John Edwards’ affair: The unanswered questions

“We’ve seen this movie before,” said Rob Christensen in the Raleigh, N.C., News & Observer. A politician initially denies cheating on his wife, and then, when his denials and lies crumble under the weight of mounting evidence, goes on TV to engage in “sweaty contrition.” Bill Clinton did it, and so did Eliot Spitzer, Jim McGreevy, and far, far too many others to name. Former Democratic senator and presidential candidate John Edwards last week joined the long, sorry list of political husbands “behaving badly,” admitting he’d had an affair with Rielle Hunter, a 44-year-old filmmaker he’d hired in 2006 to make fawning campaign videos. After denying for a year several National Enquirer stories revealing the affair, Edwards sat down for a tense interview on ABC News in which he trotted out the usual contrite admission to “a very serious mistake.” He said he hoped to put the matter behind him, having secured the forgiveness of both “my wife and my lord.’’

If he wants this matter behind him, said Mickey Kaus in Slate.com, Edwards should try really coming clean. Hunter’s friends say she first met and befriended Edwards in 2005; seven months later, he used campaign funds to pay her $114,000 for videos he barely used. So when did the affair really begin—and end? Photos show that Hunter traveled with Edwards’ campaign at least until the final days of 2006, after he had supposedly confessed to Elizabeth and ended the affair. Edwards also claims he hadn’t any idea that Fred Baron, a Texas trial lawyer who was Edwards’ chief fund-raiser, has been paying Hunter $15,000 a month, and had moved her to a mansion in Santa Barbara, Calif., to get her away from the press. The biggest question is whether Edwards is the father of Hunter’s 5-month-old child, said Howard Gensler in the Philadelphia Daily News. That’s what the National Enquirer is claiming, even providing a photo of Edwards holding a baby—presumably during his rendezvous with Hunter several weeks ago at the Beverly Hilton hotel. On ABC, Edwards vigorously denied that the child is his, even offering to take a paternity test—a test that Hunter conveniently announced she doesn’t want. Perhaps that’s a payback for all those $15,000 checks.

The most troubling question of all, though, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial, is: How did Edwards think he could get away with this? At the time of his affair, Edwards was running for president. In the “brutal glare of our politics now,” candidates have little hope of keeping past transgressions secret, let alone ongoing extramarital affairs. Had Edwards won the nomination, this affair would have plunged his party into chaos, and cost the Democrats a chance at capturing the White House. That’s what makes this such “an egregious failure of judgment and character.”

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I find his so-called confession just as “creepy,’’ said Maureen Dowd in The New York Times. Edwards insisted that he cheated on Elizabeth only during 2006, when her breast cancer was in remission—and before it spread to her bones. He actually seemed to want brownie points for the “oncologically correct” timing of his infidelity, as well as for having the guts to blame his behavior on his own narcissism and self-absorption. From a man famous for spending $400 on a haircut, Edwards’ public admission to being a narcissist was itself “weirdly narcissistic.”

If you think Edwards is a narcissist, you ought to meet Rielle Hunter, said Sarah Miller in the Los Angeles Times. I did, through a friend in Los Angeles about five years ago. I found her to be quite a character—a failed screenwriter turned New Age enthusiast, who bubbled with talk of her yoga sessions, of meeting “old souls,” and of feeding off “the energy” of highly accomplished people. One day, at a party, Hunter told me that she was going to become “rich and famous” as a result of meeting “a rich and powerful man.” When I asked her how she planned to scale such lofty social heights, she smiled and replied that she was “going to manifest it” through the focused application of spiritual energy. At the time, I thought: “What a whack job.” But a few years later, she would meet presidential candidate John Edwards, and the two would become close. The rest, as they say, is history.