Political star. Sexy political videographer. Heroic wife. Tawdry tell all. …and now add a legendary rock band, if reports are to be believed. Only Mark Sanford gives you an (arguably) bigger bang for your “politics of sex” bucks than the tragic tabloid tale of John Edwards and his recklessly rapacious ego.
So, upon getting my Sunday New York Times, my jaw dropped seeing the John Edwards – Reille Hunter – Elizabeth Edwards triangle tragedy take a shared, front page, center and above the fold presence in the paper.
That what has been owned by the tabloid National Enquirer is just now making the traditional marquee news source illustrates how tremendously difficult this story has been to report and analyze for everyone, new and old media, involved. Particularly true for Democrats and many progressives, who just want this to go away, also finding fault in the Times for running it at all. Which brings up the question of why this isn’t considered news given the wide lens this sordid soap opera has taken on as the weeks have ticked by, which included wholesale political betrayal of millions of people who thought John Edwards was fit to be president, even as he and his wife orchestrated a campaign predicated on an image of family that was the most outlandish of lies.
The New York Times running this piece today revealing more about where news coverage is today than ever before.
Having spent time as a “relationship consultant” back in the mid-1990s, I heard it all back when I used to interview men and women, married, unmarried and well beyond, trying to understand what makes people do such stupidly destructive things when it comes to sex, love and their lives. Sometimes it’s just ego run amok. Others it’s about the emptiness of love that no longer fulfills. It can even be the thrill of the chase and not getting caught. Then there is the May – December convenience connection. But it’s always hard to understand when people who seem to have it all risk it for… nothing.. Or maybe that should read everything.
Has any politician so sordidly flamed out after a meteoric rise? After all, Sarah Palin, for all her dust, never did anything like this.
As betrayals go, it makes Bill Clinton look like a choir boy; his Baptist guilt holding him back, if only for the disappearance of one little blue dress. After all, condoms with canoodling aren’t exactly common place.
Most of the details of the Edwards tale are well known by now, with the addition today coming in a sort of “Brace Yourself!” warning, with the words Drama Builds Toward a Denouement in the headline foreshadowing that the end is near.
… At the same time, Mr. Edwards is moving toward an abrupt reversal in his public posture; associates said in interviews that he is considering declaring that he is the father of Ms. Hunter’s 19-month-old daughter, something that he once flatly asserted in a television interview was not possible.
Friends and other associates of Mr. Edwards and his wife of 32 years, Elizabeth, say she has resisted the idea of her husband’s claiming paternity. Mrs. Edwards, who is battling cancer, “has yet to be brought around,” said one family friend, who like others spoke about the situation on the condition of anonymity…
The stickiness of this story weaves through the tabloid aspects that are new in the Times today, revealing the most heinous ego hijacking of lives we’ve seen in political times, making John Edwards worse than Mark Sanford, as Edwards, if he knows the truth now, still doesn’t have the moral judgment and clarity to come clean after all he’s been through; Elizabeth Edwards obviously one of the stopping points, though how it could get worse for this woman I have no idea. Ego versus self preservation never an easy battle.
If the Times report is correct, now, not only is Ms. Hunter about to move closer to the Edwardses, but she evidently is also determined to legitimize her child and take her own place, thinking she is someone who deserves more respect than she is currently receiving. Though I’d have to ask how a grown woman could get herself pregnant like this without some complicity or wanting, which is even worse.
Ms. Hunter gave her daughter the middle name Quinn, and people who have spoken with her said its resemblance to the Latin prefix for five was to proclaim that the baby was Mr. Edwards’s fifth child. (He had four with Mrs. Edwards, the oldest of whom was killed in a car accident).
The other figure in this story, the former aide to Edwards and the guy who took the first bullet for the baby, Andrew Young, has some incredible tales to tell via his book proposal, one of which adds a Jackie Collins chapter to the already stunningly stupid tales of a cheating cad.
In the proposal, which The New York Times examined, Mr. Young says that he assisted the affair by setting up private meetings between Mr. Edwards and Ms. Hunter. He wrote that Mr. Edwards once calmed an anxious Ms. Hunter by promising her that after his wife died, he would marry her in a rooftop ceremony in New York with an appearance by the Dave Matthews Band.
I can’t imagine the calls Dave Matthews’ publicist is getting.
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