I would have posted on this yesterday had I not been on the road, but more terrific reporting in the New York Times by the excellent Serge Kovaleski, whom I remember breaking stories on the City Hall beat for the NY Daily News many years ago, on the John Edwards mess. Yesterday, Serge, with Mike McIntire, demonstrated that the efforts to hide the affair were far more widespread than previously known.
I was on vacation/holiday when the Edwards story broke, so I didn't get to respond in real time, but that needn't prevent me from kicking the guy while he's down. I never liked Edwards. I always found him smarmy and insincere. Well, I guess he's sincere about poverty, and that's good, and I credit him for that. But basically he went from being a cautious centrist to a raging populist on a dime, and that's always something to be wary of, even (especially?) when the person is moving toward ideological views more simpatico with one's own.
Edwards just saw an opening to Hillary's left, period. He managed to seduce a lot of liberal wonks and economics who wanted to believe that we were at a historical moment when class-warfare politics would succeed, but we're not at that moment and we never were. It was fine that he apologized for his previous Iraq war support, but he got overly sanctimonious about it. I always saw hollowness in these things.
And then, to top it off, he was willing to make an entire political party, i.e. millions of people, complicit in abetting his sexcapades, which is exactly what would have happened if he'd somehow won the nomination.
On the lighter side: The Times story notes that Edwards and Rielle Hunter, the woman, met at the Regency Hotel on the Upper East Side. No surprise there. If you're ever in America and want to see the big players at work, go there for breakfast. You'll have to swallow to fork over $12 or whatever for an order of toast, but the pound being what it is, that may not seem so bad to Brits.
