Did anyone seriously doubt that Edwards had been screwing around? Did
it matter? (Bipartisan alert: I say that as someone who's perfectly
happy that Larry Craig decided to stick around. His only mistakes were pleading guilty to toe-tapping and sounding like a schmuck in his public statements.)
In Edwards' case, it took a caller to Howie Carr's show on WRKO Radio (AM 680) yesterday to snap me back to reality. Her point:
If the media had ripped the bark off Edwards last fall, when he was
still a semi-viable presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton would be
the Democratic nominee today.
Good grief. She was right. While Barack Obama was winning Iowa, Clinton was coming in third, behind Edwards. Though she came back and won the New Hampshire primary the following week, she never really recovered from that devastating
opening round. And until Edwards dropped out, he and Clinton split the
anti-Obama vote. (I will grant you that these things change quickly.
Just a few months earlier, Obama and Edwards were seen as splitting the anti-Clinton vote.)
Now,
I haven't gone back and re-examined the post-New Hampshire results, so
my logic may not be impeccable. Edwards did fade very quickly, so there
probably weren't too many Clinton votes that he soaked up. But to the
extent that he delayed the emergence of the Obama-versus-Clinton
steel-cage match, he helped Obama enormously. And it was in those early
weeks that Obama won the nomination.
The Edwards Escape
John Edward's affair with a campaign staffer was first reported in the heat of the Democratic primary, but most media outlets failed to follow up. Some might think it makes no difference, but this writer explores one remarkable possibile outcome of an Edwards affair expose last winter: Hillary Clinton winning the nomination.
Is this the woman who made the difference in Hillary Clinton's campaign?
