Heartbroken, in more ways than one

Former presidential candidate John Edwards (source: Alex de Carvalho via Flickr.com)

Democratic supporters of former presidential candidate John Edwards are heartbroken after his disclosure today to ABC News’ Bob Woodruff that he’d had an affair with documentary filmmaker Rielle Hunter sometime during the last two years. In October 2007, the tabloid National Enquirer accused Edwards of an affair which Edwards and his campaign denied vigorously at that time.

Okay, I’ll cut the news reporter voice here, avail myself of my First Amendment rights and simply say that I’m one of the heartbroken supporters. I’m disappointed that he wasn’t more forthcoming, and knowing this was a liability, continued to run as a candidate. I guess the hidden silver lining to the debacle that was the Michigan primary was that Edwards was shut out, in part by the Clinton-Uncommitted split. Had he been able to run a fair campaign in this state and remain on the ballot, this might have been a far worse mess today.

There are a lot of folks who are as disappointed as I am, some making demurs about cheating on one’s wife during a life-threatening illness. But the timing known so far doesn’t support this. If Edwards had been seeing Hunter in 2006, Elizabeth Edwards’ cancer was in remission at that time. What bothers me just as much about folks making objections is that they not only characterize Elizabeth Edwards as a helpless “dying wife,” but that they assume to know what’s going on inside their marriage AND they haven’t held other politicians who’ve aspired to be president to the same standards.

John McCain, for example, or Bob Dole, or Newt Gingrich, all of them cheaters — and in Gingrich’s case, a serial cheater who arranged his divorce from his first wife while she was hospitalized for a cancer treatment, and who left his second wife for an aide in his office — none of the three of them received the explosion of attention that the media detonated on John Edwards this afternoon.

But then perhaps there were no heartbroken supporters to annoy with such coverage.

I’m heartbroken not just because I feel my trust was betrayed in Edwards’ viability as a candidate, but that he was the best candidate on the issue of social economic justice; the remaining candidates in the field simply didn’t, and do not currently, speak with the same passion as he did about the chasm between the “two Americas”, that gaping gulch between the wealthiest and poorest of our country.

And I’m heartbroken, in spite of my age and my experience, to note once again that the most passionate candidates are, well, often the most passionate people.