PHEW

Notes of Concern…
…Jack Blair

PHEW!
(That Was Way Too Close)


I do a lot of reading in the summer. During the other seasons life is simply too hectic to provide opportunities for encountering many books and authors.

This summer one of the tomes I decided to read was titled
The Politician-An Insiders Account of John Edward’s Pursuit of the Presidency and the Scandal that Brought Him Down-by Andrew Young.

Why did this book make it to my list of summer readings?

Although I am interested in politics I had felt no desire to read this “ tell all” book by a disgruntled aide to former Senator Johnny Reid Edwards.

Not only was I not interested in the one term Senator from North Carolina who made a splash on the national scene in two presidential campaign seasons but also I suspected his aide was almost as deficient in morals as the former senator

But a small mention that a major producer planned to make a movie out of the book suggested to me that there might be some things of real interest in the writing.

So I purchased the electronic edition and began reading it on my Kindle.

Friends, I have just concluded reading the book and I am painfully aware how close we came to having this man (Edwards) in one of the two top positions in our country: president or vice president.

Johnny Reid Edwards was prevented by a few hundred thousand votes cast in the state of Ohio from being a heartbeat away from the presidency. In the most recent presidential contest, he was thought by many to have a real chance at his party’s nomination. After losing that nomination to Barack Obama, many thought he was the odds on choice for the vice presidential nomination. In fact, it is stated in the book that after Edwards dropped out of the contest he told both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama he would throw his support (and delegates) to whichever of them offered him the vice presidential nomination first! Talk about chutzpah! Just another example of how totally immoral Johnny Reid Edwards really was.

Andrew Young, Edward’s chief aide and confidant( and enabler) concludes in hindsight that Edwards was brought down by narcissism, greed and power-lust. Reasonable people would add to this short list: lust and immorality.

How does a fellow like this convince so many of us that he is “presidential timber?”

Let us revisit a few facts.

Johnny Edwards was a one term United States Senator who willingly admitted he was bored with the job.

Johnny Edwards was what people in business call an “8x10 Glossy” which means “all style and no substance.”

In the television and computer age, our own experiment with narcissism, we were attracted to this handsome young man with a gift for gab who was married to an overweight woman with spunk and smarts who was fighting stage four cancer.

He also never failed to point out to us his humble beginnings while showing us his incredible financial success as an “ambulance chasing” injury lawyer. How many guys do you know who pay $400 for a haircut on a regular basis?

We hope that our candidates are real. We trust that they want to make life better for us. Sometimes we live vicariously through their” larger than life” lives.

This book by Young tells us that Edwards was not above using his teenage son’s tragic automobile accident death to further his cause.

The book demonstrates in great detail that Edwards was not above using his wife’s terminal cancer diagnosis to further his candidacy.

The book demonstrates how Edwards used the people around him, without regard for their personal circumstances or the eventual damage to their lives, to further his cause.

The book demonstrates how Edwards, while prominent nationally and followed daily by reporters from both respectable newspapers and gossip rags, still felt he could bed a woman who attracted him on the first night he met her, hire her to work on his campaign, pay for her with contributed money, and actually consider her as “First Lady” material as he contemplated what he thought would be the future demise of his wife. Essentially, Edwards had a wife and a spare!

More importantly, he had unprotected sex (damning under these circumstances) and fathered a child with his mistress while in the middle of a presidential campaign.

Wealthy Americans ponied up millions of dollars to help Edwards deceive the American people. Some of these wealthy supporters knew what he was doing. From others he simply took the money and applied it to support for his pregnant concubine without their knowledge.

One such wealthy individual was “Bunny” Mellon of the considerable Mellon fortune. She channeled over six million dollars to Edwards, much of it used to fund the effort to hide the mistress as well as the author of the book’s family in high priced, toney accommodations across the country during the political season. In the book there is not much evidence to suggest she knew how her money was being used. It doesn’t speak well of her that she required no accounting.

It is not my intention to retell the story found in Andrew Young’s book. If you have an interest in this story you can read the book. What I want to highlight here is how close Johnny Reid Edwards came to being the “Leader of the Free World “and suggest that we all need to be more demanding of our candidates for national office.

Edwards used and tossed away his wife. He used Andrew Young and the entire Young family and then discarded them. He used “Bunny” Mellon and a great many other substantially wealthy Americans and did not value them. More importantly, he used all Americans who bought into his campaigns for vice president and president and could only have thought of them as dolts.

As his world crumbled, was he contrite? Did he seek our forgiveness? Did he make amends to those he used?

He did not.

Mrs. Edwards, not completely innocent or naïve by the way according to this book, came in second to the bimbo Reille Hunter. Edwards acknowledged his child with Reille Hunter long after everyone else already knew the baby was his. Not a very stand-up guy.

The Edwards children, facing the horrible cancer diagnosis with their mother, watched their father embarrass them all and abandon his wife.

Edward’s key aide, Andrew Young, is hardly employable and forever tarnished. More importantly, Young saw his whole family tarred with the same brush. Again, Young is not completely innocent or naïve in any of this. He was a willing companion on this fall from grace. And his willingness to enable Edwards says a lot about his willingness to foist this guy on the nation and about his own conceit.

“Bunny” Mellon asked only one thing from John Edwards, to whom she had funneled over six million dollars,” and that was his attendance at the funeral of her daughter.

Surprise. Surprise. He failed to attend.

Phew. We came so close friends.

We need to be more demanding of information about candidates to lead our land in the future. We need to get past their superficial qualities and demand evidence of their inner core beliefs.

Imagine what we would be dealing with had he actually become vice president or president.

And the damning piece in all of this was that he was willing to be this kind of person while thinking we were all so lacking in intelligence that he could pull the wool over our eyes.

I wonder where he got that idea.