The Democratic ticket and the John Edwards affair

TheHill.com

Byron York

There’s been a lot of talk lately that former Sen. John Edwards (N.C.) will have some sort of role in the Obama administration, if there is one.

A few months ago, Edwards, the Democratic Party’s 2004 vice presidential candidate, seemed to pull himself out of the VP race. But then, a couple of weeks ago, Edwards quietly put himself back in, telling National Public Radio, "I’m prepared to seriously consider anything, anything [Obama] asks me to do for our country."

“Anything” could, of course, mean running for vice president. But Edwards has done that before, and he didn’t exactly put Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) over the top.

Of course, "anything" could also mean serving as Obama’s attorney general, a position that has been mentioned for the former trial lawyer from North Carolina.

In any event, Edwards has shaped up as someone to watch should Democrats win in November.

But now there’s another reason to watch: an extensive story in the National Enquirer providing new evidence that Edwards, in the midst of his presidential campaign, had an extramarital affair that has, perhaps, resulted in a child.

The story began in 2006, when Edwards commissioned a woman named Rielle Hunter — sometimes described as a documentary filmmaker and sometimes as an aspiring actress — to make a series of brief behind-the-scenes Web videos about his campaign.

Newsweek did a short item on the videos, mentioning that Edwards met the filmmaker "at a New York bar where Edwards was having a business meeting."

That’s all we heard about it until September 2007, when the Huffington Post published a story headlined "Edwards Mystery: Innocuous Videos Suddenly Shrouded In Secrecy."

The website’s Sam Stein reported that the videos made by Hunter had suddenly disappeared from Edwards’s campaign website. "No longer am I working on a piece about new media and politics," Stein wrote. "Now, I just want to know why these webisodes are shrouded in such mystery."

Then, the Enquirer got into the story, reporting last October that Edwards was "caught in a shocking mistress scandal that could wreck his campaign."

When Edwards was asked about the allegation, according to the Enquirer, he strongly denied it.

"The story is false. It’s completely untrue, ridiculous," Edwards said. "Anyone who knows me knows that I have been in love with the same woman for 30-plus years.'

Later, in December 2007, the Enquirer published more details. A pregnant Hunter had moved to North Carolina, living in a house "owned by an Edwards backer" and driving a BMW sport utility vehicle registered to a longtime Edwards aide.

Hunter denied any affair, saying that the longtime, married Edwards aide was actually the father. A lawyer for that aide confirmed to the Enquirer that the aide was indeed the father.

Now the Enquirer has published a new story under the screaming headline SEN. JOHN EDWARDS CAUGHT WITH MISTRESS AND LOVE CHILD!

The tabloid reports that Edwards visited Hunter in a Los Angeles hotel Monday night, leaving her at 2:40 Tuesday morning. When the Enquirer’s reporters confronted Edwards, the story goes, he tried to escape.

Critics might question the Enquirer’s involvement in all this. Perhaps, they might charge, money changed hands to make the story happen.

Maybe it did. But one reads an Enquirer story just like one reads a story in The New York Times. You look at the allegation and try to sort out how much evidence the paper is presenting.

For example, after carefully reading the Times’s front-page story alleging that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) had had an affair with a lobbyist, one could only ask, Where’s the evidence?

That’s not the case with the Edwards story; there’s quite a bit of detail.

What will happen now? Well, we probably won’t hear as many mentions of Edwards as a possible key player in an Obama administration.

But so far, Edwards is going on as if nothing happened. The morning after the Enquirer story appeared, he was in Denver, promoting an anti-poverty project.

Asked about the vice presidency, he said, "I’m not seeking the job. But anything Sen. Obama would ask me to do in his campaign or presidency I would consider seriously."

Will Obama ask? Not likely.

Goldberg: John Edwards' Poor Scam

By Jonah Goldberg

There's a little hustler in every politician. But sometimes there's a little politician in a hustler. Such is the case with John Edwards.

Just last week, we learned that Edwards received $55,000 to give a speech, "Poverty, the Great Moral Issue Facing America," at UC Davis. The poor students who attended were charged $17 a ticket. Earlier this month, it was reported that despite the fact he denounces "predatory lending" and sub-prime mortgages for the poor, Edwards made nearly $500,000 as a consultant to a hedge fund involved in that business.

The former senator defended his gig on the grounds that he took the job to learn how financial markets relate to poverty. This is a bit like saying you frequent brothels so you can learn where babies come from. But here's the hilarious part: Edwards said he didn't know the fund was involved in sub-prime lending. If he was there to learn about poverty and finance, how did he miss this salient fact? He must be a very slow learner. No wonder his former political consultant, Bob Shrum, calls him "a Clinton who hadn't read the books."

Business Week magazine reports that Edwards launched a poverty center that conveniently worked out of the same office as his political action committee. The nonprofit center spent a staggering 70% of the money it raised on a speaking tour for Edwards and on salaries for staffers who in short order just happened to join his presidential campaign. This gives new meaning to the term "poverty pimp."

A few years ago, when it was reported that "virtuecrat" Bill Bennett, the former Education secretary, liked to gamble in Las Vegas, columnist Michael Kinsley spoke for much of establishment liberalism when he declared, "Bennett has been exposed as a humbug artist who ought to be pelted off the public stage." I thought this was unfair, as Bennett never inveighed against gambling, nor did his church consider it a sin. Edwards, who gets choked up and misty-eyed from his own relentlessly recounted stump speech about "two Americas," is more of a humbug artist than Bennett ever was. You would think that when Edwards looks in the mirror in one of his new, 28,000-square-foot house's six bathrooms, inspecting whether it's time for another $400 haircut, he might feel the slightest twinge of conscience about his us-versus-them shtick.

Now, of course, this doesn't mean that he doesn't care about poverty, and there's certainly nothing wrong with making money. Edwards has clearly convinced himself that he's done nothing wrong. He launched his fortune as an ambulance-chasing lawyer, after all, so he's good at convincing people, starting with himself, that he's on the side of the angels. But the story he tells to prove he's not a hypocrite is typically phony. For example, his 2004 presidential campaign highlighted the humble little house he led people to believe he grew up in. But the small home touted in commercials was Edwards' residence until he reached the ripe old age of 1. Then, his father the mill worker was promoted to management and the family moved into a more expensive home that never appeared in his campaign ads.

It's not that Edwards is a liar, it's that he's a toothy door-to-door salesman, seemingly hawking the issues when he's really just hawking himself.

When Edwards was preparing for his first run for president, he struck the pose of a Southern moderate. The National Journal noted that his voting record set him "comfortably apart from Senate liberals." Now that he's out of office -- he likely could not have won reelection -- he's recast himself as the election season's premier anti-warrior. Last week, Edwards gave a major foreign policy speech in which he ridiculed the very idea of a "war on terror" as nothing more than a "bumper sticker." Of course, until recently, he had no problem with the concept. As Sen. John Kerry's running mate, he campaigned on the claim that Iraq was distracting us from the real war on terror. Before that, he recanted his vote in favor of the Iraq war.

In his new book, Shrum says that Edwards voted for the war not because the Bush administration misled him but because his spin doctors did. Edwards, of course, denies this, but even in the recent South Carolina Democratic debate, he confessed that the lesson he learned from his vote was that he needs "to put more faith in my own judgment."

That's a convenient position for a man who seems to really believe only in one thing: himself.

Edwards Desperately Spins his War Vote

How can Edwards be taken seriously in his candidacy for President when he has just been outed for voting in favor of the war to bolster his inadequate presidential qualifications prior to the 2004 campaign.

Drop out now, pretty boy.

Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards was skeptical about voting for the Iraq war resolution and was pushed into it by advisers looking out for his political future, according to an upcoming book by one of his former consultants.

Democratic strategist Bob Shrum writes in his memoir to be published in June that he regrets advising Edwards to give President Bush the authority to go to war in Iraq. He said if Edwards had followed his instincts instead of the advice of political professionals, he would have been a stronger presidential candidate in 2004.

Edwards spokesman David Ginsberg disputes the suggestion that Edwards was making a political calculation with the vote that he has called the most important of his career.

"John Edwards cast his vote based on the advice of national security advisers and the intelligence he was given, not political advisers," Ginsberg said. "He got political advice on both sides of the argument, and made his own decision based on what he thought was right, not political calculation."

After standing by his vote throughout the 2004 campaign, Edwards has recently acknowledged being conflicted about his decision in October 2002 and says it was a mistake. But Shrum's book, "No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner," provides the most extensive insight into Edwards' private discussions over the decision. The Associated Press obtained excerpts from uncorrected galley proofs of the book to be published June 5 by Simon & Schuster.

Shrum writes that Edwards, then a North Carolina senator, called his foreign policy and political advisers together in his Washington living room in the fall of 2002 to get their advice. Edwards was "skeptical, even exercised" about the idea of voting yes and his wife Elizabeth was forcefully against it, according to Shrum.

But Shrum said the consensus among the advisers was that Edwards, just four years in office, did not have the credibility to vote against the resolution and had to support it to be taken seriously on national security. Shrum said Edwards' facial expressions showed he did not like where he was being pushed to go.

Edwards, campaigning for the 2008 nomination among Democrats who are overwhelmingly anti-war, has said he voted yes because he was ultimately convinced by intelligence reports saying that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He's said in recent months that he was conflicted because he was worried that Bush wouldn't work with the international community to avoid an invasion. He's said repeatedly that he shouldn't have voted for the resolution.