Down On His Tar Heels

I don't want to write about John Edwards, but it's either that or Anthony Weiner. (Are these the only choices I get??)

Edwards had it all only a few years ago. He was a viable candidate for the Presidency of the United States. He crusaded to help the poor. Everyone stood by him and his wife Elizabeth as she battled cancer. Now Edwards has been exposed as the father of a love child, he was cheating with his mistress while his wife was ill, Elizabeth is gone, and Edwards is a disgraced phony.

Now it's getting worse for Edwards. The two-timing - er, two-time presidential candidate and former North Carolina senator has been indicted on six felony charges that he violated campaign laws by using $925,000 in illegal contributions to cover up his affair with Rielle Hunter. The charges stem from the reasoning that the money came from two donors restricted to contributing $2300 each, even though Edwards says the money was given as a gift specifically to keep the Hunter affair hidden from public view and so did not count toward his campaign account balance. The government charges that because the money was used to keep something that would affect the campaign from going public, it was thus campaign-related and so violated campaign finance laws. Edwards admits to doing wrong in his personal life, but insists he did nothing illegal. If convicted, he could go to jail and lose his law license.

Edwards may have a case. The government can't tell a presidential candidate what to do with a privately given money not meant for advertising and travel expenses. That doesn't make Edwards any less repugnant as a human being, though.

As I was watching Edwards profess his (legal) innocence on TV, I was reminded by how young he still looks in his late fifties. He's like Dorian Gray. He stays the same, but his picture gets sleazier.

John Edwards: BAD to the Bone

The great intellectual Paul Fussell once described the idea of BAD, as opposed to what is merely bad, as thus: Plain bad is something like a case of scarlet fever or a failing grade - something no one ever said was good. BAD, on the other hand, is something that can be seen as wonderful, prized, desirable and valued but is in fact pretentious, showy, stupid, fake and shallow. John Edwards falls into the latter category.

Edwards finally admitted that he is in fact the father of his mistress Rielle Hunter's daughter. This, in and of itself, was hardly shocking news - people figured it out. What was shocking was that Edwards lied about it and went through great lengths and spent great amounts of campaign money to cover it up in his quest to uphold his image as an erudite, virtuous populist. Edwards in fact was none of those things, and the scandal revealed himself to be a duplicitous phony divorced from the reality of his own personality. A glib trial lawyer who talked his way into a fortune and proved to be clueless on many issues - particularly foreign policy - that he needed a grasp of if he were to be elected President of the United States, Edwards showed a callous selfishness cheating on a wife battling cancer and walking around with expensive haircuts while claiming to be a man of the people. It makes his announcement for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination from a Katrina-ravaged neighborhood in New Orleans seem all the more cynical, and no less phony than when George Walker Bush went down there after the hurricane to help build a house.

You can come back, Gary Hart. All is forgiven.

By the way, I take back my criticism of Jim Cramer for his rants against Edwards. Cramer was on to something about Edwards, citing the hedge funds Edwards was involved in that enabled him in part to build up his fortune. He could sense the phoniness in Edwards that most of us - me included - could not. That's what makes Edwards so despicable - he fooled everyone with his white-knight persona, even his closest aides and supporters. Now I understand why he was so conscious about his appearance. He had to tend to two faces.

Edwards's outing as a reprehensible monster is an upward blip in an otherwise downward trend. As Paul Fussell wrote, politicians in America, like so many other American people, places and things, are BAD to such a great degree that calling it out is hardly going to reduce the level of BAD in this country.

An Unfinished Career

The new book "Game Change" by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann reveals what a big monster John Edwards was in documenting his affair with a freelance filmmaker and the love child it produced. Edwards carried on the affair even as his wife Elizabeth was battling cancer and tried to bargain with Barack Obama for the Vice Presidency, then a Cabinet position, before the baby was born in exchange for his support. The best he could get was a speaking slot at the Democratic convention. By the time the convention took place, the scandal broke and even that was out of the question, as Edwards's political capital was worth about as much as a Guyanese dollar. I take that back - the Guyanese dollar is worth much more. This story only makes me realize how a man with a potentially great career in public service threw it all away on a fling.

I refer, of course, to former New York governor Eliot Spitzer.

One other thing we learn from Halperin and Heilemann's book is that Edwards was a consummate phony, speaking out on the issue of poverty while making an obscene amount of money as a trial lawyer and living just as obscenely in a 28,200-square foot mansion, complete with a recreational annex that includes a basketball court, a squash court, two stages, a bedroom, a kitchen, bathrooms, a swimming pool, and a four-story tower. While Edwards talked about fighting for the little guy, Eliot Spitzer did fight for the little guy. He has a record. Not the police record form the prostitution sting, but his record as New York State Attorney General. He prosecuted cases involving white collar crime, securities fraud, environmental law violations, and even fraud at the now-discredited American International Group. He could have been one of the great governors of New York, and possibly America's first Jewish President. Now Spitzer is disgraced, and so is his state. Governor David Paterson has been a complete failure as the state's accidental chief executive, with the state budget a mess and the economy arguably in worse shape than the national economy.

I at least hope that New York State residents are grateful for the job he did as Attorney General. New York, Connecticut, and, yes, Massachusetts are fortunate to be able to elect their own attorneys general and have someone accountable to the people to fight for the people. In New Jersey, the attorney general is appointed by and serves at the pleasure at the governor.

As for Spitzer, he's still an important voice to listen to, and people do listen to him - he's appeared on Ed Schultz's MSNBC show periodically to tell people how Wall Street is still screwing us. He may have a thing or two to tell us about hedge funds, which benefited Edwards.

It's only too bad he's no longer in a position to do anything about any of this.