Man Bites Blog

In 2004, John Kerry selecting as his running mate a man whose government experience amounted to a single term in the US Senate, which was not terribly remarkable, and if he had run for reelection that year he may have lost (the Democrat who Edwards endorsed to replace him lost).  His time in the Senate was unremarkable.  But he gave a good speech, checked the right demographic boxes, and the press liked him.  He also had a small child and an appealing family narrative.

But I don’t recall anyone talking about how Edwards was manifestly unqualified to be a hearbeat away from the presidency, about how irrespondible John Kerry was for picking a VP candidate with so little experience.  Though Kerry and Edwards lost, the selection of Edwards was way down on the list of reasons given, and even then it was the lack of chemistry between Kerry and Edwards.

Now, Edwards was a national figure because he had run for the presidential nomination.  But I don’t think that’ a qualification, either, just that he was a familiar face.

Regardless of whether the Edwardses have held themselves as a model marriage, John Edwards having an affair, and possibly a child, while his wife was ailing with cancer matters.

For a public marriage like the Edwardses, this is not just an offense against Elizabeth Edwards; it is an offense against every married person, and everyone who one day hopes to be married.  Like Henry V and Catherine, couples like the Edwardses are the “makers of fashion.”  If it is acceptable for John Edwards to respond to his wife’s illness by looking for some on the side, it sends the message that it is OK for the rest of us as well. 

One of the reasons people get married is the knowledge that they will have someone’s faithful love and support when they get into hard times.  If the Edwardses are a model marriage, and this is how John Edwards responded, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Are we really so sure we can’t ask for this much from each other, and indeed from our leaders?  If we get sick, should we expect our spouses to go off an have an affair?  If so, why get married in the first place?

I can understand Elizabeth Edwards would like this to be over, but I submit that this is a selfish, if undertstandable impulse.  It doesn’t do other patients any good for us to excuse those who treat their ill spouses this way.

And if Edwards is the child’s father, that raises another host of issues — did he expect the child to never know who his father was?  Isn’t illegitimacy and fatherlessness closely tied to poverty, which is supposed to be Edwards’s crusade?