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A Lament for John Edwards

Amir Khan, Ph.D. candidate - 2/21/2008

If ambition is the original sin for any politician, then John Edwards’ exit from the political arena is some form of poetic justice. No one embodied vanity better than Edwards. His White House bid was a transparent attempt to capture yet another trophy for his rather formidable display case, one which currently houses wares attesting to a rather remarkable career as a civil litigator.

Not to say that Hillary and Obama aren’t ambitious. They can simply couch their ambition more readily behind victimary demagoguery; Edwards, as a southern white male, has nowhere to hide. Hence, his ambition is laid bare for all to see so that one cannot help but feel that Edwards himself is somewhat vapid, an “empty vessel,” to quote Dennis Miller, with very little genuine political principle, and nothing more than a shallow play for significance propelling him to seek out the highest office in the land.

Yet for all his vanity, somehow, I don’t find Edwards offensive—that is, I don’t find his antics vulgar in any sense of the term. His bid for centrality has occurred wholeheartedly within the rules so that all one can resent him for is, precisely, playing the game too well—so well in fact that his fault could only be that he is always playing and never, well, politicizing, or politicking, or doing whatever it is politicians are supposed to be doing when they are not playing—as if the line could be etched out definitively.

Certainly, as a trial lawyer, Edwards has made few friends in the corporate world. Karl Rove and the Bush administration have already tried to introduce tort reform at the Congressional level, thereby mitigating the amount of liability big business can face at the hands of civil litigation, and consequently, at the hands of civil litigators like John Edwards. Always wary of a big payout, big business would do anything to curb the ambitions of any trial lawyer. Yet that is not to say that Edwards does not have rich friends (indeed, one cannot even think of running for President without them). So if it wasn’t big money that bailed on Edwards, was it instead the public?

I can make no definitive claim that public perception of Edwards’ vanity is what caused his campaign to stall. Bill O’Reilly did much to spread the conviction of Edwards as a “phony,” though this can hardly be taken as incontrovertible proof against Edwards. Yet sometimes, when the stakes are grave, prudence forces us to consider the worst case scenario, and for whatever reason, for me, the worst depiction of John Edwards still comes up looking rosy.

Suppose that everything John Edwards’ does or has ever done simply betrays his own narcissism. Even if this were the case, it seems to me that his stubbornness in clinging to his “act” betrays a disingenuousness only at the most superficial level. In fact, his commitment to the rules of the game he and his “handlers” have established from the outset will ensure that Edwards never betrays those rules. If his platform (or “gimmick”) is that he will stand up for the poor against corporate interests, then we have every reason to believe he shall stay the course—not for the sake of principle—but for the sake of his own centrality, the significance of which depends upon an overall trust and agreement between him and his voters. You may argue that his lack of genuine principle might entail equivocality in future; yet I maintain that his commitment to his own image of himself as “champion of the poor” (in short, his vanity) is not a short term investment. Once in the White House, a man as ambitious as Edwards would only seek out the next thing worthy of conquest: a legacy. Hence, his ambition would necessarily keep his “integrity” in check. It’s not that Edwards would never renege on a campaign promise; it’s just that such renegation could only come at the expense of his own centrality—hence to renege would not be politically expedient when thinking about legacies (and John Edwards, most certainly, is). Edwards is nothing if not a man of the people!

Somewhere in Edwards’ failed bid for the presidency is the paradox inherent in telling our kids that it is okay for them to want to grow up and be President, only for them to grow up and find out that even though they still want to be President, they are no longer allowed to say it. Even though Edwards’ ambition has translated into stunning victories as a trial lawyer, he is not allowed to say that because he has made gains in the judicial world, he could also make gains in a political one. (One ought not to covet the Presidency in such a vainglorious way.) That’s for the voters to decide, and the silly thing is, it remains unclear whether Edwards’ successes as a civil litigator help him or hurt him. To judge Edwards by his ambition is to miss the point; the point being that, for whatever reason, the stars have aligned such that his play for significance has him fighting the good fight. I see a tricky moral maxim lurking in the background, one that says the means cannot justify the ends. Yet we are fooling ourselves if we think that the means aren’t the same for Hillary and Barack. That is, the means to make it to the top is always ambition. The worst thing we could say about Edwards is that though he might be a phony, he certainly wants to be, and will strive to be, a “good” phony. His handlers have come up with a sellable product, one that encompasses the American dream in all its largesse and even, perhaps, some of its horror. Edwards encompasses the notion that human vice ought not to be expiated, but rather, recycled in a manner beneficial to the public good.

None of this, of course, is to say that Edwards truly is a phony. But I do find it troubling that he has yet to adequately address the fact that many of the so-called corporate “fat cats” he attacks are in his own income bracket, or that his 28,000 square foot home in Orange County, North Carolina is certainly indicative of one sort of America, just not the one he cares to ally himself during in his campaigns. Commenting on his slogan of two Americas, one for the very rich, the other for everyone else, Jay Leno retorted, “Well, I think I know which America he’s living in.” (Him and Jay Leno both, of course.)

And while taking a positive and turning it into a negative is certainly an admirable quality in public life, Edwards makes no bones about using the story of his son’s death during summations for the Lakey v. Sta-Rite Industries case—the one in which his clients were awarded a $25 million landmark settlement, the largest in the history of North Carolina (a case which also won Edwards the Association of America’s Trial Lawyer’s National Award for Public Service). Indeed, Edwards’ seeming ease in recounting the tale of his lost son almost cost him his place on John Kerry’s ticket in 2004. According to Bob Shrum, Kerry’s then political advisor, Edwards used an anecdote about his son’s death to curry favour with Kerry prior to being made Kerry’s running mate (an anecdote, incidentally, that Edwards’ claimed he kept close to his chest, but one which Kerry had, chillingly, heard from him before in roughly the same tone and cadence). Of course, since the election loss, Kerry and Edwards no longer speak to one another.

Perhaps I am now guilty of taking the populist bait, the one which I am cautioning my readers to avoid. Playing devil’s advocate is always tricky business. Edwards’ saving grace just may be that he has earned everything he enjoys, so that he personifies a version of American exceptionalism, one rooted in a Gatsbian grab for profit, fame, and success, rather than a traditional sort based on a Wilsonian assertion of moral superiority. That is, Edwards’ exceptionalism is productive, surely within a de jure cultural marketplace first, and perhaps only secondly in a de facto political arena. Yet any real political mobilization in America today must first occur at the level of the cultural marketplace anyhow. Edwards has to sell himself, and he has done considerable work designing an image that both accommodates his ambition and addresses a very real and dire economic reality: that of two Americas (despite whichever one he finds himself is in). If this is the way America spontaneously generates individuals who care at all to give a “voice to the voiceless,” why rock the boat if such individuals are capable of getting results? This is not the age of Gandhis, nor is America the country to produce them. For those who believe the market can solve every problem, Edwards is the ideal candidate, and a “genuine” one at that—formed in the crucible of the American dream, making his case for significance by opposing a version of it that increasingly emphasizes only the pursuit of happiness (wealth) at the expense of liberty and equality for all.

The appeal of Obama’s campaign may prove that such a top-down paternalistic approach is resented more than embraced; yet Barack’s grassroots campaign of moving from the “bottom-up” very quickly starts to look like Clintonian pragmatism under the banner of ‘Yes we can,’ lacking a supplementary dotcom boom to boot. One could argue that by the time Obama is finished drawing together partisan differences, his four years in the White House will be up—a point of contention, to be sure, between him and Edwards, the latter reluctant to endorse the former, despite their mutual antagonism to Hillary Clinton.

In the end, it looks like Edwards was outdone by what he sought to do from the position he sought to do it from. Like Kerry before him, he was effectively “swiftboated.” Though Kerry was ultimately “exonerated,” the poison of the accusation allowed a taboo to fester within the minds of the voters. Though they were unable to say it, voters were free to wonder why a rich kid would have gone to Vietnam at all. Unable or unwilling to buy “duty” or “obligation” as any sort of legitimate casus belli, voters were then forced to conclude that John Kerry’s efforts could only have been political. So that John Edwards, despite his 2007 three-day, eight state “Road to One America Tour,” his fight to index the minimum wage, his founding of a research institute devoted to Poverty, Work and Opportunity and UNC Chapel Hill, his endorsement of universal healthcare, and his advocacy to curb predatory lending by loan sharks and money marts, could only be seen as another rich kid, this time running for President on the backs of hardworking and decent Americans.

I don’t say that such sentiment is beneficial. America needs to get over such self-destructive cynicism. The bottom line is that like Tom Brady and the New England Patriots, John Edwards is a winner, wholly capable of fighting for the poor and bringing real change to America’s economic infrastructure. As a man whose earned the American dream, it isn’t any less plausible to play “angel’s advocate”—that is, to believe that Edwards truly wants to give back to the country that has allowed him to achieve to such a high degree, but in such a way that Edwards need not decimate or apologize for everything he has managed to accomplish thus far. While we may love to rail on the Patriots for losing the Superbowl, the stakes are much higher in the political sphere—high enough so that we ought to be able to put aside petty resentments to elect the most qualified individual.

But obviously, one’s qualifications cannot be so easily separated from one’s image, so that in 2007, when John Edwards began repeatedly berating Hillary Clinton to stop taking money from corporate lobbyists, Americans were simply unwilling to believe that Edwards, himself a multimillionaire, who by no means ran a pecuniary campaign, had not taken, at the very least, similar sorts of donations. Nor were they willing to ally themselves with Edwards during the post-Iowa South Carolina Democratic debate (which Mrs. Greenspan hailed as ninety-nine percent bickering offset by one percent of John Edwards calling attention to the fact that there were, in fact, three candidates in the debate, not just two). Edwards once again began by grilling Mrs. Clinton on her dubious campaign fundraising; when Hillary retorted that Edwards himself had taken contributions from “people who employ lobbyists [and] who are married to lobbyists, ” so that essentially he (Edwards) was splitting hairs, Americans, on the whole, were willing to side with Hillary. Edwards could only retaliate, somewhat flatly, by insisting that his taking of money was “not the same thing.”

Had Edwards answered truly, that he, indeed, had not taken money from corporate lobbyists (or their children, or spouses, or what have you), but that the single largest body sponsoring his 2008 White House campaign were employees of the Fortress Investment Group (though at a relatively tame sum of $167,460), he would not have come out of that exchange looking much the wiser. Hillary’s quick turning of the tables ensured that Edwards had nowhere to go; he was caught treading water.

Rather than bridging the divide between two Americas, Edwards tried to live vicariously and exclusively in each, hoping that America at large would somehow buy his professional credentials in one while ignoring his personal credentials in another, a difficult high-wire act to pull of, no doubt, though Edwards deserves all the more credit for making a valiant stab at it. I fully agree with the senior Edwards adviser who said that “Clinton is the status quo, Obama appeases the status quo, and John fights the status quo.” Perhaps it wasn’t his phoniness, but his lack of novelty that outdid him. As superficial as we might perceive Edwards to be, we cannot discount the fact that the American media is far kitschier in taste—too busy right now swooning over the first woman and the first black candidates duking it out for the Democratic nomination to bother about real policy debate. This of course, is another lesson of the market; you are only as good as your novelty. In a race of Al Gores, John Kerrys and Bill Bradleys, Edwards would have had enough charm, charisma, and experience this time around to make a serious run at the nomination. As it stands, and as he put it himself, he must “step aside so history can blaze its path.” In the current marketplace of ideas and images, victimary novelty sells better than novel political ideas, even those espoused by a southern white male with considerable political skill and financial resources. In a campaign as superficially fickle as this one, let’s hope if Obama ends up winning the nomination and the Presidency, that his plan for change is more than skin deep. He has all the rhetoric with few concrete policy proposals to gun for. It was Edwards who had both.