I don't think voters really care about infidelity. In 1992, Bill Clinton won the Presidential election despite obvious infidelities. This is an ad from 2005, when Jon Corzine ran for Governor of New Jersey (I worked on this campaign and kept all the commercials). His ex-wife was featured in attack ads against him, and he ended up crushing his opponent by ten points because voters didn't care. Voters are not stupid or puritanical, and if John Edwards' wife forgave him the voters probably would too. So I don't think that a revelation of an affair would have mattered if Edwards were the nominee.
Now, that's not to say that it's not a horribly embarrassing situation. It is, and I feel for their whole family, especially Elizabeth, who has been nothing but wonderful to us in the netroots. But the reaction among this so-called liberal community makes me genuinely uncomfortable. Elizabeth Edwards put up a statement on Dailykos about the whole episode, with 1600 laudatory comments discussing her 'pure' heart, an outpouring blessing her virginal soul. I know there are a lot of Elizabeth Edwards fans out there, so it's worth looking at the politics of what she said. Here's the gist.
John made a terrible mistake in 2006. The fact that it is a mistake that many others have made before him did not make it any easier for me to hear when he told me what he had done. But he did tell me. And we began a long and painful process in 2006, a process oddly made somewhat easier with my diagnosis in March of 2007. This was our private matter, and I frankly wanted it to be private because as painful as it was I did not want to have to play it out on a public stage as well. Because of a recent string of hurtful and absurd lies in a tabloid publication, because of a picture falsely suggesting that John was spending time with a child it wrongly alleged he had fathered outside our marriage, our private matter could no longer be wholly private.
The pain of the long journey since 2006 was about to be renewed.
Lots of people are furious about John Edwards having an affair, and I hear two basic arguments. The first is that he betrayed his family, and one should not have respect for such a man. I believe that this is private matter and I have no right to judge. Marriages are complicated and so is cancer, and if Elizabeth Edwards has said that this is a private matter, that's enough for me.
The second argument is that it is unforgiveable that Edwards created such risk and betrayed his supporters and his cause by putting his candidacy in such jeopardy. He could have been the Democratic nominee, so says this crew. Now, I don't buy this, I said above, but there's no evidence and can be no evidence either way. Realize though that Elizabeth Edwards knew about this affair in 2006, and they jointly decided he would run for President. So if there's a political sin, it belongs to both of them. Now, I don't necessarily think it's the smartest thing in the world to have an affair and then run for President, but it's also not necessarily a career killer. If Edwards were the nominee and this came out, depending on how it came out, he could probably handle it. That's what political campaigns are about - managing the flow of information - both good and bad - coming out about you and your opponent.
So anyway, one frustrating part of this whole situation is how the cult of personality piece is playing out in an extremely misogynistic and invasive way, how Elizabeth Edwards is seen as the wounded woman deserving of chivalrous praise while John Edwards is considered the betraying scornful husband. That is just lame. She's not a possession, and he's not a manly saint. If she asks for privacy and a non-judgmental pose, then give it to them. They worked this out, or at least that's what she says. So let them deal with their marriage. And politically, if he betrayed their followers, she betrayed their followers as well, so hold them both accountable if you feel so strongly about his bad judgment. Anything less is just residual sexism.
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