Edward's Affair: What’s Wrong with US Politics

Friday, former Senator John Edwards admitted that he had had an affair with a member of his staff in 2006 and had lied about it during his presidential campaign. The pundits are jabbering about it like high school girls with the latest gossip. And that is precisely what is wrong with American politics. What Mr. Edwards has done is taken an irrelevant issue and turned it into a career destroying situation, over something that shouldn’t have been brought up in the first place.

The belief that how a person behaves in private is identical to how he will behave in office is, on the face of it, laughable. The idea that a person would break the oath of office as easily as a marriage vow ignores the fact that there is an entire citizenry with a stake in the oath of office that will punish or reward the behavior of the office holder. In a marriage, there is just the couple and immediate family, and usually none of the adults is entirely blameless when things go wrong. Besides, if one were to truly hold to that belief, no divorced person would qualify for public office.

On the very same day that Russian troops entered Georgian territory, the TV news was aghast that John Edwards, son of a mill worker who rose to be US Senator, cheated on his wife and then lied about it. Some 2,000 dead and a potential regional war is brewing, and the media are telling the masses that the important story is one of middle aged infidelity. That’s not news; for many, it’s standard operating procedure.

Had Mr. Edwards fared better in the Democratic Primaries and actually won the nomination, the Democratic Party would be in crisis right now. Indeed, the convention would likely not accept him, and Mrs. Clinton (wronged woman herself) would be the nominee. However, he didn’t. He’s a has-been in the party even before this story broke.

Eleanor Roosevelt is often credited with saying, “Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.” Whether the attribution is correct is beside the point. The American body politic has proved this week-end that it is cluttered with small minds.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

Kensington Review Home