My commenters are right, and I was wrong about John Edwards's affair. While I'm for a more modern understanding of marriage, Edwards can't be my poster boy. He's heedlessly selfish and vain (and also a good politician and right on the issues). The most important information we ever got about Edwards's character was in 2004, when the Swiftboaters destroyed John Kerry and John Edwards stood there and didn't go out and savage them and George Bush. That was dispositive. I was angry at him then, and should have remembered it and not supported Edwards this time around.
Edwards's two other big character moments are the $400 haircut (along with the I'm so pretty video) and the affair. A year ago Glenn Greenwald, an otherwise-brilliant lawyer and blogger, cut Ben Smith of Politico a new one for reporting the $400 haircut. Said it was the sort of trivia that clogs up our political process. But Smith was right. The $400 haircut was important info and good gossipy-important journalism.
Why was he getting that $400 haircut? My wife, who always found it weird that Edwards was running when his wife had cancer, reminded me this morning of a British movie or teleplay we saw called The Politician's Wife. You can netflix it. (Personally I'm against netflix because I feel it means you have no more sex life.) In the movie the politician's long-suffering wife, played by Juliet Stevenson, watches her husband's affair with a floozie come out (before Sexism, there used to be a great expression: there's the girl you want to bring home, and the girl you want to have fun with), and the team of advisers and the penitent husband get her to sit still for it publicly, and weather the storm, to preserve his meteor. Up through that point, the movie feels very conventional. But it has a scorpion turn: the politician's wife decides to fuck all of them over in the end and destroy his career. Very English. Gail Collins hinted at this outcome in her column the other day, praising Elizabeth Edwards for not making an appearance. Guess I'm hoping Elizabeth pulls a politician's wife.
