I'm sympathetic to the argument that John Edwards's affair
is none of our business. Personal moral failings should generally
remain private matters, even public figures are entitled to a
reasonable zone of privacy, and reporters conducting stakeouts in
hotels to root out infidelity is at least distasteful, if not
incompatible with my first two points. But a lengthy affair that
involves a potential love child -- I find John Tabin's dissection of Edwards's denials persuasive
-- is in a different league. That alone is something we ought to
want
less of in public life. Worse, the details of the affair -- the
amount of campaign resources that went into covering it up, the
hush money, his wife's cancer -- do tell us things about Edwards's
character that the public has an interest in knowing.
Given how central Edwards's family and his wife were to both his
presidential campaign and his personal narrative, finding this out
is along the lines of discovering that the ambitious trial lawyer
enriched himself and impoverished others by using bogus science, or finding out that
Edwards went from being a Southern moderate in Bill Clinton's
Democratic Leadership Council mode to just four years later being
the liberal second coming of Bobby Kennedy, or learning that
Edwards strongly supported the Iraq war when it was popular and
just as strongly opposed it when that became the popular position.
In other words, it is part of a larger pattern of Edwards being a
fraud, someone who makes Clinton's phoniness seem like one of
Holden Caulfield's rhetorical excesses. Maybe if Edwards had
already been a washed-up pol before this story broke, the media's
reluctance to run with it would have been justified. Since Edwards
might have played a significant role in the next Democratic
administration, it's a legitimate story.
topics:
Bill Clinton, Business, Law, Iraq
