"It's easy to get caught up in the distractions and the silliness and the tit-for-tat that consumes our politics; the bickering that none of us are immune to, and that trivializes the profound issues -- two wars, an economy in recession, a planet in peril," then-Sen. Barack Obama said last April, on the night he lost Pennsylvania's Democratic presidential primary to Hillary Clinton.
That sort of thing has been a consistent theme from Obama, both on the trail and while he's been in the White House, the message being that people should stop focusing on the small, silly things that characterize so much of politics, preventing actual substance from being part of the discussion.
In some ways, Obama and his team have tried to live up to that. In others, well, they're just as guilty as everyone else.
One of the sillier, more trivial stories from the presidential campaign, and perhaps the one that got people on the left most consistently riled, was what started out as a pretty short blog post by Politico's Ben Smith, who reported that John Edwards had been getting $400 haircuts. Though other scandals have since overshadowed memories of Edwards' 2008 campaign, it was a big deal at the time, and it stuck around for quite a while.
Well, now we know who was responsible for the distraction and the silliness that emanated from that story: Obama's campaign. Campaign Manager David Plouffe revealed the truth in his new book, writing, "We did much less of this [opposition research] than other campaigns did, but there were times we indulged -- it was our researchers who found John Edwards's infamous $400 hair cut expenditures."
Smith has posted the quote on his blog, and has acknowledged that the Obama campaign was the source of his information.
David Plouffe, President Obama's former campaign manager, is just full of revelations -- or at least his new book, "The Audacity to Win," is.
The latest has to do with a little bit of backroom wheeling and dealing that hadn't been disclosed before now. It seems that, during the Democratic primaries, former Sen. John Edwards' campaign decided he couldn't win the nomination earlier than they acknowledged that fact publicly -- and once they had, one aide went to the Obama campaign with an offer.
TPMDC noted Monday that in his book Plouffe writes:
[S]ome time after the debate, I got a call from a senior Edwards adviser.
This was the pitch:
"Listen. It's clear unless the race is shaken up, Hillary is going to win. You guys might not even win South Carolina. What would shake the race up is John ending his campaign, but not simply to endorse another candidate. All things being equal, John prefers Barack. They should announce they are joining forces and will run as a ticket. Edwards can vouch for Obama with blue-collar and Southern whites and is running on a change message.
"It's a perfect fit. And it has to be something that big to slow down Hillary. You need a big shakeup in the race and this could be it."
Obviously, this didn't happen. And though it's unclear whether Edwards knew about the offer, it's clear in hindsight that he's lucky the Obama camp didn't go for it. As things stand now, the disclosure of Edwards' affair has all but driven him out of politics, but not necessarily closed off the possibility of a comeback. If the former senator had been a vice-presidential nominee for a second time, and the affair had become public during the campaign, potentially dooming Obama's chances, Democrats might have been angry enough to give up on him permanently.
What would Americans talk about without celebrity sex scandals? It's getting to where even a diligent voyeur has trouble keeping the protagonists straight without schematic diagrams like the character lists in 19th-century Russian novels.
If adultery were a crime, a cynical homicide detective once told me, the prisons would be bigger than the graveyards. Even so, reveling in other people's sins has become the national pastime. We've become a country of Peeping Toms, a sadistic activity.
Recently, four separate sex scandals vied for the news consumer's attention: a film director, two prominent politicians and a TV comic. As usual, the unlucky lovers saw their privacy obliterated and their intimate lives rendered into moralistic fables. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make famous.
Everybody's least favorite character is French/Polish film director Roman Polanski. Except for a few Hollywood fools and European intellectuals who express the perverse belief that art excuses all crimes, hardly anybody would be upset to see Polanski go to prison. (In polls, ordinary Poles and Frenchmen reject the art alibi by large majorities.) As one who thinks his film "Chinatown" a masterpiece, I don't much care what happens to him.
Polanski's a one-dimensional villain to almost everybody except his 1977 victim, now a 45-year-old mother of three who's forgiven him. She thinks even the seven weeks he served undergoing psychiatric evaluation were excessive. Samantha Geimer has long argued that charges should be dropped.
Should her wishes be honored? Not necessarily. However, it also shouldn't be forbidden to wonder why she thinks that way. Wasn't her life irretrievably ruined by the famous director's crime? Evidently, Geimer doesn't think so.
It's also important to call things by their right names. Yes, it's illegal for an adult man to have sex with a 13-year-old girl; the slang term is "jailbait." (Remember Louisiana rock 'n' roller Jerry Lee Lewis and his 13-year-old wife being expelled from England?) But that doesn't make Polanski a "pedophile," i.e. a deeply disturbed person obsessed with pre-pubescent children. If I had my way, there'd be no need for a "Megan's Law" tracking paroled pedophiles, because there wouldn't be any parole. Ever.
Anyway, here's what the now-deceased judge who accepted Polanski's guilty plea said at the hearing: "The probation report discloses that although just short of her 14th birthday at the time of the offense, the (victim) was a well-developed young girl who looked older than her years; and regrettably not unschooled in sexual matters. She has a 17-year-old boyfriend, with whom she had sexual intercourse at least twice prior to the offense involved. The probation report further reveals that the (victim) was not unfamiliar with the drug Quaalude, she having experimented with it as early as her 10th or 11th year."
The child also apparently had the Stage Mother from Hell, a film industry tradition. In short, there may have been excellent reasons why both sides wanted to avoid a highly publicized Hollywood trial, and no reason to treat the grand jury testimony of a 14-year-old girl pressed by her mother and the prosecutor as holy writ. She may have interpreted Polanski's pleading guilty to a reduced charge as a kindness.
That said, Polanski's 1979 interview with novelist Martin Amis ought to earn him a special place in hell, if not a California penitentiary. "If I had killed somebody, it wouldn't have had so much appeal to the press, you see?" he said. "But ... judges want to (bleep) young girls. Juries want to (bleep) young girls. Everyone wants to (bleep) young girls!"
Actually, no they don't. But a culture that tolerates beauty pageants for heavily made-up little girls, promotes teen bombshells like Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus and a million "Barely Legal" porn films ought to consider where Polanski got the idea. The law may demand that a fleeing felon be brought to justice, but we Americans should probably be a bit less smug about it.
As for philandering politicians, here's all anybody ever needed to know about former senator and Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards: According to the New York Times, he once calmed his "anxious" mistress "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."
Then there's GOP Sen. John Ensign, described by the same newspaper as a "silver-haired senator with a statesman's looks and family money -- his father helped found a Las Vegas casino -- (who) has championed conservative social values." So Nevada, whose two main industries are legalized gambling and prostitution, elects a casino heir who's also a professional Christian, and we're supposed to be shocked he turns out to be a conniving fraud?
Meanwhile, David Letterman, a then-unmarried TV comic, had love affairs at the office. This is news? Wake me if he runs off with Michelle Obama.
© 2009 Gene Lyons. Distributed by Newspaper Enterprise Association
Neil A. Lewis of the New York Times reported over the weekend that John Edwards is thinking of publicly confirming that he's the father of Rielle Hunter's 19-month-old baby. This comes a month after North Carolina television station WRAL reported the same thing, which was right around the time the National Enquirer announced that "secret DNA testing" had already proven it. And going by the tabloid's track record on this story, that means it stands a pretty good chance of being true.
Meanwhile, in the absence of the sort of hard proof the Enquirer claims to have acquired, the Times has collected every damning rumor or bit of circumstantial evidence available. For instance, former aide Andrew Young, who originally claimed to be the baby's father, has written a proposal for a tell-all memoir in which he says Edwards asked a wealthy donor if he knew a doctor who would falsify a DNA test, and 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." (Ouch. So far, Elizabeth Edwards has succesfully balanced standing by her man with making it abundantly clear she is not amused, but if that allegation is true -- with or without the Dave Matthews bit, but especially with it -- I think I speak for America when I say, "DTMFA.") Those are probably the most disturbing allegations, but my favorite is this one: "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." Never mind that the name Quinn has been skyrocketing in popularity for the last few years, especially for girls. It's almost like "quint"!
I'm not sure what it says about this story that the National Enquirer has been way ahead of everyone else from Day One, while the New York Times is not only playing catch-up but resorting to etymological speculation from anonymous sources. (I mean, besides that Edwards apparently surrounded himself with way too many people who would be willing to talk for money.) But at this point, I'm hard-pressed to say why Edwards hasn't tried to get out in front of this. Since even his lawyer's comment on the issue is not a categorical denial, but "there may be a statement on that subject at some point, but there is no timetable and we will see how we feel about it as events unfold," it's hard to believe the Enquirer's got this one wrong. And as Lewis puts it, if the politician 'fesses up to being little Frances Quinn's father, he "could suffer a further blow to his credibility but could also be praised for belatedly accepting responsibility." Seeing as how the credibility ship has pretty well sailed, if it's true, I'd certainly go with the option that might lead to tepid praise -- and, as Sarah Hepola pointed out, a real child support arrangement.
Even as he admitted to an affair with Rielle Hunter, former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., denied that he's the father of her young daughter. That may be about to change.
The National Enquirer, which has been the leader on the Edwards affair story from the beginning, has already reported that the one-time Democratic vice presidential nominee took a paternity test at Hunter's urging, and that it showed he was the father.
Now, a North Carolina television station, WRAL, reports that Edwards is actually going to admit to paternity at some point in the future. WRAL bases its story on anonymous sources whose relationship to Edwards isn't disclosed. These same sources told the station that "Edwards' public admission could come before the end of the criminal investigation" currently being conducted into the possibility that the former senator used campaign funds as hush money for Hunter.
Surprising exactly no one -- except, possibly, John Edwards' spokesperson, whose leisure dinner Wednesday night was very likely interrupted by approximately five billion calls -- the National Enquirer is reporting that "secret DNA tests" prove Rielle Hunter's 18-month-old daughter Frances is, in fact, the spawn of a particular former presidential candidate. (Hint: It's not Dennis Kucinich.)
Sure, take it all with a grain of salt or ten: This is the National Enquirer -- but that's the pub that broke news of the affair, and it hasn't been wrong about the story yet. If the report proves true, then we can finally end this charade about "who's really the dad," and families can start healing, and long-suffering wives can start accepting, and politicians can stop lying -- or, at the very least, child support arrangements can be made, stat.
Last Thursday, as War Room reported, Hunter testified in front of a grand jury to determine whether or not campaign funds were illegally funneled to her. So the twists may keep coming, but perhaps one chapter is (dare we dream?) closed.
At this time, Edwards has no plans, sadly, to appear on Maury Povich.
Sigh. The September issue of the Atlantic is online once again and with it yet another vitriolic essay by our favorite antihero, the stay-at-home-mother-with-help, moral scold Caitlin Flanagan. Having worked her way through the mommy wars and the emotional lives of teenage girls (on which she is still, presumably, writing a book), Flanagan has seemed, as of late, particularly concerned with letting us all know that adultery is very, very bad.
This month brings more of the same: In case you were wondering, Caitlin Flanagan considers it a devilishly immoral act to steal another woman's husband. I'm not inclined to disagree -- nor do I have any personal investment in defending husband-stealing, having never had much interest in the practice myself. Her essay is a consideration of three books (Jennifer Scanlon's biography of Helen Gurley Brown, Helen Gurley Brown's "Sex and the Single Girl" and Elizabeth Edwards' autobiography, which reveals, among other things, the details of her husband's adulterous affair), all of which have long since been debated from almost every conceivable angle. So while I invite you to engage with Flanagan's essay and come to your own conclusions about her argument, today I would like to draw your attention to what Flanagan does best: the fine art of the literary insult. Love her or loathe her, friends and enemies alike, I would hazard, are united in their awe of Flanagan's great gift to recall the meanest girl on the junior high playground, to make one's head snap back and sputter, "Oh-no-she-didn't." Without ado, here are the greatest hits of this month's column.
Flanagan starts off with pitting the feminists who condescended to Gurley Brown against the ladies of the steno pool who lionized her. And it's hard to decide which group comes off worse:
[S]econd Wave feminism -- with it's endless reading lists and casually divorced breadwinners, its stridently unshaven armpits and Crock-Pots of greasy coq au vin -- was fine for the educated set, the B.A.-in-anthropology, little-bit-of-money-put-aside women who could get themselves master's degrees in library science, peel off the Playtex 18-Hour Living Girdle one last time and divest themselves of the whole maddening, saddening, 24-Hour Living Death of mid-century houswewifery. But the movement wasn't much of a starter for the young women of the steno set -- call them the Seven Thousand Sisters -- who barely made it all through 'Doctor Zhivago,' let alone 'The Second Sex,' and who, moreover, had no desire to go through life looking like Sasquatch and feeling angry all the time.
OK, ladies: Choose your corner. Are you going to be the casually divorced Sasquatch pushing greasy coq au vin, or the poor chick who can't keep up with "Doctor Zhivago"? At first you might be lulled into thinking that Flanagan is just empathizing with the working-class women who felt left out by mainstream feminism. But don't get too comfortable! Here's what she has to say about Helen Gurley Brown:
The central tension of her work, and what has made it such a success, is that her ideas, launched at women who desire to gain or maintain a position in the middle-middle class emanate from the sort of person who gives that group the deepest and most reflexive shudder of all: pee-on-the-side-of-the-road white trash.
Somehow, the fact that women in Gurley Brown's family were known to pee on the side of the road led her to "embrace all aspects of the body, including the various functions and products of the alimentary tract." So that's why she was such a slut! But don't think there was anything glamorous about that! Far from being the "the newest glamour girls of our time," Flanagan imagines Gurley Brown's followers, the aforementioned "ladies of the steno pool," as follows: "Bertha in Accounting, with the hair on her chin; Dolores in Typing with the illegitimate son; Wanda the clerk, with the lift in one shoe." See? They may be after your husband, but don't worry: They aren't even pretty!
In the second part of her essay, Flanagan shifts gears completely and brings us to the funeral for a dead child. She writes:
I had known the boy well -- he had been a student at the school where I taught English -- but I hadn't loved him. In fact, I had never loved anyone yet, because I was years away from having a child of my own, and until you've done that you're just guessing about love, gesturing toward it, assuming it's the right name for a feeling you've had.
This is a low blow, even for her: Either you concede that mother love is the only kind that counts, or you are left pitting your own, different definition of love against the grief a woman feels at burying her child. And it recalls one of Flanagan's most famous lines: When she wrote of her own battle with cancer and concluded that her husband's kindness to her was a direct result of all her years of housewifery.
By now, Flanagan has us exactly where she wants us: contemplating the cruelty of a woman who would steal the husband of a woman who has both buried a child and battled cancer. Yes, it's the Rielle Hunter show, with hefty doses of venom all around. John Edwards is the guy who "has spent his life looking like a kid just on the verge of getting his first big boy haircut" while his wife, Elizabeth, is writing a tell-all in "a desperate attempt to protect her sweet, sad children from the influence of this erstwhile cokehead and present-day weasel after she has died."
I think I speak for most of us when I say that this particular affair and its fallout was one of the most unsettling in recent memory. But it's also a pretty extreme stand-in for the consequences of ordinary adultery and it seems diabolical to imply that this is the kind of thing Helen Gurley Brown had in mind when she urged single ladies to pursue sex, even if she didn't always keep a respectful distance from other women's husbands. But hey, implies Flanagan, what else do you expect from pee-on-the-side-of-the-road-white-trash?
John Edwards spoiled the Dave Matthews Band for me
The Sanford/Edward Mistress Throwdown Continues
