There was a time when many of the great minds in the Democratic Party thought John Edwards would be the perfect presidential nominee. He was cute and from the South, and the son of a millworker, and he talked about poor people and had lots of position papers.
Unfortunately, he was about as deep as a melted ice cube.
I was in a car with him once, driving to the airport from a campaign event in which he had expressed his support for South Carolina shrimpers who wanted to ban the import of Vietnamese shrimp. I asked him whether voters of the Red Lobster persuasion would be willing to pay the far higher price of home-caught shrimp. And when he waved the point away, I asked him about the trade implications, and what it would mean to the Vietnamese shrimp farmers. Edwards stared out the window and finally drawled: “You really care a whole lot about shrimp, don’t you?”
For somebody with “big, bold positions,” Edwards really had very little to say that wasn’t slick and evasive. You have to look out for candidates who keep using the word “bold.” Mitt Romney does it all the time, and he is so not.
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But, somehow, the public realized that this guy who looked so good and sounded so glib was really a fraud. Even without knowing about the secret love child or the sleazy right-hand man, or the impressive ability to stare right into a TV camera and lie like a rug, they got his number and picked other people to run for president. Voters’ gut instincts are generally pretty good. They certainly were with John Edwards. Which is, in a way, a happy ending to an awful story.
I know this is probably divulging a big secret, but I scanned over some of what Ms. Collins had written about Edwards in the past, and I will give her credit: she always harbored some major doubts about him. The point is not that those critical of Edwards from the beginning knew about his affairs and terrible character (but maybe looking the other way like many in the media did with Bill Clinton's personal life probably helped a little) but that his politics was so demagogic and belittling to the American people. I am just glad that Ms. Collins was among the small small minority in the MSM to not continuously cover for Edwards' millimeter depth of political knowledge.
UPDATE:
John Hinderaker takes the media to task for their abdication of their jobs in covering Edwards over the years (and simultaneously holding Mitt Romney to a very high level of scrutiny):
Consider the lengths to which the Washington Post recently went to reveal that Mitt Romney cut another boy’s hair when he was in high school. Imagine the hundreds of people the Post must have interviewed, covering every stage of Romney’s life. (The Post didn’t want to go back nearly 50 years to find something they could hang on Romney, but they evidently couldn’t come up with anything more recent.) If the paper could learn, and inform its readers, that Romney cut a fellow student’s hair 47 years ago, why couldn’t it figure out that John Edwards was stashing a mistress and child with an aide who falsely claimed to be the girl’s father, and using rich campaign contributors’ money to do it? Not 47 years ago, but last month?
The answer, of course, is that the Post (like the New York Times and virtually all other newspapers, news magazines and television networks) had no desire to dig up information that would be harmful to Edwards–just as they had no intention of learning or publicizing facts that would be damaging to Barack Obama. The Edwards case reveals breakdowns of two kinds that are more or less opposite. There was a breakdown in the Department of Justice, because criminal laws that don’t really apply and are far too draconian to fit the case were brought to bear. But equally important, there was a breakdown in the media, as reporters and editors scrupulously averted their eyes from a scandal that would have damaged their favored party, until the National Enquirer forced a grudging level of coverage. (The parallel to Drudge and Monica Lewinsky is obvious.) The latter breakdown, it seems to me, is more threatening to our democracy than the former.
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