| Wade Smith and Jim Cooney; are Edwards lawyers.... | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Jan 29 2010, 05:50 PM (5,217 Views) | |
| cks | Feb 1 2010, 08:07 AM Post #121 |
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There is an interesting review of The Politician in this morning's WSJ. It should be a interesting read - and perhaps should be required reading for all political aides as a wake-up call about the seduction of power. |
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| abb | Feb 1 2010, 08:41 AM Post #122 |
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704722304575037443544453292.html JANUARY 31, 2010, 8:30 P.M. ET The Hazards Of Loyalty Hypocrisy, hubris and Rielle Hunter. By ARAM BAKSHIAN JR. For a man whose first—and only—winning election campaign was waged against an inarticulate septuagenarian hog farmer, John Edwards made quite a splash when he arrived in Washington in 1999 as the new junior senator from North Carolina. Lauch Faircloth (the hog farmer in question) had been anything but a formidable opponent, and Mr. Edwards did seem like a fast-talking opportunist, the quintessential trial-lawyer-turned-politician. But the members of the liberal establishment swooned—pundits and politicians alike. They found themselves charmed by his enthusiasm, his good looks, his populist appeal. Here, they said, was a younger Bill Clinton without the baggage, a potential standard bearer who could help the Democratic Party reclaim the middle ground that Newt Gingrich had seized for the GOP with his mid-1990s "revolution." No one swooned more than Andrew Young, whose memoir is aptly called "The Politician," referring to the man he served rather than himself. A failed restaurateur who had gone back to school for a law degree and then taken a job with the North Carolina Academy of Trial Lawyers, Mr. Young was just over 30 when he first saw Mr. Edwards in action. He was so impressed by an Edwards campaign speech that he turned to his wife, Cheri, and said: "This guy is going to be president one day. . . . I'm going to find a way to work for him." Cheri, who emerges as one of the few sensible, decent people in this sadly tangled tale, had a different reaction. "She looked at me, unimpressed, rolled her eyes, and said, 'Let's go to the beach.' " But her husband was smitten. He would spend the next decade as a trusted—and all too trusting—aide to a man he idolized as "one of the most promising leaders of a generation." Mr. Young became a specimen of a familiar political type: the dedicated, servile staffer who subsists on the reflected power and glory of his boss, half-martyr, half-parasite. Mr. Young's duties included slaving away as domestic servant, errand boy and babysitter for the Edwards family in addition to working in the senator's office on Capitol Hill. Mr. Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, assured Mr. Young that he was "like family." Certainly Mr. Young subordinated his own family to the whims of his employers, sustained by a dream of accompanying them to the White House. "I was just a young, ambitious guy who saw a real opportunity in Edwards," he writes. If Mr. Young had been a better judge of character, it might not have taken him 10 years to wake up. Signs of Mr. Edwards's hypocrisy and opportunism were abundant: "On many nights, my phone would ring and I would hear the senator on the other end. Sometimes he sounded petty and irritated by ordinary events. He especially hated making appearances at county fairs, where 'fat rednecks try to shove food down my face. I know I'm the people's senator, but do I have to hang out with them?' " Staffer-adulation would not have mattered much if Mr. Edwards hadn't been taken so seriously by the power brokers of the Democratic Party, who kept hoping, as did Mr. Edwards himself, that he would break-out into national stardom: He ran for the 2004 presidential nomination, eventually becoming John's Kerry's running mate on the Democrats' losing ticket. He was considered a front-runner for 2008 and was holding his own in the early polls until Nemesis arrived on the scene—ready to punish hubris—in the form of a shopworn, blond New Age enthusiast named Rielle Hunter. By early 2008, rumors of Ms. Hunter's affair with Mr. Edwards were making their way into a subculture of gossip-purveyors and political observers. It is clear from Mr. Young's memoir that the Edwards staff knew what was going on and chose to deny it to any reporter who pushed for answers. Not that the mainstream media did much pushing—sexual misconduct was too "low" for respectable publications, even though they had served as a conveyor belt for Mr. Edwards's heroic (and false) campaign narrative: that of a loyal husband attentive to his cancer-stricken wife. It took the National Enquirer and a few bloggers to break the Hunter story. Mr. Edwards called the allegations "tabloid trash." When Ms. Hunter's pregnancy made the news, he persuaded Mr. Young to "take the bullet" by claiming to be the father—something Mr. Young now regrets. One could say that Mr. Young's memoir is one long expression of sincere regret and shame for the role he played in Mr. Edwards's public career. Still, one man's tragedy is another man's farce. In its account of scandal-frenzy, "The Politician" begins to read like a collaboration between Tennessee Williams and P.G. Wodehouse—with Mr. and Mrs. Young and their three children and a very pregnant, very out-of-it Ms. Hunter secluded under the same roof, receiving abusive voice mails from an increasingly hysterical Elizabeth Edwards and being alternately schmoozed and abused by Mr. Edwards himself, with howling packs of reporters in hot pursuit. In the end, the truth came out—as it was bound to. (Someday a staffer will serve his boss by reminding him of this inevitable fact.) Mr. Edwards admitted that he was the father of Ms. Hunter's daughter—after a succession of lying scenarios collapsed and his candidacy, his career and his marriage were reduced to rubble. Perhaps it all goes back to Mr. Edwards's trial-lawyer days. After dazzling juries for so long, he thought he could talk his way out of anything. We are reminded by Mr. Young that one of Mr. Edwards's early boosters was the late Ted Kennedy, who "saw almost unlimited potential in this young, energetic, well-spoken, good-looking Southerner." In a conversation with Mr. Young, Mr. Kennedy waxed sentimental about Washington in the early 1960s: "It used to be civilized. The media was on our side. We'd get our work done by one o'clock and by two we were at the White House chasing women. We got the job done, and the reporters focused on the issues. . . . It was civilized." We now know that Mr. Edwards's idea of civilization was much the same as Kennedy's. Mr. Bakshian worked as a White House aide to Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. |
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| cks | Feb 1 2010, 09:00 AM Post #123 |
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abb - Thanks for posting this. |
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| Rusty Dog | Feb 1 2010, 09:15 AM Post #124 |
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You've got to watch out for Mr. Nemesis. And for Mr. Hubris.
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| Joan Foster | Feb 2 2010, 07:13 AM Post #125 |
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No wonder they hope to discredit this book....but unfortunately, it makes me wonder WHY those who knew Edwards SO WELL...were all so willing to endorse and enable his scam of the North Carolina and American electorate? The author of this essay uses the term "duped." You mean Edwards could "dupe" someone like Wade Smith...someone who had always been in his immediate circle...who knew him best? HUH? I don't think "duped" is the right term. As my hero-worship crumbles here...I'm thinking co-conspirator here in the scamming of trusting voters. http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-01-31/andrew-youngs-revenge/2/ "The truly shaming revelation here is how—except for the hound dogs of the National Enquirer—the press and the political establishment were duped by a candidate who, even before the Rielle Hunter craziness, was a giant phony. It should be collectively blush-making for the press to remember the newsmagazine covers, the fawning TV sitdowns, the op-ed boostings Edwards garnered in the course of his years as a crowd-pleasing, “Kennedyesque” candidate who supposedly cared for the underdog and coined the “Two Americas” catchphrase. It turns out that the cocoon of John Edwards' megalomania was a third America all its own. Right from his first Senate campaign days, when he turned up at rallies driving himself in someone else’s beat-up Buick even though he had a BMW and Lexus coupe in the garage of his multimillion dollar home, there was virtually no aspect of the Edwards campaign persona that was true. The Armani label cut out of his suits. His desire to flee as soon as he could from any encounter with the “fat rednecks” who reminded him of his own humble beginnings. (Young writes that campaign workers watching the debates during the 2008 race would knock back a drink every time Edwards uttered the words “son of a mill worker.” Soon they were howling drunk and helpless with laughter.) Young’s wife, Cheri, regarded herself as making a good living as a nurse. Edwards asked her how much she was paid and then offended her by blurting, “Jesus, how the heck do you survive on horrible pay like that?” Edwards certainly wouldn’t know. After the 2004 election loss, he added to his trial-lawyer fortune by getting hired as a door opener by Fortress Investment Group, a hedge fund that avoided taxes by incorporating offshore accounts. Young and Edwards were equally intoxicated by the access to celebrity and money that politics provides. “It’s hard to overstate the value of having rock star friends,” Young writes, apparently without irony. “I once organized a trip to a Dave Matthews concert, with backstage passes included, to reward a busload of big Edwards donors.” (The senator also had the group meet him at the airport so he could show off his new jet.) “The experience of hanging out with a presidential candidate and musicians who made thousands of fans scream for two hours was enough to persuade one fellow to give $2 million to ‘combat poverty.’” All this attention, this media susceptibility to his easy sound bites, turns Edwards from a spoiled, facile man with broadly good intentions into something darker, something even sinister. |
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| Joan Foster | Feb 2 2010, 05:25 PM Post #126 |
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But when the Enquirer story was published, nothing much happened. "To our relief, no serious newspaper or TV network picked up the story because they couldn't find a source to confirm it," Young writes. "Our phones and those of our friends and relatives rang constantly with calls from reporters and producers, but we ignored them all. Rielle and the campaign followed the same strategy, and since they still play by the multi-source rule, the big print and broadcast news organizations were stymied." The damage was confined to a few websites. "We began to think that perhaps our strategy had worked," Young writes. What followed was an insane series of events in which Baron shelled out enormous amounts of money to fly Hunter and the Youngs around the country to keep them out of sight until the Iowa caucuses, and then the New Hampshire primary, and then, after the campaign fizzled but Edwards still had hopes of making it onto the Democratic presidential ticket, until Hunter had the baby. But the Enquirer was not finished with the story. In July 2008, the tabloid published a detailed account of Edwards' visit with Hunter and the baby at a Los Angeles hotel. "Andrew, they caught me," a tearful Edwards is quoted as telling Young in a phone conversation. "It's all over." Surely now, Young thought, the press would jump on the story. But it didn't happen, at least not quickly. The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the broadcast networks and the cable news outlets -- none reported the story. And yet this time it bubbled up, from the blogs to talk radio to late-night television. By the second week of August, Edwards appeared on ABC News to semi-confess. An explosive scandal had been kept out of the press for months at a time when the man at the center of it was an important player in national politics. Why? Young thought it was because the Edwards camp so tightly controlled information that journalists weren't able to find sources to corroborate the Enquirer's reporting. Perhaps that was part of it. But the fact was, many editors and reporters just didn't want to tell the story. They admired Elizabeth Edwards. They saw no good in exposing John Edwards' sordid acts. They looked down on the National Enquirer. An account in the New York Times openly confessed the paper's "lack of interest" in the story. One Times editor told the paper's ombudsman that the Edwards story was "classically not a Times-like story," and the Times' top editor, Bill Keller, explained that the "hold-your-nose quality about the Enquirer" helped account for the paper's reluctance not just to publish but to even look into the story. "In the case of John Edwards," said Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz, "even though it was clearly out there, everybody in America knew about this well before CNN and The New York Times and The Washington Post got into this game -- there was still a great reluctance." Of course, in the end the story came out anyway. But only after the sheer weight of Edwards' corruption made the facts impossible to ignore. Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/In-sex-scandal-Edwards-braced-for-media-onslaught-that-never-came-83326282.html#ixzz0eQ6bdQrz |
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| abb | Feb 2 2010, 05:50 PM Post #127 |
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We waste our time trying to convince the MSM to do their jobs and report our side of the story. We've seen that for four years with The Frame. It's one of the reasons I started my blog. We will in time all become bloggers and reporters. We have the technology. And we here at LieStoppers damn sure have the skill. |
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| Baldo | Feb 2 2010, 06:03 PM Post #128 |
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Young was interviewed today on Hannity's Radio show. I heard about 10 minutes. Edwards is in big trouble. Young worked for him for 10 years and spilled his guts in that book. Elizabeth doesn't come out any better. He said she knew about the dalliances but wanted the White House more than anything. |
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| abb | Feb 2 2010, 06:37 PM Post #129 |
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Using campaign funds to keep up a mistresses lifestyle could tend to draw a prosecution. And with all the bad ink, his political cover is damaged. |
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| Rusty Dog | Feb 2 2010, 07:32 PM Post #130 |
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And with all the bad ink, his political cover is |
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| brittany | Feb 2 2010, 11:30 PM Post #131 |
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Saw the interview. Young came across as very genuine. What did he say Riellle thought the baby was a reincarnation of Buddah? Edited by brittany, Feb 2 2010, 11:32 PM.
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| Concerned | Feb 2 2010, 11:39 PM Post #132 |
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I think she said the baby was the reincarnation of a Buddhist monk that was going to save the world. I saw the interview, too, and Young said that Elizabeth had suspected (or known about) other previous Edwards affairs. So Elizabeth kept tabs on his cell phone calls and finally John used Young's cell phone to send and receive from Hunter. Hannity said it was an interesting book. |
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| cks | Feb 3 2010, 06:17 AM Post #133 |
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Concerned - lovely avatar! Did not get to hear the Hannity interview....what is interesting is that EE suspected that there were other affairs (as Gomer Pyle would say "Surprise! Surprise!". |
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| jewelcove | Feb 3 2010, 11:05 AM Post #134 |
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Abb, What is your blog, and could you give us it's link? |
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| abb | Feb 3 2010, 11:20 AM Post #135 |
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http://lincolnparishnewsonline.wordpress.com/ Lincoln Parish News Online What isn't in the newspapers is often more newsworthy than what is. |
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