Several weeks ago, I read about the Edwards/Enquirer story at Perez Hilton. Now, I love tawdry affairs and have been one of the first in the fray to bash other political sluts. Hello, Senator Wide Stance! But I decided to keep quiet on this one for several reasons.
1) As soon as that story hit, Edwards was taken off the VP shortlist. Boom. His career was over. Therefore, this affair moved from being a public interest, fair game for ridicule topic to being a private, off limits story.
2) The way that Edwards got caught was so humiliating that I still cringe thinking about it. He was chased by Enquirer reporters into a bathroom. Ew.
3) I really did feel sorry for Elizabeth. She’s a highly likable person with cancer, and she didn’t need any more humiliation.
4) I was away on vacation when everybody started talking about it. (And wasn’t it killing me?)
So, let me talk about it now.
Edwards is a king sized dirt-bag. I just want to say that unequivocally. I read some bloggers who said that he wasn’t as much as of a dirt-bag as Senator Wide Stance. I would say that it’s pretty damn close. And then all the continued lying and parsing… Yuckeroo.
Like Gail Collins, I think that scandals should be relevant to the public. Collins says that "often a sex scandal suggests a politician has gone out of control in other ways."
There are other reasons why we should care. A politician who lies to his wife will lie to me the voter. A politician who cheats on his wife with cancer has no moral compass. A politician who thinks he can’t get caught has lost sense of reality. I don’t expect much from a politician, but a sense of reality could come in handy.
What is with all the political scandals lately? Are politicians more dirtbaggish than the general male population? Are all men having affairs, but regular guys don’t have the Enquirer reporters tailing them, so we just don’t know about it? Is there something about political office that warps the male brain?
Apt. 11d 
Politicians having affairs lately? What about FDR? Kennedy? King? Clinton? Jesse Jackson? It’s seems to be par for the course. Lust must be a huge component of power.
I think that Edwards was pretty damn brazen about it, having the affiar on the campaign trail, hiring his girlfriend to make a documentary when she had never made one in her life. The denials about the ties to payments and paternity only make it worse. What an ass. As someone said “I would have cut off a limb to get a decent president in the white house, but he couldn’t even keep it in his pants.” I mean what a time to choose to be unfaithful.
Our marriage is over 20 years, as are most of our friend’s, just like the Edwards. There have been a few that have fallen apart because of affairs in the last couple of years. It’s not just politicians, though they seem to do it on a bigger scale (hookers, pay-offs, love children) than the average guy hanging around neighborhood block party.
And what Larry Craig did, is completely different. The man is in so much denial about his sexuality that he doesn’t have the guts to have a real affair where he might emotionally connect to another person. He just has anonymous sexual encounters so that he can still cling to the illusion he is straight. I truly feel sorry for him because of all the self-loathing he must feel. Heavy duty denial that lead him to act like a total ass about the wide stance arrest. He should have resigned, gone into therapy and lived a private life.
I guess what they both have in common is their enormous egos that let them think they can get away with lies like this.
LikeLike
In the case of Craig, I used to think along the lines of Lisa V, especially when he said he was resigning. However, once he tried to say that he wasn’t fully informed when he plead guilty, he lost me completely.
As for Edwards, I don’t buy the “He’s not a public figure anymore” argument. We’re less than four years removed from him being a vice presidential candidate and only several months from him running for the president. To me this means that the press and public can reasonably expect that Edwards is interested in running for office in 20012 or later. And, that press shouldn’t withhold information from the people who were so recently inventing time, money, and effort to support his candidacy. If you could stop press coverage of your bad points simply by resigning or withdrawing, there is a great deal of relevant information that the public would miss.
LikeLike
Yeah, I’m glad that the Enquirer and Perez Hilton covered the story. I’m glad that Edwards is out of the game. I just didn’t think it necessary for the entire press and the blogosphere to cover it. A few sources were enough to do the job of informing the public. Everybody piling in would have been overkill.
LikeLike
MH,
Exactly. He was a public figure and a viable VP up until a few minutes ago. The reason that he isn’t now is that he got caught. And less than a year ago, he was a very viable presidential candidate. You don’t get more public.
“And, that press shouldn’t withhold information from the people who were so recently inventing time, money, and effort to support his candidacy.”
It seems pretty close to fraud to be collecting millions of dollars in campaign contributions and volunteer work, while simultaneously indulging in extracurricular activities that could render all of these efforts worthless. Also, it makes the people who trusted you, idealized you, and defended you look like morons.
No matter what JFK and MLK got away with back in the day (and that was very much a man’s world), contemporary American politicians are living under completely different rules. Being able to recognize the realities of this new environment and navigate safely within them is every bit as much a qualification for high office as knowing the name of the president of Kazakhstan.
For the record, I think a 3-5 year political time out for people with recently publicized coke habits, hooker habits, and mistresses is about right. The current redemption-in-15 minutes paradigm is a bit too fast.
LikeLike
I just didn’t think it necessary for the entire press and the blogosphere to cover it.
As Amy wrote, “He was a public figure and a viable VP up until a few minutes ago.” And you would prefer to limit the outlets for transmission of this story?
If only the Enquirer and Perez Hilton had covered this story, it might not have reached the broad audience that should know the truth about Edwards. He might still be a viable politician with a only slightly shady story in his past.
You may be well intentioned in wishing limited press coverage of certain stories, but I’m just relieved that people who think as you do are becoming less important in deciding what news I receive.
LikeLike
Donning tin hat:
I think the affairs were always happening. Lust/power/desire/yaddayadda. I think that what’s different now is that there are some really nasty people with access to a lot of information on their political opponents and they’re not afraid to use it.
LikeLike
“I think that what’s different now is that there are some really nasty people with access to a lot of information on their political opponents and they’re not afraid to use it.”
Alternately, when the press and politicians were almost all men, the press would cover up for erring political husbands out of a sense of male solidarity. A perhaps related detail is that Americans today are much more negative about adultery than they were fifty years ago (at least that’s what Frum says in his book on the 70s).
LikeLike
Laura, I wasn’t faulting you for not covering Edwards. Nobody expects an individual blogger to cover everything.
Also, I think the piling on had less to do with the media (and blogs) and everything to do with how Edwards handled the situation (deny, deny, behave very suspiciously, deny, deny, grudging-almost-certainly-incomplete-admission, deny, …).
As for your questions, I doubt political office has any effect on male fidelity. Any correlation is probably spurious. My guess is that wealth, power, and charisma are the important factors.
LikeLike
Here’s Joanne Jacobs on how Edwards recently cut off funding for a scholarship program:
“For three years, students at a rural North Carolina high school have planned for college, encouraged by the promise of scholarships for all. But John Edwards has withdrawn financial support for College for Everyone, which “he once promised would be a model for the nation under an Edwards presidency, reports the News Observer.
“Edwards’ foundation raised money to pay for the cost of one year’s tuition, fees and books at a public college.
“Patrick Miller, Greene County school superintendent, said the Edwards program helped raise the college-application rate from about 26 percent several years ago to 94 percent this year.
“Supporters say it was always meant to be a three-year pilot, an odd time frame for a program aimed at high school students. The kids who started ninth grade taking college-prep courses to earn the scholarship will discover that they’re on their own financially.
“If Edwards had won the Democratic nomination, he’d still be talking about College for Everyone — and funding it. But now his backers are spending more than half the cost of a year’s scholarships for every Greene County grad to support Edwards’ mistress and baby in a $3 million mansion. Throw in the payoff for the alleged baby daddy and his wife and kids and . . . Well, they’re not living on macaroni and cheese.
“I’d suspected Edwards was a phony who adopted populism as a campaign gimmick, not because he really cares about the poor and working class. It bothered me that he spent millions on a huge mansion and that he used his anti-poverty foundation to create jobs for his campaign staffers. I guess we’ll see whether he actually does anything to help the poor, now that his political ambitions are kaput.”
Ouch.
LikeLike
“A politician who lies to his wife will lie to me the voter.”
Not necessarily. The sex drive is a great deal stronger than the political instinct.
“A politician who cheats on his wife with cancer has no moral compass.”
I agree. So why have we heard so little about Newt Gingrich or John McCain in this context ?
CF: McCain’s first marriage, she was crippled in a car crash, so he divorced her for Cindy.
Newt is a serial adulterer, starting with serving divorce papers on his first wife in hospital after her operation for cancer: but it doesn’t appear to have affected his career in the least.
Also note that in 2006 Elizabeth Edward’s cancer was gone, according to her doctors: it only returned in 2007. So this isn’t even relevant to Edwards.
“A politician who thinks he can’t get caught has lost sense of reality.”
see response to first point. It’s sex, so has very little to do with reality.
This is the only point worth considering: and that only in the USA. No other democratic country takes the sexual peccadilloes of its politicians so seriously.
LikeLike
The scholarship case shows how in Edwards’ case, an unsatisfactory private life wound up affecting public behavior, impacting dozens of innocent people. (On the other hand, even though Edwards didn’t follow through, those kids were positively affected by the promise of scholarships, which made them try harder and set their sights higher.)
LikeLike
How is Newt’s presidential campaign doing?
LikeLike
Doug,
Either Edwards isn’t telling the truth when he says it ended in 2006, or the baby isn’t his. Keep in mind that:
1. Edwards repeatedly denied the affair before admitting it.
2. Visiting a woman with whom you’ve been accused of having an affair, after you’d ended the affair, would seem ridiculous unless you had a motive stronger than “I’m going to see a baby that’s not mine.”
LikeLike
How is McCain’s presidential campaign doing?
“A politician who cheats on his wife with cancer has no moral compass.” (or I guess that doesn’t play if your wife is just crippled by a car accident?
I am personally becoming convinced that affairs are an occupational hazard for powerful/successful men, a point a social scientist friend of mine tried to argue after the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal. He argued that he’d expect that pretty much all the senators/presidential candidates (to use a particular group) would have had affairs, on the grounds that opportunity would produce adultery.
I’m hoping that we actually do elect a non-adulterer as president this time around. This hope, assumes, of course that Obama has somehow escaped this particulars hubris, a hope I’m fervently crossing all my fingers and toes for. At the least, of the two choices we have, he’s the only one not admitted to be an adulterer.
As far as I’m concerned, Edwards is not a public person, and I have no interest whatsoever in discussing his situation unless he tries to reenter the public world.
LikeLike
You know, I think a subtle part of the problem is in saying something like “Elizabeth Edwards is a likeable person”. I mean, I feel that way too. I feel like I like her, and that’s quite aside from feeling sympathetic or sorry for her because of her illness and situation. And I feel like John Edwards is a dirtbag, in part because I really dislike this pattern of behavior not just in political, public men, but as a pattern I feel like I’ve witnessed in a certain social strata.
But then I start thinking about some of the married couples that I knew growing up, friends and acquaintances of my parents, where it became knowledge that there had been an affair, almost all of them husbands cheating on wives.
And I start thinking about how complicated and individual and messy those cases are even if you don’t know the truly intimate sexual or personal details. I start thinking about how people you think you know aren’t at all what they seem when you only know them in passing, or only know the face they present to visitors or casual friends. And there’s still cases where I’d say I feel like one person did wrong and the other person was wronged but the strength of my feeling about those sentiments varies a lot.
In the few cases I know about my peers, that sense gets even stronger. I can think of one case where the couple seemed to me to be kind of unhappy even when they said they were happy, and then one person cheated and they were done and then both of them have seemed much more fulfilled in later relationships. The cheating was saying something that evidently they couldn’t say out loud. I know, everyone says that you should speak clearly, etc., talk it out, but come on, anybody who has been in a very long-term relationship knows that even when they become richer and more satisfying emotionally with each passing year, they also contain strange depths, complex emotions, hard-to-articulate richness. Life is not Oprah.
So then I come back to this and I say, “Yeah, he’s a slimebag and she’s very likeable” but I wonder if I actually know anything of the sort. It feels a bit like passing a profound moral judgment on individuals on the basis of something like a WWF match, on broadly sketched stories and performances that we see before us. I wonder what I’d think if I actually knew them.
LikeLike
Surprised no one’s mentioned David Vitter yet, who’s still a Senator from Louisiana.
I’m remembering (maybe falsely) that roughly half of all marriages in America feature an affair at some point. Anyone have better numbers at hand? But as long as it’s a significant share of the population that’s fooling around, it’s going to be a significant share of elected leaders, too. On the one hand, adjust downward for greater likelihood of exposure; on the other, adjust upward for the opportunities and the type of personality it takes to get out and constantly ask people for support.
LikeLike
I had forgotten Sen. Vitter. I think Gov. Spitzer just dominated the field of “politician with prostitute” to the extent lesser performers tend to get forgotten. Sort of like how when someone says “News Anchor”, I still think of Cronkite or the way Sen. Craig just obliterated the competition in the category of “gay, semi-public sex.” Now George Michael will only be remembered for WHAM.
LikeLike
Amy P. is right to state that adultery is LESS tolerated now than it was 20 or 50 years ago. Conservative David Frum reports it, liberal Stephanie Coontz in “Marriage: A History” reports it, and moderate Paul Amato reports it in “Alone Together.” People are not only less tolerant of adultery, they are less approving of divorce and are more likely to think it’s wrong to abandon an ill spouse (Amato).
Fifty or a hundred (let alone several hundred) years ago, John Edwards would have been EXPECTED to have a young, pretty mistress and lavish money on her. Remember the courtesans and grandes horizontales, Camille and Violetta? Elizabeth would have been *expected* to suck up any infidelity and turn a blind eye. Wives put up and shut up.
Feminism has improved the position of women (Western women, at least) in relationships. The reason adultery is less tolerated now is because WOMEN expect their husbands to be faithful. Men have always expected their wives to be faithful or else. We have sympathy for Elizabeth because the consensus is that she should expect her husband’s devotion and sexual exclusivity. That’s really pretty new.
LikeLike
John Edwards never had much to offer a national audience beyond pretty hair, pretty teeth, cute kids, and his (allegedly) amazing marriage with the (allegedly) wonderful Elizabeth Edwards. Wasn’t his relationship to his base mediated at largely through her? Hence the loss of one item from his package of qualifications hurts him more than it would hurt a lot of other politicians, for instance Bill Clinton.
I think it’s also hard to overestimate the importance of fresh infractions versus “old news”. Hearing that Sen. Craig propositioned someone in a men’s room 30 years ago just doesn’t have the same impact that hearing that he did it yesterday. That’s part of why the McCain stuff isn’t taking off. In public life, there seems to be a statute of limitation (call it the Reagan Rule) on hanky-panky. After 30 years have gone by, a couple (no matter how initially adulterous) gets a certain amount of automatic respectability. Likewise, even if you were a Klansman 50 years ago or left a young woman to die, you’re still eligible to be Congress’s conscience.
LikeLike
Hasn’t McCain’s shameful behavior with his first wife gotten at least some press? I remember reading a long article about it in the Washington Post. He mentioned in that stupid interview with the preacher last Sunday. (Should I do a post on that? It would provide a good excuse to use the phrase, “the cone of silence.”)
Good comment, Allurophile.
A few years ago, I saw Robert Reich talk at APSA. He said that he thought that the Lewinsky affair demonstrated major weaknesses in Clinton’s character than had nothing to do with adultery. It showed that he was too willing to take risks. A president who gets a blow job in the Oval office thinks he’s invulnerable and is rather careless.
So, you all seem to think that the percentage of politicians having affairs is higher than the general population. They may have more opportunities, but they also are more likely to get caught and hugely embarrassed on national television. Gotta wonder if that danger is part of the turn on.
LikeLike
That was gratuitously nasty, Amy. What gives?
Also have to disagree on Edwards’ substance. To the extent that discussion of inequality was part of the 2008 campaign, he put it on the agenda. He drew the spotlight on New Orleans at the start of his run, and the city still needs all the attention it can get. There was plenty of substance — not that I would expect a committed conservative to necessarily acknowledge that fact.
It’s a pity that he’s not available to the Obama campaign now, to highlight differences between someone who earned his wealth and someone who married money.
LikeLike
I don’t think AmyP was gratuitously nasty. She was a little partisan – shoulda, coulda talked about Henry Hyde seducing a young bride and busting up her marriage, back in the day, and holding on to ‘revered elder’ when it hit the press. And Newt Gingrich’s dumping of cancer wife, then going on to a swell career.
But it’s interesting to think about what is unrecoverable and what is not: Gary Hart – out. Bill Clinton – survived Gennifer, Monica, the plausible rape allegations from Juanita Broaddrick. John Edwards – probably out. Bob Livingston – out. Newt Gingrich – after dumping wife #2 for wife #3, he has gone on to lucrative talking head rather than running for office, and Bush conspicuously stayed away from him. Spitzer – out. Gerry Studds – survived having an affair with a page, reelected as long as he wanted. Dan Crane – lost for reelection after the same offense. Vitter seems to be surviving having gone to a whore. Spitzer not. Toe-sucker Dick Morris had to switch from adviser to columnist/talking head.
Time after the offense before it is discovered seems to matter. Whether you are running for a national office, closely contested, clearly matters. Vile little details like Spitzer wanting his whore to lick his anus, Edwards’ wife having cancer, and Morris’ toe-sucking seem to matter.
Edwards had made a real effort to present himself as an idyllic family man, I think that made the collapse more damaging. Clinton never had.
LikeLike
dave s.,
I was trying to figure out inductively what the rules are–what the public forgives and what it doesn’t. As you point out, sometimes there seems little rhyme or reason to it, but certain patterns do emerge. Time after offense does seem to make a difference, as you say. Edwards got caught in a hot sheet situation. Hence, he wasn’t able to pull the classic “ThisisoldnewsandIlovemywifeandshehasforgivenmealongtimeagosowhydon’tyou?” I also think that it’s a lot easier to weather scandals as a member of congress, rather than as a presidential candidate. You can be awfully dirty in various ways and be a senator for 50 years. The role of the media is a lot different these days. In the past, they filtered out a lot of stuff that nowadays goes immediately to the internet.
I didn’t know about Hyde, by the way. And I did call it the “Reagan Rule.” That was my bipartisan gesture.
Doug,
A case can be made that the Republican Party has already punished McCain for his indiscretions (including the political ones) by making him wait 8 years for the nomination. (Even if it wasn’t explicitly an issue in 2000, consider that immediately after the Clinton administration, having a Republican candidate with a clean home record was important, particularly running against Al Gore.)
I may have been gratuitously nasty, but I was also carefully factual. Edwards is a rather handsome guy (if you like that boyish look), and being a former Klansman doesn’t seem to be an obstacle to being the conscience of the Senate.
LikeLike
I don’t know what happened, but in my first paragraph I was trying to write out “This is old news and I love my wife and she has forgiven me a long time ago so why don’t you?”
LikeLike
Dave S., there was one piece of information in your comment that had managed to escape my notice to this point. I think you can guess which one. On a related note, anybody else want this bagel. I don’t feel much like breakfast now.
LikeLike
MH, yes please. And could you get them to bring the rest of our stuff from Germany while you’re at it? Don’t mind the Russians, they say they’re leaving.
AmyP, your throwaway description of Chappaquiddick is not carefully factual.
LikeLike
Doug,
So, how would you describe it? I was just reading the Wikipedia article on the incident, and there’s just no pleasant way to summarize Teddy Kennedy’s actions on that night.
LikeLike
Doug, I think Amy’s description was a pulled-punch (he is very ill). Bad I driving, confused decision-making, not wanting to see the police right away. I’d always assumed he was drunk and evaded a felon conviction by waiting till morning. On the basis of his loss to Carter, I’m guessing this is a common thought.
As for the bagel, I can’t get your stuff from Germany on the way. I won’t cross the Atlantic (I have my reasons), so I’m going around the long way.
LikeLike
MH,
The avoiding the authorities for 12 hours and acting like nothing had happened was what was really striking to me in the Chappaquiddick story. If you or I had an accident and a friend’s life were in danger, we’d do anything we could to help (and at least according to his story Kennedy may have tried to rescue her himself), but if it was beyond our powers to make a difference, the next step would be to call the police, call paramedics, call the fire department, turn out the National Guard, whatever. You wouldn’t stop until either your friend was safe or you knew there was no hope–you wouldn’t just swim off to your hotel and lay low until late the next morning. I agree with you that the only plausible explanation for the events of the night would be severe impairment and a desire to get the blood alcohol down before facing the authorities.
LikeLike
It may be amusing to discuss the indiscretions of those we’re not voting for (Kennedy, Edwards, even Vitter — unless we’re in whatever state he’s in). But, really, the only one we should be discussing is why McCain’s transgressions apparently don’t disqualify him (since he’s the only one we all have an opportunity to vote for).
As Dave S. says, though, there seems to be little rhyme or reason in what the electorate forgives in personal indiscretions. Therefore, we may well have our own personal moral compass, we should admit that personal foibles (or even personal evil) only bars a person from the presidency when the people decide it does. McCain is not more moral than Edwards because he had affairs when his former beauty queen wife was crippled 20+ years ago, rather than last year. They both committed immoral transgressions of their marriage vows. But, as this very conversation shows, our evaluation of their two personal sins seems to depend almost entirely on our evaluation of their other strengths. If Edwards were the democratic nominee, and running against McCain, this new information (and it is new to me) would make absolutely no difference in my personal voting decision.
And, as we know, MH & AmyP aren’t going to vote for Obama, even though he’s apparently is the one who hasn’t committed the sin of adultery.
Conclusion: no inductive reasoning possible, except that personal transgressions are just one more thing we weigh in determining a candidate’s value to us.
LikeLike
PS: In Dave’s analysis, I think we can draw no conclusions at all about what’s survivable. I think it’s a chaotic system, and depends not just on the transgression, and the individual’s strengths, but also what other options were available to avoid the sinner. I mean, if you were a republican trying to avoid the admitted adulterer, your only real choice was Mitt, right? Vitter presumably (if he squeaks through) will squeak through under the same lack of better options.
LikeLike
I wonder if the fact that John Edwards seems to have got himself into a particular peck of trouble with his affair is the fact that Elizabeth Edwards is so widely liked and admired. She’s survived the death of a child and Stage IV cancer with grace and courage. The general feeling seems to be that she got a raw deal.
I don’t think people feel that Hillary Clinton, Silda Spitzer, or the other political wives got quite the same raw deal, nor do they have Mrs. Edwards’ charm and likeability. JMHO that’s a huge factor.
LikeLike
http://wonkette.com/tag/john-edwards
Wonkette says there’s more where that came from! “DID JOHN EDWARDS HAVE MORE SEX WITH LADIES?: Intrepid blog reporter Choire Sicha hears that a New York Times Metro reporter is digging into “a story about John Edwards and a Duke graduate.” We are Ethical and don’t want to spread scurrilous rumors, but maybe John Edwards has been fucking a Duke graduate? Maybe John Edwards has been fucking seven Duke graduates and had like 20 babies with each of them, who knows, there must be more information out there.”
It is kind of unusual for someone to be faithful for 25 years and only then start to screw around (Bill Clinton, e.g.), so I won’t be real surprised if there was a history.
Mickey Kaus has been playing with the chronology here: Elizabeth pretty much has to have known about it at the time they were doing a lot of ‘swell family facing adversity’ television stuff. And that kind of moves her into the Hillary-type political partners territory. Does that make him less of a jerk? No, in my view, but hell, maybe, if there was tacit consent to an ongoing pattern. And what cards does she have to play? She wants her children to go forward with their father in honor and glory after she is dead.
LikeLike
They say a picture is worth a 1000 words: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/galleries/their_cheatin_hearts/their_cheatin_hearts.html
More on factors which make hanky panky fatal to the career or not: Spitzer was widely hated for his aggressive use of the power of prosecution to enhance his career. His removal was not going to knock the Dems out of power in Albany. So he had lots of enemies, few folks who were invested in his success. Clinton, on the other hand, was essential – his removal would have been a giant setback for his party. And he had a long record of accomplishment, and he had never particularly run on his personal story.
Edwards is someone without a big record of accomplishment – trial lawyer who made money and had an undistinguished Senate term. Much of what he ran on was charming family story and left populism. So when the charming family story fell out from under him, there wasn’nt much left. Obama is also a guy who has a lot of his attraction from charming family (and self) story, not much record of accomplishment. If he were fool enough to stray, he’d be similarly vulnerable.
LikeLike
Hilzoy, writing in 2006 about Obama’s legislative record:
“But I do follow legislation, at least on some issues, and I have been surprised by how often Senator Obama turns up, sponsoring or co-sponsoring really good legislation on some topic that isn’t wildly sexy, but does matter. His bills tend to have the following features: they are good and thoughtful bills that try to solve real problems; they are in general not terribly flashy; and they tend to focus on achieving solutions acceptable to all concerned, not by compromising on principle, but by genuinely trying to craft a solution that everyone can get behind.
“His legislation is often proposed with Republican co-sponsorship, which brings me to another point: he is bipartisan in a good way. …
“It does, however, involve preferring getting legislation passed to having a spectacular battle. (This is especially true when one is in the minority party, especially in this Senate: the chances that Obama’s bills will actually become law increase dramatically when he has Republican co-sponsors.)
So my little data point is: while Obama has not proposed his Cosmic Plan for World Peace, he has proposed a lot of interesting legislation on important but undercovered topics. I can’t remember another freshman Senator who so routinely pops up when I’m doing research on some non-sexy but important topic, and pops up because he has proposed something genuinely good. Since I think that American politics doesn’t do nearly enough to reward people who take a patient, craftsmanlike attitude towards legislation, caring as much about fixing the parts that no one will notice until they go wrong as about the flashy parts, I wanted to say this.”
Topics Hilzoy cites:
Nonproliferation
Avian flu (starting in 2005, well before most headlines)
Regulating Genetic Testing
Reducing medical malpractice suits the right way
Then:
“He has done other things that are more high-profile, including:
* His “health care for hybrids” bill
* An Energy Security Bill
* Various bills on relief for Hurricane Katrina, including aid for kids and a ban on no-bid contracts by FEMA
* A public database of all federal spending and contracts
* Trying to raise CAFE standards
* Veterans’ health care
* Making certain kinds of voter intimidation illegal
* A lobbying reform bill (with Tom Coburn), which would do all sorts of good things, notably including one of my perennial favorites, requiring that bills be made available to members of Congress at least 72 hours before they have to vote on them.
* And a proposal to revamp ethics oversight, replacing the present ethics Committee with a bipartisan commission of retired judges and members of Congress, and allowing any citizen to report ethics violations. This would have fixed one of the huge problems with the present system, namely: that the members have to police themselves.
But it’s the wonky legislation that I love. That and the fact that, for a freshman Senator in the minority party, he has a decent record of getting his proposals enacted.
As I said earlier, I am not interested in getting on anyone’s bandwagon at the moment… But I read one too many pieces about his lack of a track record, and I thought: clearly, the people who are writing these haven’t had the same “there he is again!” experience that I have had while researching arcana. So I thought: I should say so.”
LikeLike
Edwards career stalled because people didn’t vote for him; we have no idea whether he could have “survived” his adultery, since he had disappeared into the woodwork way before then.
LikeLike
“* A public database of all federal spending and contracts”
I really like that one. For a lot of the others, he seems to be playing it safe, in the style of the later Bill Clinton’s school uniforms and midnight basketball. There’s little to make anybody mad.
Actually, let me correct that. I just looked up the “healthcare for hybrids” and that does make me mad. That one puts the taxpayer on the hook for the moronic contracts that US automakers have signed, while in exchange, the automakers are supposed to funnel 50% of their savings into research for fuel-efficient cars. If it were a Republican proposing this, it would be (quite rightly) described as corporate welfare. I especially hate it because it is paying for inputs, not results.
LikeLike
Well, the argument was that there was not much of a record of accomplishment. And of course the piece was written in October 2006, while the Democrats were still in the minority.
Her points about his style also speak to how he would govern if he wins in November.
LikeLike
Rod Dreher is talking about how current American political conventions require that a politician’s family lose their privacy and become public figures:
“Anyway, I hate how American politics and its conventions make it difficult for a candidate to build a shield of privacy around his or her family. I think the Clintons did as good a job with Chelsea during their White House years as can be expected. Think, though, of the tragedy of the John Edwards family. That cad made his wife and kids a big part of his campaign, in selling his personality to the public. And it was fraudulent. Surely Elizabeth Edwards and the Edwards children would have suffered intense pain from John’s trashy extramarital behavior even if they had been only in the background of the campaign. But having held them up in the spotlight, Edwards set his wife and kids up for even worse suffering.”
LikeLike