There is an article on the new film “Outrage” tucked in the Style section of the Washington Post today with a final line that is fitting today: If our leaders aren’t true to themselves, how can they possibly be true to us. The answer is easy, they cannot.
The film “Outrage” arrives on a week that stirs up so much political baggage, helped along by willing political participants, that it’s hard to imagine a more timely opening. Sure “Outrage” talks about “allegedly gay politicians who actively campaign and vote against gay rights,” but it washes over events of this week that had Elizabeth Edwards dredging up her husband’s infidelity and her reaction, all of which reaches back into the past plucking uncomfortable past personal disasters of leaders who have let us down.
Sometimes it’s not just about infidelity or voting against your own civil rights while being gay yourself. It’s about betrayal of political trust. Lying to people who have sometimes given up their lives, worked untold hours and put everything in your hands. We can have a conversation about the lunacy of any person doing that with a politician, when people put more trust in the person than the policies they represent, but that’s another discussion.
Getting a comments from die hard Edwards supporters, I now understand how ridiculous WJC supporters sound when they excuse the Lewinsky affair. The loyalty built from politician to advocate, especially on such a high level, unfounded when the person you’re advocating cannot be true to himself, making a mockery of all the long hours, cajoling and banner waving you’ve done.
Going back, Robert Reich wasn’t half as mad about the stupid infidelity of William Jefferson Clinton as he was about the lies told blatantly, the half truths and “word games,” as Reich judged it, from a man that many who served him felt had betrayed them all, but also the charge they were trusted to keep.
Re-enter John and Elizabeth Edwards and the Oprah interview. Like Clinton, but also the subject of “Outrage,” the whole thing may have started with an indiscretion, but once it was decided that the Edwardses would join together in a lie to the public, their supporters, and the nation, on the wings of what amounted to award winning political performances, it became about something else.
The Elizabeth Edwards and Oprah full hour on the affair John Edwards, minus any mention of Reille Hunter’s name, was a horrendously painful thing to watch, an event that remains remarkably wrenching for Mrs. Edwards, that much was clear. She’s certainly earned the right to have her side heard. What was revealed in the hour, however, one expects was not what she intended. Oprah didn’t even seem to understand what had been said at one point early in her interview. It hit me immediately.
So, as Mrs. Edwards set the scene with Oprah, two days after John Edwards announced his presidential campaign he tells his wife about his cheating, which supposedly happened once. Her response was that he needed “to get out of the campaign… for her family, for my children, for John and for me it would be best if he got out of the campaign..” Good advice, right instinct. But John Edwards thought differently. She continues:
“He said, and, truthfully, he was right. It was hard to argue with this. That if you want to raise a lot of questions what you do is get out of a campaign you got into two days before. We just set up offices and got people on board. It would have been a very… would have raised a lot of questions in people’s minds. …” – Elizabeth Edwards (Oprah interview)
Trying to keep people from raising questions was what was important? At that moment it’s all so clear, as everything the Edwardses stood for falls in on itself.
They aren’t the first.
No matter what’s in the book, what Mrs. Edwards revealed in the Oprah interview, is that keeping the affair hidden was her husband’s primary concern. Was it also to protect his wife and his family? One would hope, but that’s not what Mrs. Edwards said to Oprah.
That Mrs. Edwards says her husband was “right” and that it “was hard to argue with this” is stunning. As whip smart as she is she had to know this would eventually unravel in the glare of a hot presidential campaign. What was Mrs. Edwards thinking?
Then there is the bigger problem for them both: Presenting yourselves on the campaign trail as one thing, when behind the scenes a completely unimaginable scenario has played out that you’ve chosen to lie about by hiding so you can benefit.
The worst of it is that Mr. Edwards had a completely organic rationale he could have used to keep going. It’s so obvious it screams, but it never occurs to either of them, not even in preparation for the Oprah interview. Mr. Edwards could have simply said to his wife that the mission they started so long ago, the fight they were waging for America was too important to be hijacked by one stupid mistake he’d made. That’s something that would have been, to use Mrs. Edwards’ words, “hard to to argue with.”
But that’s not what John Edwards said to his wife. By her own admission, that’s not why Mrs. Edwards agreed to be complicit in the charade, and it’s not what she said on Oprah, regardless of what’s said in her book.
It’s the cowardice to face up to what’s happened, instead choosing to betray supporters by producing political theater that at its heart was about hiding the truth that, whether it’s Gary Hart, Jim McGreevy, Bill Clinton, John Edwards, or the complicity of Mrs. Edwards, opens out on a political charade that goes on for months and months and includes further denials all for the purpose of saving yourself. That Edwards dragged his vulnerable, terminally ill wife along is unforgivable. That she willingly went along is yet a new chapter in the stand by your man book of political embarrassments.
I’m not sure how all this opens out on our politics. The honesty of our politicians and their lack of courage to make hard choices once they are handed power from the voters, but something tells me it’s related. Many say that our politics suffers because there’s too much scrutiny on candidates, and maybe that’s the case. But there’s also the possibility that we’ve come to expect less from them because we’re too fragile to look at them unmasked, preferring to make excuses where none suffice, keeping them on pedestals they haven’t earned and cannot live up to.
Supporters have to expect more, excuse less and be willing to be brutally honest when their politician fails the ultimate test of leadership, being true to himself at all costs. But especially when that politician is a fraud. Being blinded by misplaced faith doesn’t mean you haven’t been made a fool.
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