Ken Doll Lust

Gail Collins, NYTimes

When it comes to politicians and sex, our expectations are
not all that great. Human nature being what it is, there will continue to be
adultery no matter how many instructive scandals they’re exposed to. But you
really would think that by now they’d know how to make a decent public
confession.
Yet there was John Edwards, ignoring the many, many previous examples of why
it is so important to admit the truth quickly and keep it simple. Unable to
deny any longer that he had had an affair with a campaign worker, he insisted
on parsing. It was all a mistake. If she was paid off, it wasn’t my money. And,
in what may be a new high in the annals of weaseldom: my wife’s cancer was in
remission.
As to why he did it, Edwards blamed “an egotism, a narcissism that leads you
to believe that you can do whatever you want.” That we could have figured out
on our own.
For a man bent on clearing things up, Edwards seemed strangely incurious
during his interview on “Nightline” on ABC. He had no idea why his national
finance chairman has been funneling payments to his ex-mistress, and he was
apparently never tempted to pick up the phone to ask. His 2 a.m. visit with the
woman, Rielle Hunter, at a Beverly
Hills hotel last month was a secret mission to keep
her from going public about their liaison, the briefness and meaninglessness of
which cannot be stressed too often. And he has no idea what baby that was in
The National Enquirer picture.
Edwards met Hunter in a bar in New
York in 2006, and paid her $114,000 to follow him
around, documenting his every move for campaign videos. (In a TV interview back
in happier times, Hunter called the experience “life-altering.”) Said videos
were posted, then mysteriously disappeared from the Edwards Web site, with
officials muttering something about campaign finance rules. They exist today on
YouTube, where you can see the candidate sitting on his plane, grinning like a
hound dog in heat, while he tells Hunter that he doesn’t want to be “some
plastic Ken doll that you put in front of the audience,” and pokes himself in
the chest while announcing, “I actually want the country to see who I am — who
I truly am.”
When The National Enquirer ran a story that Hunter was pregnant and named
Edwards as the father, he denied that there had been any relationship. One of
his campaign workers stepped up and took responsibility for the baby. But when
the little girl was born, Hunter did not list any father on the birth
certificate.
All this is weirdly reminiscent of the saga of Grover Cleveland, my favorite
American president when it comes to sex scandals. He had barely been nominated
in 1884 when a small, scurrilous newspaper from his hometown of Buffalo accused him of
being the father of a love child born to Maria Halpin, a store clerk. She later
took to drink, and Cleveland, a bachelor, arranged to have the baby adopted by
friends.
“Moral Monster,” said my favorite headline, in The Cincinnati Penny Post.
“Grover Cleveland’s
True Character Laid Bare. A Boon Companion to Buffalo Harlots. A Drunken, Fighting,
Roistering Roué.” The scandal almost cost him the election, and the baby
inspired a famous political slogan: Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa? Gone to the White
House, ha, ha, ha.
It probably wasn’t Cleveland’s
child. The birth certificate lists the baby’s name as Oscar Folsom Cleveland,
and Oscar Folsom was Cleveland’s
married law partner, who had been killed in an accident before the birth. But Cleveland stolidly
refused to defend himself and Folsom’s name was never really connected to the
scandal. Then, once he was safely in the White House, the new president married
Folsom’s beautiful 21-year-old daughter, Frances.
This is as good as it gets for sex scandal survivors. The marriage was happy
and Cleveland
wound up serving two terms. The American public has always had an extremely
pragmatic attitude toward their elected officials and will overlook almost
anything if they believe the sinning pol can deliver on the job.
If Edwards’s political career is toast, it will be because he has always
seemed to be less than a sum of his parts: the position papers, the “Two
Americas,” the photogenic grin, the supersmart wife. The only piece of the
package that consistently disappointed was the man himself. He wasn’t a very
good running mate for John Kerry, and as a presidential candidate, he always
struck me as being about 2 inches deep.
We take whatever lessons we can get from these sad public messes. We will
marvel, yet again, at how much less damage would have been done if the offender
had taken the inventive tactic of not lying. But on one front, at least, human
behavior really does seem to be evolving. Edwards told his wife that she didn’t
need to sit loyally by his side while the TV cameras rolled.