John Edwards
His trial has been declared a mistrial.
The personal is not the political. His wife seemed like a good person, but I could care less. FDR cheated on his wife. JFK screwed hookers in the White House pool while married.
The facts about John Edwards that I care about are these:
1) He was the only major politician who made a big issue of poverty.
2) He was the only major politician to say he didn’t believe in the war on terror.
3) the reason the affair came to light is because he stopped paying her off, which he did because he was no longer in the race.
The children who thought that having a black president, despite the fact that he was, on the policies, worse than EVERY other democratic nominee, are why the US is so fucked right now. (And yes, he was worse on policy than even Hilary Clinton. Don’t believe me, believe Paul Krugman.)
Edwards trial was a politically motivated show trial. The goal was to make sure that everyone thinks that there was no left wing candidate in the election, and that Obama is the best you can ever do. Well, that and a personal hatred, as best I can tell. Obama refused to cut a deal with Edwards for support. What did Edwards ask for in exchange for support? Help for the poor.
Obama did cut a deal with Clinton, of course. He let her have State, so she could influence foreign policy, the ONE policy area where she was to his right.
Comments are closed.
Perhaps I’m speaking out of turn here, but I’m guess you could NOT care less about Elizabeth Edwards being a nice person.
The thing that really pissed me off about the media coverage of the 2008 Dem primary (specifically before the Iowa caucus) was that any Black voice (and there were quite a number of us) that supported Edwards was completely shut out.
I’m only one remove from both Edwards (ie. I never met either, but I know lots of people who have). Of course that’s true about most US pols, given my previous job.
Elizabeth Edwards seems to have been a good person, and John Edwards treated her shabbily. Disgracefully, even. But I don’t have a personal relationship with either (or didn’t) so, no, I don’t care. The question is “would he have been a good president, or at least better than Clinton or Obama?”
Again, I don’t know, but I think there’s a good chance he would have been. The devastating political critique of Edwards, to me, is that he’s a phony. I don’t know if that’s the case or not, some people I know think he is, others think he wasn’t, or rather, not too much of one.
Plenty of good, even great politicians have cheated on their wives. That’s too bad, but I don’t see it as anything we /should/ care about, or not enough to affect our votes. Should America have re-elected Hoover because FDR was having an affair?
To me, the 2008 election was an elections the Dems would have had to completely fumble to lose. So there was no reason to go for “electability”, the question should have been good policy. Edwards was better than Clinton or Obama on every issue I can think of, domestic or foreign.
To be honest, I blame the unions. They were gutless. They should have gone whole-hog for Edwards, because if he’d won, he’d have owed them. Obama fucks unions every chance he gets, he despises them, he knows they’ll support him no matter what.
Largely agree but re: 2) he did vote for the Iraq war resolution. Any subsequent mea culpas pale in comparison. That said, hard to imagine he’d relish the kill list/assorted civil liberties abuses that the current decider has.
He voted for it, but unlike Clinton he said it was a mistake. Obama wasn’t in Congress, but in 2004 said he would have voted for it. (And let’s be honest, given his record, no one can argue with a straight face he wouldn’t have voted for it.)
Edwards changed a lot on policy between 2004 and 8. The question is, was it real, or real enough?
The answer is “I don’t know”. But at least he said the right things and seemed to mean them. And he was good on poverty even in 2004, so I think that was real.
The unions have sold out the working class in this country since Taft-Hartley was passed in the late 1940s. Systemic Disorder had a terrific post on Taft-Hartley. I never knew that, according to the post on Systemic Disorder:
“The anti-labor drive in Congress came to focus on two bills: The House bill was introduced by Representative Fred Hartley (R-New Jersey), a right-winger who had been friendly to Hitler Germany and imperial Japan right up to the eve of World War 2. A roughly similar bill was introduced in the Senate by Senator Robert A. Taft (R-Ohio), the ultraconservative, wealthy son of a U.S. president who had political ambitions of his own. But both bills were written by lobbyists for corporations like General Electric, Allis-Chalmers, Inland Steel, J.I. Case, and Chrysler, and the Rockefeller interests.”
Sure wish there was a preview option on your blog, Ian.
The URL for the Systemic Disorder post on Taft-Hartley is here:
https://systemicdisorder.wordpress.com/2012/05/23/the-taft-hartley-act-neutrality-as-a-weapon/
Alcuin – thanks for the link!
So who can we throw our support behind now? Who do we try and draft to run in 2016? Who’s the best player on the bench?
I was for Edwards at the beginning of the 2008 campaign. Even if he didn’t believe in what he said, if he had won on that platform that might have encouraged someone who did believe in it to run on it. Oh well. Now we have Mr. Drone.
“And let’s be honest, given his record, no one can argue with a straight face he wouldn’t have voted for it.”
Jesus, I think we can now unequivocally say he’d have blown Chick-Daney on national teebee if it’d have built up his bonafides with the serious peeps.
But speaking of children, there are plenty about. How many otherwise sensible folks who still argue that Hillary would have been better or that Bill was the 2nd coming of FDR. Seems like many of us embrace the fantasy. I say this as a prostrate one-time Obama voter. It’s left such a horrid stain that I can’t imagine ever voting again.
“But speaking of children, there are plenty about. How many otherwise sensible folks who still argue that Hillary would have been better or that Bill was the 2nd coming of FDR. ”
Typical Obamabot, even in their regrets, they still use the right wing tactics, like saying the people who were right all along were right but for the wrong reasons. I don’t know anybody who thought she was that great, but she was definitely HELLA better than Obama, who started betraying his solemn promises on FISA as soon as he had the nomination sewn up. And if that wasn’t blatantly obvious to “children” like you by March of 2008, then you had no business making grown up decisions about voting.
I supported her only because I thought she was the second worse candidate left in the race and it wasn’t even close (I already knew Obama was more in a league with Bush and Cheney and Lieberman than with even the dregs of the NeoLibs like the Clintons), and by the time my state’s primary came around, 2nd worse out of 2 didn’t leave a lot of choice.
I thought Edwards was maybe someone I could have supported, and as Ian pointed out, at least he *said* a few of the right things – although I never got the sense that it was more than posturing, perhaps very sincere, or perhaps just superficial (whereas Obama’s posturings have always been glaringly insincere). But in hindsight, I don’t really have any reason to think he would have been worth a shit. Most likely his scandals would have made Clinton’s look like nothing in comparison. Total fucking idiot thinking he could get away with a blatant affair, a baby and a transparently false cover-up (Clinton got impeached for a crappy blow job and some evasive sophistry. HTF did Edwards or his deceased wife think he could pull that one off?). Plus, godonlyknowswhatelse he was up to in the nonsexual scandals department. I hate when folks extrapolate from someone’s sexual indiscretions or even recklessness to pronounce their judgement suspect in every area. But in Edward’s case, I’m sorely tempted. Anyway, he would have been a lame duck before his first state of the union address, so any good intentions he might have had would have been largely irrelevant. Nancy and Harry would have led his impeachment. Not sure if a lame duck presidency would be marginally better or worse than what we got with Obama, but I’m pretty sure it’s not worth regretting the missed opportunity.
I guess I owe Hillary an apology, since now it looks like she was really only the 3rd shittiest shit sandwich on the menu. And who knows? Once she got the Oval Office, she might have decided to revive paleoliberalism with an Eleanor R seance. And forgodsake, only an Obamabot would think she would not have evened the score with her political enemies with a righteous attorney general and a justice department full of attack dog US attorneys, instead of see-no-evil-other-than-whistleblowers Eric Holder and Bush’s USA’s who refused to resign? Even if you couldn’t see thru Obama’s bullshit in 2008, the number one reason to vote for Hillary was the fact that the R’s were scared shitless of her, whereas they actually seemed to welcome Obama’s candidacy, even saying lots nice things about him before while Hillary was still in the race.
And as for Elizabeth, too bad about the cancer and all that, but she seems like she was just as arrogant and delusional as her husband. I get the impression they both got carried away believing their own press.
“And as for Elizabeth, too bad about the cancer and all that, but she seems like she was just as arrogant and delusional as her husband. I get the impression they both got carried away believing their own press.”
I believe the above and that they believed the rich were different than you and me. He talked a good game and I would have voted for him but he was toast before he got to California. It’s hard to imagine anyone involved in that kind of insane relationship and cover up was emotionally mature enough for the President, i.e., keeping focused. I don’t particularly care for the idea of infidelity in marriage but if done by public figures, it should be discrete and not on a very public campaign trail. Duh. And he got caught badly. He was too tained and appeared too insane for Obama to have given him a cabinet post. Edwards blew his own game and credibility to be able to carry his message about poverty anywhere. Kinda like Spitzer — good politics but too stupid (reckless) to survive in this climate. If you want to be an effective whistleblower or truthteller to power you have to be clean. That’s just the facts of the game, unfortunately.
Guest, I’d like to revise my offhand remark. Mentally strike-through the “otherwise sensible folks” part.
Actually, from what I know, Elizabeth really was a left winger on a lot of issues.
As for Clinton, yes, the fact that she was vindictive was a big reason to vote for her in my book: she would not have kept Bush’s USAs, for example. And she would have gone after her enemies. And that’s good. And on foreign policy, well, I really don’t think she’d have been much worse than Obama is. If they really disagreed, she wouldn’t be at State.
She’d also be a lot better for women’s rights, which is one of the few things I’m sure she actually believes in.
They’re all a bunch of shitbags. Just because these power hungry bastards say they’re for something or other doesn’t mean they are really for it. That’s 101….like the Law of Gravity. Hillary Clinton was once a Barry Goldwater girl…..and look at her now…..she’s now the administrative assistant to Jabba the Hutt. What that means is that these pseudo sociopaths will be whatever they have to be to seize and maintain status and authority.
I agree it’s ludicrous that Edwards was ever brought to trial, considering the egregious violations that are occurring everywhere, every minute of the day. There is obviously a vendetta involved, and he was such an easy target. Remember, he’s a class action trail lawyer, and some folks in high places don’t take kindly to being pick-pocketed. Perhaps a long-held grudge by one of his many “kills” got what they believed to be vindication.
Either way, I could care less about John Edwards or any of these slimy slobs. They’re all just a cast of characters in this piss poor rendition of ancient oriental theater.
Great post except: Why would I believe Krugman? He’s a neo-librul Democrap hack.
“Hillary Clinton would have gone after her enemies”
Considering that she had perhaps no bigger enemy than Richard Mellon Scaife, and she made nice and drank tea with him when she thought it would help her career, I find this very difficult to believe.
So who can we get behind? Who is our candidate in 2016? Assuming Obama doesn’t suspend the Constitution, that is.
Why is there simple clarion truth here and different grades of bullshit most everywhere else?
Thanks yet again Ian.
Also – regarding this bit of news -
“Obama refused to cut a deal with Edwards for support. What did Edwards ask for in exchange for support? Help for the poor.”
Do you recall where you read this info? Sounds like a source I’d like to bookmark.
Hillary vindictive? Now you tell me.
Thanks, Ian, for this post. I came out of some sort of hibernation in 2004 to work for the Edwards campaign in the Iowa Caucus. Never had done anything like it before. I had read a speech of Edwards the summer before as I was researching the candidates and a phrase jumped out at me. “It is time to reward work over wealth.” The more I researched, the more I liked about the message. For me it was always about the message. It was an exciting time in Des Moines. We were underdogs and almost beat Kerry. The power of TPTB came down hard but the momentum was ours. Even Dan Baltz later told me that if we had had another week, we would have won.
Personally, everybody I met in the small group of volunteers were good people. There were lots of union people and working people. And lots of trial lawyers and public defenders. But I accidentally ended up at the same hotel as Edwards and his friends. I didn’t even know he was there at first. But I met his law partners, college friends, and Judge Farmer and his wife. Judge Farmer was the judge in the somewhat famous Lakey case where the little girls insides were sucked into a faulty pool drain. He told the story of how the courtroom hushed when it was discovered that there had been many cases before that one that the company had settled out of court. He said that Edwards’ summation lasted 1 1/2 hrs and he used no notes. Farmer said it was like nothing he had ever seen on the bench. He and his wife were in their seventies and came all the way from N. Carolina to help. It was 20º and they went door to door like the rest of us.
Maybe I’ll finally write this all up. I worked for him again in 2008. Again because of the message and because he was moving ever left. His “The Game is Rigged” speech is one of the most powerful injustice inequality speeches I have ever heard. I saw a man on a journey. A flawed man, yes. That was always apparent if you really looked. But we all are. Yes, he was a politician and you have to have a certain cockiness to think you can run a country better than anybody else. And yes, I didn’t like his hair either but I was willing to overlook that.
I am now done with electoral politics because I saw close up what becomes of populists. My friend Margot worked for Jesse Jackson in 1988, the last time before 2004 that I cared about elections. Jesse had gone to the hills of West Virginia and Margot said that the white people came out to see him and held his hand and wept that someone had finally come since Bobbie Kennedy. Edwards was the only one since to go there. Jesse won 11 primaries and they brought him down too with the rumor of sex scandals.
The campaign and the people I met opened my eyes to working people’s issues and the deep flaws in the way this country operates. It made me realize that Martin Luther King was right. If you solved poverty, you solved everything. You solved environmental issues and issues of war and peace. Everything. I will never regret my time spent working on those campaigns because it made me wake up and smell the alfalfa.
For you conspiracy theorists out there (and I now am one), read Russ Baker’s take on Edwards last week. http://www.alternet.org/story/155461/why_do_sex_scandals_destroy_democrats_but_not_republicans/
@someofparts. I’ll try to scrounge around for the info on the deal. I was told at the time that Edwards asked Obama to include a trip to Appalachia, probably West Virginia or Virginia to address poverty in the upcoming campaign. Didn’t happen. Surprise. Surprise.
oops bad html to close the blockquote
If I had wheels, I’d be a trolley.
—-
During the primary (and even still), I thought the differences between Obama and Clinton were negligible, however, I opted for Obama because I foolishly thought “well, at least with Obama in office, we avoid a staff full of Clintonistas.” Ah – foolish me.
Now I can’t conceive of ever voting D again. And no, I never voted for R for national office.
But who can we vote FOR?
Who can you vote FOR?
How about this:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-axd-OBrni6Y/TsUsRFc4A7I/AAAAAAAABEo/lb2c_c6l3gA/s1600/eggplant.jpg
The result will be the same.
Maybe round up all the French-speaking Americans and start our own socialist party.
Someone at another website noted that when Obama-rama guts Social Security and Medicare the Democrats will be finished.
Coherent, organized people might do something with an opportunity like that.
I think an eggplant would be an improvement. It’s not old enough to run for president, unfortunately.
Vote for Jill Stein (Green) or Rocky Anderson (Justice) or John Wolfe, Jr. (D) or Darcy Richardson (D). Any of them would be worlds better than Rombama or Obamney.
In 2008, I supported Kucinich. But he dropped out, so I supported Dodd, a sort of career liberal. I believed Edwards to be insincere. When it was between Obama and Rodham Clinton, I chose Rodham Clinton for the reasons Ian states. She was to his left on domestic issues and about the same on foreign policy. I did believe she was the best bet to have channeled Eleanor Roosevelt as has been suggested. I did not think she would have been a rewarmed Bill Clinton. I believed the accounts of her disagreements with him over Welfare and other policies he championed when his back was against the wall.
Water under the bridge. I’m voting for Stein.
I read all the goddamn policy releases during the campaign since it was my job. Of the three major candidates Edwards was the leftmost, but Hilary was to the left of Obama, just slightly, but noticeably. If you don’t want to believe Krugman, believe me.
“They’re all a bunch of shitbags.”
Jesus! Don’t say things like that when I’m drinking coffee. Now I need a new keyboard.
Thanks, Alcuin, for the Systemic Disorder link. His post on the Argentina default is an excellent summary as is his essay “Where does Profit Come From?”
Did you here that a new study shows that people in Congress now talk like high school sophomores? Like LOL at that.
So voting for Eggplant is not too far off.
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/onpolitics/post/2012/05/congress-speaks-dumb-sophomores-sunlight-foundation-/1#.T8kkgL_VqkI
Better link right to the Sunlight Foundation sight: http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/05/21/grade-level-congress/
Great charts!
From my FaceBook Posting on the subject
File Under: “Be careful what you wish for…”
I don’t know anybody who likes John Edwards in 2012, but the case against him could be brought against anybody who ever ran for political office.
Briefly, the FEC doesn’t consider the extortion payment a campaign contribution, but the prosecutor decided Federal Election Law applied, but federal standards as to what that law was…did not. Thus the jury instruction is not to determine if the extortion payment was for “express advocacy” [the FEC standard], but to look into the mind of the contributor and determine if the monies paid in the extortion could be construed to be “for the purpose of influencing an election…You [the jury] will consider any evidence about the intent, motivation and goals of Ms. Mellon…The government does not have to prove that the sole or only purpose of the money was to influence the election. People rarely act with a single purpose in mind.”
Under that standard, you could convict an ham sandwich.
Later…
The Jury was 10:2 with most feeling the case never should have brought to court and the holdouts wanting to convict him of something…meanwhile nobody has been charged in the ongoing mult-trillion dollar thefts of taxpayers money by Wall Street.
“Actually, from what I know, Elizabeth really was a left winger on a lot of issues.” Talking a good game on the issues is different from not being an asshole. From what I’ve read about them, they were both the kind of assholes that rich people can become. Careless people. Rules are for other people. She was actually the one with the big $$. However, I believe the point of the article was that it was politically motivated and that appears true and disturbing. Unfortunately, there’s just no one to root for.
Hillary lost because of her calculating vote on the war in Iraq and because folks were sick of the Clintons and wanted something new. I couldn’t look at Bill and not think of his repeal of Glass -Steagel or the CFTC “Modernization” Act. I agree, Hillary would have been much better on domestic issues. It’s hard to reconcile how we have arrived at this nadir but here we are.
I’ve been doing a lot of deep background on Obama of late, stuff going back to even before he went to the Illinois statehouse. When you look at enough of this stuff, you start to notice things that happened around the same time but don’t particularly seem related. Then you look again and think, well wasn’t it convenient that the one thing worked out the way it did right when that other thing was happening. You see a lot of this with Obama. It’s not that you can link the stuff, but there do seem to be way too many of these things with Obama. You start to think that there’s something else there, if you could only put your finger on it.
My guess, and it’s nothing but a guess, is that someone with a very broad reach was rocking this guy’s cradle all the way along. Not in a birther kind of way; that stuff’s goofy. But somewhere along the way, someone either brought this guy to Chicago with a career plan for him in mind, or identified him soon afterwards. But it would have had to be someone very big; big enough to steal him away from every elite law firm in the country.
“big enough to steal him away from every elite law firm in the country”
Do we know for sure that the big law firms wanted Obama? His knowledge of and respect for the law are shaky, at best.
You might find this interesting, about the right wing’s attempt to “colonize” Black American politics:
http://blackagendareport.com/content/corey-booker-and-hard-rights-colonization-black-american-politics
@ Montana Maven: – Conspiracy theorist? Hardly. I never had the time to read it, but I bought an interesting book, by Timothy Melley, entitled Empire of Conspiracy. Essentially, his thesis is that conspiracy theorists exhibit something called “agency panic”. I’m going from memory here (I read a few pages of the book), but agency panic is rooted in a sense of powerlessness and fear and conspiracy theories reinforce and justify that sense of powerlessness and fear. It’s an interesting book. There is quite a difference between believing in the “international Jewish bankers”, the Bilderbergs, and the other actors that hang out at Alex Jones’ site and a realistic appraisal of the methods that the elite use to destroy their opponents.
Krugman is not a neoliberal. Yes, he’s generally a free trader, but not a deregulator or privatizer, nor is he in denial over the distribution effects of free trade, in fact inequality is a big concern in his writings, which is hardly the hallmark of a neoliberal “make the pie bigger yada yada” type.
Montana Maven – That Russ Baker link was a real eye-opener. Thanks.
You rightly stated that Mr Edwards was the only candidate to address poverty and take a strong anti war stance during the run up to the last presidential election.His fall from grace had nothing to do with his politics but fall he did and rarely have I been so disappointed pondering what could have been.Instead Democrats elected a center right corporate lackey who has squandered almost all of the opportunities and good will afforded him in this endless desire to please the hard right ideologues and wall street vultures who helped mire the world in the economic bog we all now struggle to find purchase in. Once Edwards was dispatched in a corporate media ass stomping (get that union loving commie fucker!) I did my best to try to convince people that Mrs.Clinton was a far better choice than Obama,but alas everyone had already hopped on the party train to Sillytown.