I Wish I'd Been Wrong

Back in January, I wrote a post entitled "A New Deal With the Blue-Eyed Devil" - in which I explained why I was beginning to mistrust John Edwards. I was tentatively supporting Edwards' presidential bid at that time.

Edwards' ties to Fortress Investments made me doubt the veracity of his stated commitment to serving America's underclass. As I examined Edwards' employment by and investment in a company with ties to offshore tax havens for the wealthy and subprime mortgage loans for the poor, I came to the conclusion that poverty was more a platform than a purpose for this personal injury lawyer.

Back in January, I deemed Edwards an opportunist. But I maintained then, as I do now, that opportunism isn't necessarily a bad thing. Moderated opportunism, like Obama's reversal of opinion on offshore drilling, may not be pretty - but it is smart politics. Politics is a dirty game - a game that often requires the betrayal of short-term goals in order to achieve a greater end. The ability to seize upon an opportunity that will end in that greater good, even at the expense of one's values, is the mark of a great politician. It takes remarkable moral intelligence to accurately weigh ends and means - to understand which justifies the other and make sacrifices accordingly.

And so, it's not the opportunism displayed by John Edwards in making his wife's illness a focus of his presidential campaign that angers me. Neither is it the hypocrisy of this focus in light of Edwards' extramarital affair with Rielle Hunter. No, it is his blatant disregard for the people whom Edwards' was claiming to serve - the underclass - that makes my blood boil.

By signing up for a foolhardy presidential bid knowing that this affair might surface, John Edwards placed those Americans whom he claimed to serve in peril. What if Edwards had won the nomination? Where would the Democratic Party be now, in light of this affair? Or, more importantly, where would those Americans whom Edwards claimed to serve be?

I think there is little doubt that, if Edwards had won the nomination, this affair could have ruined his chances of winning the general election. By embarking on a presidential bid with an extramarital affair lingering in his recent past, John Edwards failed the American underclass.

Any of the other Democratic candidates, if elected, would have served our nation's poor far better than John McCain would. If Edwards truly cared about "forgotten Americans" as much as he claimed to, he would have conceded the nomination to one of the other Democratic candidates - to a candidate who did not have the time bomb of a nasty affair ticking away in his front pocket.

Edwards' use of $114,000 in campaign funds to pay to his mistress, a novice-at-best filmmaker, for a few months of documentary work adds insult to injury. A millionaire many times over, John Edwards did not "keep" his mistress using his own funds. He used money supporters donated in good faith, instead.

It is clear Edwards' regard for himself, for his own desires and his own ambitions, outweighed his regard for those whom he served.

The American underclass, and those who truly wish to serve it, dodged a bullet with John Edwards. And we have the blogosphere, the Huffington Post in particular, to thank for it. I think the mainstream media would have uncovered the Edwards scandal, eventually. But John Edwards could have secured the VP nomination by then. In our 24-hour news nation, much is often made of little. Considering the near-nuclear fallout of the Rev. Wright scandal, it's not inconceivable to think that a vice presidential scandal on the level of the Edwards/Hunter affair, if timed correctly, could have tipped the scales in favor of McCain.

I wish I had been wrong about John Edwards. Although I never was so naive as to believe that his commitment to helping "forgotten Americans" was entirely selfless, I had hoped that his poverty platform wasn't as self-serving as Edwards is proving it to be.