That’s of course unknowable. I think the desire for change which Obama represents would have been just as strong. It’s entirely possible that Obama would have won more quickly and more decisively had Edwards not been in the race. As an aside, I wish this country would grow up and quit going crazy every time a prominent politician has an affair. Edwards’ affair wouldn’t even be newsworthy in France.

I had the TV on all day because Russia has just attacked Georgia. For hours, talking heads voiced grave concern, weighed the consequences of, and the shocking dissimulations attending, John Edwards’ infidelity. WTF? There’s a brand new war, and all CNN can discuss is John Edwards’ dick???

I think Hillary lost the nomination for herself and Obama won it with himself and the promise of change. I think Mrs. Edwards was the star in that family.

I agree with Joan Cooney on this (as with so much). It might have sped things up a bit but Obama is a force of nature.

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.

I feel I must respond to my friend Julia Reed’s passionate indictment of John Edwards. In particular to her assertion that lying about sex is not much different from lying about war. Putting John Edwards’s sordid story aside, it seems to me that the penalties for lying about sex are far more serious than those for lying about war. Lying about war gets you re-elected to the presidency while lying about sex gets you impeached. Many of our finest presidents including Thomas Jefferson and Franklin Roosevelt were unfaithful to their wives. The reason they didn’t lie about it is they weren’t stalked and outed by the National Enquirer. You can be sure, had they been caught, they would have lied.

Years ago during the Watergate scandal, when articles about JFK’s affairs, including the one with Judith Exner, began to appear in the press, I am told that Shirley MacLaine went to London to promote a film. She was asked by a reporter what she thought of the stories emerging about JFK. She is said to have replied:"I’d rather have a president who f—s women than one who f—s the country." Me too.

I take Joan’s point about fucking women rather than fucking the country. And I have always thought Shirley MacLaine’s line was brilliant — and classic Shirley. It ain’t the sex that bothers me. (Or at least not all the time. I like Edwards’s wife too much for the sex not to bother me here.) And it is not even just the brazen lying. It is that these are different times than JFK’s. A president did damn near lose his office for having sex in it. So given that, and Gary Hart, and all the others who have been brought down by messing around, given that we are in the age of the Enquirer and YouTube and all the other immediate and endless entities that cover this stuff, to have an affair in the middle of a national campaign speaks to a deep-seated arrogance and recklessness that I think could end up fucking the country.

I don’t see much point to this question. Every hesitation to buy a pack of chewing gum might affect future events. It’s just that he’s a slime dog especially for carrying on when he did and when his ill wife was being used to enhance his image and when he has two very small impressionable children and his TV appearance on Nightline made things worse. He was his usual oleaginous self, still ‘selling’ his image.  And for that matter I think he is still lying about the money paid on his behalf to the girl and maybe about the baby. Who really cares beyond his immediate suffering family? This guy is truly toast.

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