Written by Rebecca Winson
Thursday, 28 January 2010 00:00
In a month where confidence in Obama’s Presidency continued to hit new lows, and, in the words of Jon Stewart, “the Kennedy legacy goes down to a naked guy who owns a truck”, the Democrats felt a new blow last week with the revelation that ex Senator John Edwards had fathered a child to his former employee Rielle Hunter.
Edwards – whose wife Elizabeth is suffering from terminal cancer – admitted to the affair in August 2008, but always denied fathering Rielle’s daughter Frances Quinn Hunter. Until recently, Edwards’s former aide Andrew Young had claimed paternity of the child. Young is now set to release a book next month detailing Edwards’s campaign trail and the affair itself. It was presumably due to this that Edwards admitted paternity of Frances Hunter. “I am Quinn’s father,” Edwards declared in his statement. “It was wrong for me to ever deny she was my daughter and hopefully one day, when she understands, she will forgive me.”
Edwards’s revelation immediately brought moral and political scrutiny upon the Democratic Party and Obama’s administration, then in the process of starting relief programmes in shattered Haiti. Although Edwards plays no part in the Obama administration, or the senate – he retired in 2004 – he is nevertheless a prominent Democrat. He was John Kerry’s running mate in the 2004 presidential election, and mounted a short lived campaign to be presidential candidate in 2008. His name was rumoured to be on Obama’s vice presidential short list. He has campaigned tirelessly to end poverty, raise the minimum wage, promote racial and social equality and help the homeless. He is pro-choice and was brave enough to admit he was mistaken to vote for the war in Iraq. The day after his admission, he was in Haiti, helping out with rescue efforts. For the bunch of rabid Republicans currently hell bent on hampering every bill the Obama administration tries to pass, the revelation of Edwards affair was pure gold. Even liberals – a group currently wavering and splitting in opinion polls – were perturbed. New York Times columnist David Carr wrote: “it would be hard to argue that the body politic is not enriched by revelations that Mr Edwards is not who we thought he was.” There is no doubting that the Edwards affair could do significant damage.
For not only was Edwards revealed to be as immoral and as human as the rest of us, allegations began to appear that he had misused campaign funds. A federal grand jury is currently investigating if any funding was used to cover up the affair, and Hunter has testified in front of them. Frederick Baron told ABC News in 2008 that he had been providing financial assistance to both Hunter and Young without Edwards’ knowledge. Even if this is true, the fact that Baron was Edwards’ campaign finance chairman makes this a little hard to stomach, and don’t the majorly right wing American press just know it. While the rest of the world concentrated on Haiti and the global recession, Fox News chose to headline Edwards affair on the front page of its website. Meanwhile, ABC was smeared with everything from a timeline of the affair to comment pieces on terminally ill Elizabeth’s bravery.
Irreparable damage has been done the reputation of one of America’s leading left wingers, and hence to his party. At a time when Haiti proved the Democrats were in stark contrast to Bush’s Katrina-ignoring administration, the American Left’s media coverage boiled down to an illegitimate child and a lying Presidential candidate. Thanks to the right wing press, the small matter of an ex senator’s slip up will most likely reverberate for years to come.
Friday 30 July 2010
