The Cedar Lounge Revolution

Edwards affair’s base… February 11, 2010

Reading Slate.com’s piece on the John Edwards affair one can only look bemused at the expenditure of energy and resources on keeping it [mostly] secret.

From cash payments concealed in boxes of chocolates to three way conference calls used to keep his wife Elizabeth unaware that Rielle Hunter was ringing him the sheer scale of the deception engaged by Edwards is remarkable. But what is more remarkable is that reading through the Slate article it didn’t work at all. Or rather, Hunter and Edwards appear to have flaunted the fact of it. There often seems to be that in such circumstances, a throw caution to the wind aspect even when all else is deep fried in seeming secrecy. Details such as their kissing in front of campaign aides are beyond puzzling.

Then… and this is equally odd, there is the small matter that he paid living expenses to Hunter, with money from a philanthropist. One would think that in the media saturated world of the contemporary era someone would have thought twice, or three times about engaging in such machinations.

One of the issues about affairs that has always puzzled me is the amount of time and resources they appear to demand. Difficult for most to sustain for any length of time. But for someone like Edwards who wasn’t short of work he should have been doing instead it’s almost inexplicable. And of course, as with the information that aides knew, the boundaries between the secret and the ‘known’ blurred.

Generally my attitude is that the personal lives of politicians are none of my business. Affairs are about those who are involved and those who are directly affected. And it’s difficult to know what goes on in other peoples lives at the best of times and attempting to work out motivations, or worse sit in judgement, seem pointless. Most of this sort of the interest in this sort of stuff seems prurient in the extreme. But where this moves beyond the purely personal is on two levels. Firstly, now that he has admitted what was going on, that he lied about it publicly and explicitly on a continual basis – and while doing so presenting his marriage, and his wife’s travails in an overtly politicised fashion. And secondly that while lying about it he was a serious contender for the White House. And it is that latter issue that raises a particular point… or as … on the always excellent It’s All Politics podcast from NPR (Jan 21 2010 edition) put it..

I always feel queasy about talking about sex scandals of politicians I think there are a lot of reasons why it shouldn’t affect anybody, [though] I understand there’s a lot of things about hypocrisy which upset people…The thing that will always bother me about John Edwards and hopefully this will be the last thing I say about Edwards is that he was still campaigning for the Democratic Presidential nomination and later was offering himself up as a running mate of Obama… while he was in the midst of this affair and of course had it broken in October 2008 while he was on the ticket could have blown a hole in the ship and down goes the ship.. .and while I’m not trying to making the case for the Democratic Party anybody who is so selfish that they could be involved in something like that while selling themselves as a Presidential candidate is just contemptible.

As regards the title of this post – Google it… apologies…