demurely snickered and said, "I would always say, 'TMI! TMI! Too much information!'" Well, you're obviously the soul of gentlemanly southern discretion, sir. That must be why you mentioned her vagina in your book in the first place. By morning, "Rielle Hunter's vagina" was a bona fide search term. Its conditon may remain shrouded in mystery, but in a story that's nothing but TMI, that moment on Behar's show may just be the TMIest yet. Until, no doubt, tomorrow.
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If we're to believe the National Enquirer, John Edwards allegedly "beat" his wife during an argument that brought about their recent separation, and Elizabeth Edwards supposedly "lashed out physically" on several occasions after her discovery of his affair (and child, and sex tape). The claim comes from a "close friend" of Elizabeth's -- the kind of close friend who is willing to spill secrets to a national tabloid, I guess. The Enquirer is quick to point out that this anonymous pal "passed a lie detector test regarding the shocking fight."
OK, well, that's one more awful claim to toss into this depressing domestic drama. (And one more bathtub filled with bleach so I can clean myself of this foul matter.) I'm really uninterested in speculating on whether or not this report is accurate, but I would like to draw your attention to the art the Huffington Post decided to run with its write-up about this new allegation: A photo of John with his arm stretched high, fingers extended, and the palm of his hand hovering right above Elizabeth's unsuspecting head. Classy, guys, real classy.
Speaker 1: "I love you. I really love you ... I will never abandon you."
Speaker 2: "I fell in love with him ... I truly believed that we were going to do great things, and he was my ticket to the top ... I became his sole confidant."
Given the crush of recent news coverage, you won't have any problem believing the first speaker is John Edwards. Your task now is to figure out the second speaker, who is also the person to whom he directed the aforementioned remarks. Is it:
A) Soon-to-be-ex-wife Elizabeth?
B) Mother of most recent child Rielle?
C) Disgraced ex-aide Andrew?
As anyone who sat through last night's "20/20" soft-pornathon can attest, the answer could very well have been A or B, but it is in fact C.
And maybe that's everything that need be said about the quasi-erotic and not-so-quasi-erotic ties that bind political leaders to the young men who champion them and sacrifice their egos for them and work 16 hours a day for them, and even their example pales alongside that of Andrew Young, who pretended to be the father of his boss's mistress's child despite already being the married dad of three kids. And who, to keep that deceit alive, actually dragged his family across the country with the mistress in tow and paparazzi snapping at their asses the whole way.
War-scarred Bob Woodruff was the correspondent assigned to this tale of staffer gone mad, but wouldn't the job have been better handled by George Stephanopoulos? Who, like Young, knew a thing or two about mopping up the sex spoor of charismatic bosses? How easily they would have bonded over man-tinis at the Matchbox, comparing their respective exit strategies. Unkind memoir? Check. Moral rearmament? Check.
But with Woodruff in the interviewer's seat, the whole thing played out like the hoariest Victorian melodrama. Meet John Edwards, millworker's son, champion of "One America." Meet ailing wife Elizabeth, rising from her deathbed to put her husband in the White House. (Anyone who still believes "20/20" is capable of journalism had only to look at the computer-induced tears welling up from Elizabeth's still photos.) Meet evil temptress Rielle Hunter -- not her original name! -- using New Age wiles and Internet familiarity to seduce Edwards under the guise of being his "videographer."
And now meet Andrew Young, the "little known but loyal aide" aspiring now to disloyalty and great renown through the publication of his tell-all book, "The Politician." Not to begrudge Young his royalties, but you'll save yourself a few bucks and a few hours by committing the following allegations to memory.
• Edwards and Hunter's favorite song was "Steady As We Go" by the Dave Matthews Band, and they made love in Elizabeth's bed while she was gone.
• Edwards tried to arrange a fake paternity test that would absolve him of being the father of Hunter's child.
• To help Edwards cover up said child, nonagenarian heiress Bunny Mellon sent checks totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars inside boxes of chocolate.
• Hunter, heavily pregnant and on the lam with Young and his family, rejected room after room at a Hollywood, Florida, hotel because each one lacked "the right energy." She settled finally on the penthouse suite.
• Elizabeth, still under the impression that Young was the father of Hunter's baby, left him the following phone message: "You and your concubine and your entire family can stay out of our lives."
• Modern people still use the word "concubine."
• Politicians and their spouses still leave messages and record acts that can be played back later.
Which brings us to, oh yeah, the sex tape, ticking like a dirty bomb beneath the whole "20/20" episode. According to Young, the tape was made just a couple of months before the 2008 Iowa Democratic caucus, and it shows a "visibly pregnant" woman wearing Hunter's jewelry and having intercourse with a man -- well, here it's worth quoting Young's revealingly prim description: "I can't speak for the other body parts, but it's definitely [Edwards'] face."
Could the North Carolina senator have been so stupid as to record his own extramarital sex? (Not even Bubba went that far. That we know of.) Would his lover have been so scatterbrained as to leave it in a house she shared with Young and his wife?
Barring any viral outbreaks, we have only the word of the chastened Youngs, whose remorse came chiming out like church bells at the end of their "20/20" pilgrimage.
"Are you sorry?" nudged Woodruff.
Mrs. Young: "I'm sorry that we lied to ourselves, to the people of America. And I'm sorry that we helped a person that we found out was not the person that we devoted ourselves to."
Mr. Young: "I am so sorry for my part in this."
I was a bit sorry, too, to have lost an hour of my life to them. And I was left to ponder why we still care so much about the sexual misconduct of a politician who was not even a heartbeat away from the presidency. Or the vice-presidency. Or the ambassadorship to Burkina Faso. Why does this story have such hellacious legs?
Is it because no one has been willing to stay in character? Edwards began as a rather asexual, grinning millionaire populist; he's now an oversexed hick, searching for grace in the wilderness of Haiti. The saintly Elizabeth, bearing her cross through 14 stations of Oprah, is now, thanks to the deconstruction of Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, a staff-terrorizing harpy flashing her mastectomy scars. Rielle Hunter, emblem of a love so lowly that Elizabeth dared not speak her name, has subsided into a silence that, in the context, looks suspiciously like dignity. (Except that she's now obtained a court order requiring Young to turn over all photos and videos belonging to her.)
Then there's the child. A very young girl named Quinn, who deserves a much better welcome into the world than she's received.
And I can't help but feel that this whole fetid business deserves better. The ideal interpreter, in my mind, is not "20/20" or the National Enquirer (which first broke the story) or the New York Times editorial page but a sensitive novelist on the order of Curtis Sittenfeld, who can roam through the hidden psychic corridors and explore scenarios that our current journalistic and political discourse can't accommodate.
The possibility, for instance, that John Edwards never believed he could be president and never particularly wanted to be. That he genuinely loved his wife -- even as he was sleeping with another woman, even as he was imagining a life after his wife's death. That he may one day cherish his youngest daughter more than anything else in his shrinking world.
In the absence of direct testimony, none of this can be posed as anything but questions. But it's safe to say a sex tape is the last place to look for answers.
It seems impossible to believe that a politician with presidential ambitions -- especially one actually in the midst of running for president -- could be stupid enough to actually make a sex tape. That's especially true if said politician happens to be married, and his co-star is someone other than his wife.
But John Edwards really may have done it.
That's what Andrew Young, a former aide, has been claiming. And now, with Young -- who, to cover up for his boss, initially claimed Edwards' daughter with Rielle Hunter was his -- publishing a tell-all and doing a big interview with ABC News, there's new information that adds some credibility to his claim.
CBS News reports that Hunter has obtained a court order that requires Young to turn over to her photos and videos she says are hers. (In his telling, he found the sex tape in a box of her videos that she'd left behind after moving from a house in which she'd been living while they kept up the charade about Young being the father.) CBS quotes Maj. Charles Blackwood, from the Orange County, N.C. Sheriff's Office, as saying the order deals with "video recordings and photographs that depict matters of a private and personal nature."
That could describe any number of things besides a sex tape, of course. And given Young's foray into the public eye to spill the details of his boss' affair, it's understandable why Hunter would want to get any personal materials back from him. But the court order, and the timing of it, does seem to suggest something more at work.
Dealing with a pregnant mistress and a suspicious wife, John Edwards and a close aide agreed by the middle of 2007 to solicit funds from a wealthy widow who had promised to "do whatever it takes" to make him president, according to the former confidant's new book.
Bunny Mellon, the widow of banking heir Paul Mellon, began sending checks "for many hundreds of thousands of dollars" hidden in boxes of chocolates, according to "The Politician" by former Edwards aide Andrew Young. The tell-all account describes how Young took the money and used it to keep mistress Rielle Hunter happy, hiding her from the media and a cancer-stricken Elizabeth Edwards.
Young claims the former vice-presidential nominee later said he didn't know anything about the cash even though the two discussed the matter and the cash began arriving soon after Edwards made a call to Mellon.
"The Politician" is due in bookstores Saturday. An advance copy was given to The Associated Press by publisher St. Martin's Press.
The book has received a lot of attention because of its racy details about the affair, the crumbling Edwards marriage and the candidate's efforts to keep the paternity of his child with the mistress hidden. John Edwards finally admitted last week that he was the father of the girl, who is now almost 2 years old.
But Young's reckoning also contains some of the most detailed information about a hanging question for John Edwards' future: an ongoing federal grand jury probe into his campaign's finances.
Prosecutors have refused to comment about the investigation, but Young says he spent hours testifying to the grand jury about the "huge sums of money that had quietly changed hands" during the campaign. Hunter has also made an appearance at the federal courthouse in Raleigh where the grand jury is meeting.
Edwards has said in a previous statement that he is "confident that no funds from my campaign were used improperly." A spokeswoman did not immediately return a call seeking comment Thursday.
Mellon, now 99, had promised to give money to Edwards' political groups even before the affair began and eventually gave a total of $6 million for Edwards' causes, according to Young's book.
Edwards' political action committee paid Hunter's production company $100,000 in 2006 for her to work as a videographer to follow around the candidate as he prepared for his second quest for the White House. Months afterward, in April 2007, the PAC received $14,000 from Edwards' presidential campaign and then paid a similar amount to Hunter's production company.
Later cash destined for Hunter originated directly from Mellon checks that were sent to Young, with notes discussing her contributions to "the confederacy." Other distributions came directly from Edwards' former campaign finance chairman Fred Baron, including a FedEx envelope of $1,000 and a note that read: "Old Chinese proverb: Use cash, not credit cards."
Young said federal prosecutors pressed him last year for details on the names, dates, amounts of the disbursements, "and just who knew what, when."
The longtime aide contends in the book that Mellon did not know what the money was being used for, and he argues that the funds "were gifts, entirely proper, and not subject to campaign finance laws."
Joe Sinsheimer, a Democratic government watchdog in Raleigh who is following the case, disagrees. He believes the private exchanges of money described in the book and used to shuttle Young and Hunter around the country should have been classified as campaign donations.
"Baron and Mellon gave the money because they wanted to protect the candidacy of John Edwards for president," Sinsheimer said. "Therefore, the money should be classified as campaign moneys."
Mellon's attorney, Alexander Forger, said he has also testified before the grand jury while Mellon has been interviewed by prosecutors. He said Young repeatedly pursued Mellon for money, at one point suggesting she mortgage her farm to get cash, but that she didn't know where the money was going.
"She made a personal gift to the senator," Forger said. "She filed a gift tax return. She intended it for his personal use and had no understanding of what his need was and where the money would go."
Baron, who died in October 2008, had said that he paid to help Hunter and Young to protect them from public scrutiny.
The money seemed to have political implications for Edwards: According to Young, Edwards asked him before the presidential primaries to take public responsibility for Hunter's pregnancy and to take his family and the mistress and disappear.
Baron would let him use his private jet and pay for expenses, Edwards told Young. To convince Young to take the fall, Edwards appealed to their friendship, Elizabeth's failing health and a cause that is "bigger than any one of us," Young quoted Edwards as saying.
And later, with Young growing restless because Edwards hadn't come forward to set the record straight, Baron asked the aide to "hold on until August" -- when the Democratic National Convention would be -- and expected that Edwards would be a big player in the next administration. Soon after, Baron wired "several hundred thousand dollars" to the builder of Young's home to help with the expenses.
As for Edwards, Young described the candidate as someone who wanted his hands clean from the money. He claimed that Edwards wanted the arrangement with Mellon to remain private so that the former trial lawyer would have "plausible deniability."
After Edwards admitted to the affair in August 2008, an estranged Young and Edwards met briefly to discuss the future. Edwards talked with a baffled Young about the checks Mellon had written to cover Hunter's expenses.
"I didn't know anything about this," Young quoted Edwards as saying. "Did you?"
(This version CORRECTS that Rielle Hunter only made one appearance at the Raleigh courthouse, not multiple.)
I'm one of those people who, for quite some time, gave John Edwards a pile of extra credit just for having the good sense to marry a woman like Elizabeth: Smart, accomplished, thoughtful, charismatic, beautiful in an approachable, age-appropriate way, undeniably strong, decently progressive, Internet-savvy. Look, I'll just say it: She's the kind of woman I'd like to have a beer with. And, yes, that mattered to me; it mattered to a lot of us. By last May, when her most recent memoir came out, Elizabeth's popularity rating was nearly 40 points higher than her husband's, which had dropped to 19 percent. It was clear by then that all the extra credit in the world couldn't save John Edwards from failing grades as both a husband and a politician, but his wife remained well-loved by the public -- many of whom were thinking nothing so much as, "DTMFA, honey."
Now, in the wake of his totally unsurprising admission that he fathered Rielle Hunter's toddler, and in anticipation of a tell-all memoir by former aide (and former pretend babydaddy) Andrew Young, Elizabeth finally has D'ed the MF. But before she and her girlfriends can head out for tequila shots and an impassioned karaoke rendition of "I Will Survive," there's one more round of public humiliation to go. After years of maintaining a practically indestructible image as the sane and strong one, the unflappable survivor in the face of tragedy, terminal cancer and her husband's spectacular infidelity, for the first time, Elizabeth Edwards might be in danger of losing her position as the thinking America's sweetheart. Among the scandalous (and questionably sourced) revelations in John Heilemann and Mark Halperin's "Game Change," published earlier this month, was an all-new portrait of the woman known as "Saint Elizabeth." She yelled at staffers! She talked like she was smarter than her husband! She was jealous of people who seemed too close to him! Not very saintly behavior at all.
Of course, she was yelling at staffers she believed had enabled John's affair, she probably is smarter than he is, and being infuriated by your husband's obvious closeness to a woman he actually is sleeping with is not really the same as being a paranoid, possessive harpy. Oh, and then there's also the fact that she'd recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer and informed that her husband, who was running for president of the United States, was cheating on her, and pretty much everyone knew it but her, and it was all coming out in the National Enquirer, and meanwhile, she had two small kids to raise. If ever a woman earned the right to lose her shit completely, it was Elizabeth Edwards in 2008. But we loved her more because she apparently didn't. As far as we knew, she heroically held it together, just as we'd expect our Elizabeth to do.
So the revelation that maybe -- maybe -- she didn't comes as a surprise, and it paves the way for us to buy into an even more damning accusation: that it's her fault John Edwards didn't slink quietly off the public stage while the gettin' was good. She "insisted" that he stay in the race, and even though a substantial portion of us would have trusted this man to be president of the United States, we're meant to believe he wasn't strong-willed enough to reject that advice. His decision to keep going wasn't about his own ego, sense of entitlement and delusion that the Hunter story would somehow not destroy his career -- it was all about his domineering wife's demands, apparently. Why, really, she's even more to blame than he is, if you think about it! As Joan Walsh said, "How do I count the ways that is wrong? John Edwards was both the candidate as well as the philanderer, who even after he'd lost, tried to strike a deal with Obama to become his vice president -- and his terminal-cancer-stricken wife, who might have been clinging to the campaign to protect her from the pain of her husband's infidelity and her likely death, is worse than he is?"
And yet, those who have seen advance copies of Andrew Young's "The Politician" are warning that it contains more of the same. Says ABC News, "Young's accounts paint a portrait of Elizabeth as a controlling wife beneath a collected exterior." She kept a close eye on her husband's movements -- though, again, this was evidently a reaction to knowledge of his cheating, even before Rielle Hunter was on the scene. She "kept him up all night fighting" -- about his cheating. She got Hunter shitcanned -- because why again? She "obsessed" over Young's knowledge of the affair and efforts to cover for Edwards, left angry messages and, according to the author, "insisted her husband fire me, which he couldn't do because he needed me to take care of Rielle." Of course. Let's review: Andrew Young facilitated the affair between Edwards and Hunter and helped the candidate avoid accountability by acting as a go-between, fielding phone calls, keeping Elizabeth away from her husband's mistress, and even publicly claiming to be the father of Hunter's baby -- and now I'm supposed to feel sorry for him because Elizabeth left some voice mails that hurt his fee-fees? I'm supposed to regard her as some pushy, controlling, jealous bitch because she behaved as though she expected her husband not to screw around on her -- while running for president, no less -- and his aides not to lie to her face about it? What?
But it's out there, and it seems to be the thing that's finally penetrated her Teflon coating. A Public Policy Polling survey taken after "Game Change" came out found Elizabeth Edwards' popularity at 46 percent, a 12-point drop since May. (Small consolation: Hubby's now at a record-breaking low of 15 percent.) So now, just as she's finally getting free of that philandering son of a millworker (and, after the tequila shots are digested, facing single motherhood and a fatal illness at age 60), she's also dealing with an unprecedented hit to her own reputation. It just seems so unfair. Tracy Clark-Flory wrote of the Edwardses' split yesterday, "She's better than this absurdly tawdry scandal, and it isn't hers to endure." But it has been hers to endure for ages now, and the final insult is the latest buzz -- that actually, maybe she isn't better than all this.
Maybe she is and maybe she isn't -- how would most of us ever know? Books like "Game Change" and "The Politician," regardless of their accuracy, remind us that the public faces of politicians and their families can be worlds away from the private ones, and our opinions about who's fit to lead the country are often based at least as much on carefully manipulated emotions as facts. It's entirely possible that the image of Saint Elizabeth was nothing but the smartest, most effective P.R. move the Edwards campaign ever pulled off. But I find it hard to believe it was all an illusion -- they can take away her reputation as a gentle stoic, but not the intelligence or demonstrated fortitude or public grace upon which her compelling persona was built. And while I'm still irritated that people are trashing her even as her soon-to-be-ex-husband's list of confessed and alleged misdeeds grows ever longer and more headsmackable -- a sex tape, are you kidding me, John Edwards? -- maybe losing a pedestal you've been forced to stand on for years can ultimately be as liberating as losing an endlessly thoughtless and embarrassing spouse. You can't be an acknowledged saint and a living human being at the same time, after all. So maybe all of this -- the separation and the wave of public criticism -- will clear the way for Elizabeth Edwards to be more fully herself, whatever that really means. I'm pretty sure I'd still like to have a beer with her.
John Edwards spoiled the Dave Matthews Band for me
The Sanford/Edward Mistress Throwdown Continues