Jesse posted that the news about John Edwards having an affair is disappointing. I’m not so sure it is. In fact, I’m not so sure why we should care about Edwards’ extramarital affair (I had the same attitude about the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal). He’s a politician and his life is public, but his sex life is none of my concern. Making this public certainly doesn’t help his family, which is already dealing with a difficult situation. Millions and millions of people have affairs every year. Why do we care about Edwards? Cheating on his wife doesn’t diminish the work he has done on poverty and health care.
Cross posted at pushback.
2 comments:
I'm a regular reader who enjoys this blog very much, so I hate to make my inaugural comment on a post when I disagree with something, but here goes:
I actually think it is a big deal about Edwards cheating--not because the value of his public work is diminished by his personal indiscretions, but because he chose to campaign for president while at the same time leaving a huge skeleton in his closet to could be discovered at any time.
Imagine that he had won the nomination and this story just broke. It would have put the party into disarray, and it probably would have almost guaranteed a Republican victory in November. Or what if it broke right when he was taking office? It would have tainted his administration, and then we would have had two Dem presidents in a row having highly publicized affairs. Ultimately, I think it was irresponsible to the Presidency, the country, and his party to pursue the presidency while doing something that could jeopardize everything he was working for.
It's not the sex, it's the money. Edwards hired Hunter as a "documentary filmmaker" in order to keep her close by for... you know. At least $110k of the money donated to Edwards' PAC went to finance his affair. If there's some way in which that's excusable, I don't see it.
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