My gut, such as it is, tells me that even without Edwards in the race, Obama would have won the nomination. Mark Penn, Howard Wolfson, the bloviating Bill Clinton, and Hillary herself, were clearly capable of screwing things up all on their own.

More interesting to me are the issues raised by some of my colleagues. Just because one story of great importance is developing does not mean another is not important (the Russian invasion of Georgia vs. John Edwards’s "dick" as my friend Ms. Buck so delicately puts it!). I followed the events in Georgia with great interest myself—for that matter, as these national stories broke, I was also extremely interested in whether or not my idiot mayor was going to deign to appear before the New Orleans city council to answer allegations of corruption in a city agency charged with rebuilding the homes of elderly Katrina victims—an issue of the utmost importance to me right now. But that is not to say that it is unimportant when a politician, particularly one of three who had a chance to win the nomination of his party, lies—about anything. Because in the end, I don’t think there’s all that much difference in lying about sex or war. It suggests the same rotten thing about character. The fact that we have been asked to respond to this question suggests that the very race for the Democratic nomination could well have been affected had the truth come out earlier.  

Also, I am getting impatient with the France analogies. We are not France, thank God. Nor are we a nation of uptight moralistic right-wing prudes just because stuff like this matters to us. In this case it is not the affair that matters so much as the fact that John Edwards put himself out there as a paragon of virtue, a man of integrity, a family man who relentlessly used his family as part of his political narrative. When his wife announced that the cancer that will now kill her had returned, the two of them appeared on 60 Minutes and Elizabeth Edwards bravely said that she had no intention of asking her husband to drop his race, that she wanted to engage in "the fight of our lives." A few months later I was in the same house in North Carolina where Edwards gave his cringing NIghtline interview, and Elizabeth and I sat together on a sofa, both of us with tears rolling down our faces, as she told me of the decades-long landscaping plans she’d had for the grounds surrounding her family’s new "dreamhouse" she knew she would no longer be able to see through. So that when her husband parsed every question like the lawyer he is, when he self-righteously reassured Bob Woodruff that the affair was in no way HIS WIFE’S FAULT, I wanted to reach into the TV and strangle him. The idea that this guy had a shot at being president was suddenly sickmaking. It also took me back to an incident on a train trip through the midwest that Kerry and Edwards took during the 2004 campaign. At every stop, the candidates came to the front of the train and addressed the gathered crowds, and at every stop there was a guy dressed up like a huge styrofoam waffle who would heckle Kerry and make fun of his "waffling" record. The guy was like every pest at stops like that, and Kerry barely paid him any attention except to laugh at him, which was the proper response and which made me like him a lot more. (I once saw George H. W. Bush lose it with a guy in a chicken suit.) Even Theresa Heinz Kerry used him as a lesson in democracy (pointing out that in her native Mozambique, even mild dissent like that was a jailable offense, so wasn’t it nice that the waffle guy could stop by?). Anyway, it was past midnight, the last stop of the night in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and the waffle guy and a few stragglers dutifully showed up. Everybody, including the two or three of us from the press who bothered to get off, were half asleep when Edwards, in full red-face, vein-popping throttle, turned on the waffle guy, who was interrupting him. "Let me tell you one thing," he said, jabbing his finger at this looney man, screaming hoarsely. "My wife and children are on this train and it’s time for you to show them some respect, mister." At that point Edwards looked far sillier than the waffle man, but last night, watching the interview, all I could think of was that he should have thought about that respect thing a tad longer himself. I was also reminded that Edwards’s father Rocky told me that the first thing he had taught his son as a young boy was how to successfully punch someone in the nose. Great.

People talk about McCain’s temper or Obama’s lack of experience, but they are both grown men and comport themselves as such. Next to the shallow and callow Edwards, who now carries about him the faint whiff of ugliness and tawdriness, there is, in fact, no contest. That’s what campaigns are for, and that’s why stories like this are indeed important. They reveal a lot about the man.