John Edwards

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Many of the Founding Fathers were terrible family men, but how much of that was because of years away from their families crafting a new political system from scratch (almost), and how much of that was due to personal character flaws? I'll bet much more of the former and much less of the latter. My problem with someone like Edwards is that he was entirely self-centered, and that is likely to leak into his professional carreer as well. If someone sacrifices Family for Job, that's acceptable. Not necessarily the right choice, but acceptable. If someone sacrifices Job for Family, (s)he won't get hired, but it's still acceptable. If someone sacrifices either or both simply for 'me, me, me, and me', that's something else.

 

I'm not missing any point Chandos -- I just don't care about man's personal life. While I agree with Aldeth that having an affair when you're wife has cancer is rather low, I've also never been through the stress of being forced to watch my wife die slowly from cancer (nor any of the other issues he was dealing with). I'm not willing to condemn him -- I may not like him, but then I feel that way about most politicians. I realize these scandals have an impact on our country, but only because we (as a nation) turn it into the media sideshow.

 

I agree with T2. Obama can boink the White House Head Chef all night long as far as I'm concerned, as long as he is also fixing our current issues. What's between him & Michelle, well, I couldn't give a Rat's ass about. If a politician can get results that help the nation, I could care less if he or she cheats. The media circus that follows these instances is our own fault. If we read it, they will print it. If we don't buy it, they won't sell it. Simple enough to me.

 

Excellent comment T2. Sadly, I can't rep your for that one.

Edward's personal life is his personal business. I am not interested in it, just as I am not interested who and who else Tiger Woods boinked. It's also not my business. The boinking has nothing to do with either man's job. It's private, or supposed to be private. But that's where we are. It's not about politics or policy or job performance but celebrity.

And crucis, Drew is perfectly correct about Edward's job. Your dislike is tainting your judgement. You like to imagine him as an ambulance chaser because you don't like him. It has nothing to do with what he did or didn't do in reality.

 

I disagree. Being a political leader, particularly being the president, requires that a person be of good moral character. The Founding Fathers knew this. Frankly, I think that it shows how low this country has fallen that so many people don't care about the moral character of the people they choose to lead their country. It's sickening.

No, you're wrong, Ragusa. The fact that he was an ambulance chaser is what caused me to hate his guts, not the other way around.

 

crusis, you do realize many of the founding fathers died from complications due to syphillis don't you? Kennedy had Marilyn Monroe in the White House (as in boinked her while Jackie was elsewhere in the place). Lady Bird Johnson walked in on her husband doing his secretary on the Oval Office desk.

I think if you went back and looked closely at the history of the White House you would find many Presidents and Vice Presidents had adulterous affairs. Good moral character is relative.

 

Many of the Founders had excellent characters, despite a few flaws, which everyone has. George Washington's character was not a myth, despite the "cherry tree," which was a myth. I would ask you to contrast John and Abigail Adams with Ben and Deborah Franklin (Deborah was a loyal and steadfast wife, btw), NOG.

I agree with Crucis, character DOES matter, as does good judgment and discretion. No Ragusa, I respectfully disagree with you, my friend: people who can't keep their own personal lives in order, have a more difficult time managing a country of 300 million people. A rare few can pull it off, but take a look at some of the more recent cases of those "hiking the Appalachian Trail." You don't have to go back forty years or fifty years, but just in this last 10-15 years. Would you want a guy who claimed to be "hiking the Appalchian Trail" and instead spending 5 days in Argentina with his pronounced "soul mate," to be YOUR president?

 

Saying something doesn't make it so. If you truly came to the conclusion that John Edwards was an ambulance chaser through a rational assessment of the cases he's chosen to take along with the cases he's refused; while also taking into account the legal tactics he employed in those cases he did take, you should be more than capable of citing some specifics. Thus far, you have done nothing of the sort. Other than bringing up the fact that Edwards used to be a medical malpractice attorney, which on its own means absolutely nothing, you have yet to put forth even the tiniest shred of evidence to back up your assertion that the former medical malpractice attorney known as John Edwards was an "ambulance chaser" -- a pejorative typically reserved for personal injury lawyers.

If you cannot cannot come up with any specifics, I am forced conclude that your conclusion is not based on a rational assessment of the facts at hand. I'll not speculate about what else might motivate your conclusion because I believe it is folly to make assumptions about another person's motivations. Nevertheless, your refusal to bring up any specifics of any kind in order to back up your assertion rather strongly indicates that you are, to put it mildly, being less than objective in this case.

 

Like Crucius, I disagree with this comparison. Tiger Woods' job isn't one that involves character at any point. He hits the ball and sees how close he can come to the hole. The only influence he wields is that of his money and reputation, and those are his to wield as he sees fit. He earned them.

Politicians are another matter, though. Their power and influence are a matter of trust put in them by the People, and their jobs frequently involve character (as we can see from any of the scandals that don't involve sex). Like an eye-witness, how much we trust their character plays a major role in how things go.

I don't know much about Ben Franklin's character or his family life, but as I understand it John Adams spent most of his childrens' childhoods either in Congress (months away), over seas, or back in Congress. Again, he made a decision to put the good of the People as a whole, and the safety of the formative years of our nation, above that of his family, and I am not about to condemn the man for that. Of all the founding fathers, he and Washington are the two I respect the most, in fact. My point was actually that such sacrifice was a symptom of good character, and not of bad character, and that it should be distinguished from throwing family away for personal gain.

Agreed entirely. The amount of power we trust these people with will test the character of anyone, even the most upstanding of people. Those who's characters have already been shown faulty should justly be ruled against on such grounds.

 

Character does matter, but I have found over the years that marital fidelity is an individual thing and that extremely competant professionals can have issues with fidelity. The only problem I have is when they try to cover up the issue -- that gets sticky. I know Edwards lied to the press and I can't say I blame him; perhaps I give him too much credit but I there was a very good possibility his wife would be dead before she ever found out. Why not lie and try to spare her the grief? That said, it was not a well thought out response. I don't remember seeing him doing anything to tamper with evidence or cover up the existance of the baby.

 

I have a great admiration of Ben, for many reasons. His character was really quite good, despite the flaws I listed in the above post. Although he did hold office occasionally, he was mostly an agent: at the beginning for the Crown,(or so he believed) trying to unseat the Penn family from the colonies, (or so he imagained he could), and later for the colonies themselves against the British Crown and Parliament (but only after they had turned on him as a result of the Hutchinson letters affair).

As some of his biographers have noted, Franklin's intellect and personality were just too large for Philadelphia, maybe even for the colonies, and he was more suited to be a player upon the world's stage. He raised his son, William, to be a complete, loyal servant to the Crown, (to be a loyal King's man) before his own personal break with England, and when the break happened, he expected William to do an abrupt about face, which William could not bring himself to do. As a result, Ben disowned his son in every vindictive manner he could muster. After the Revolution, William, completely cut-off from Ben's life, lived as an exile in England, his step-mother long gone and his wife having passed away a few years earlier.

Since you have not read much on Franklin, NOG, I would recommend one biography, which is the H. W. Brands' volume, An American Life. I don't mean to be too presumptuous, NOG, but among the several on him I've looked at, it is by far the best, IMHO.

Edit: How could I forget Adams? I must be getting old. He and Abigail had a warm, wonderful marriage and friendship. John's time away from his wife and family is one of the most engaging, personal, stories of the Revolution, and eventually he was able to bring them to Europe (which was sooooo different from Ben's situation). For Adams I would recommend the David McCollough biography. Adams had an outstanding charcater as well, but as Ben Franklin noted of his fellow compatriot in France, he could be "completely out of his head." John Adams was known to be emotional and a bit high-strung.

 

Politicians are not elected as moral paragons. EDIT: That's the domain of priests./EDIT

I can understand Ted Haggard's infidelity being a problem in face of his stance on family values and sexuality. There are politicians, largely on the right, who proclaim the same values, and as they are running for office on these values in an effort to appeal to a certain segment of their party's base it is fair game to ask questions about the extent to which their lives reflect their rhetoric. From what I recall Edwards didn't run for office on such values.

According to fidelity statistics about every second married American (iirc woman ~45% and men ~50-55%) commits infidelity in his married life. While I believe in fidelity in marriage, I also accept the reality that it is unrealistic to expect American politicians to not show the same statistical characteristics as their electorate. Americans are far too critical of people on the basis of human failings.

 

Priests get elected? I'll take your word on it.

I don't claim that politicians are elected as moral paragons, but rather that they are entrusted with increadible power and authority, which requires one to be pretty close to a moral paragon to resist the temptations of.

T2 makes the point that we can't lump all 'character' into one variable, that there are different types and a failing in one may not be a failing in others. I'm not sure I agree 100%, but it is an interesting position. Personally, if I found out someone was cheating on his wife of 30 years with a woman 30 years his junior, I wouldn't trust him with my personal finances or power of attorney. You may, T2, I don't know. The analogy to politicians, though, is pretty exact, as we trust them with the nation's finances and, essentially, power of attorney.

 

I edited the text to clarify the probably least relevant point in that post.

 

Ragusa - You are focusing on the sex act itself way too much, although even that is pretty bad (the details are pretty bad, and I heard there is even a homemade video tape). And for a minute let's set aside the pure ego and very bad judgment of starting an affair during a presidential campaign.

It is how a person reacts in this situation, which further demostrates character and if this person should be trusted with high office. Because of the affair, he began to ask others and friends to lie for him; he asked a friend to pretend to be the father; He wanted an abortion; he wanted to fake a DNA test to prove he was not the father; he started to use funds from supporters to move around his mistress and their child in an attempt to hide them. In short, he built a web of deceit and corrpution around himself to try and save his political campaign. It's not just the sex act; you are focusing too much on that.

 

Nonsense. The US political system is built to not need paragons because the founders apparently had a hunch that paragons are a rarity. That's why they implemented checks and balances. That's iirc the genius behind the US idea about governance.

Chandos,
I am not defending Edwards. I merely object to the moralising view that politicians who cheat on their spouses cannot be trusted because they apparently have a deeply flawed character (that is shared by the philandering half of their constituents).

It would have been commendable had Edwards reacted to the outing of his affair and the parenthood like David Letterman did with his affair and the extortion attempt. Alas, Edwards didn't. There is a very simple explanation for why Edwards was lying and wanting that DNA test: His political career and campaign and his personal life were at that time just falling apart. To me it looks like Edwards fell into panic.

 

Exactly. You understand my point, just as I do yours.

 

I think you miss the point. We want and demand that our leaders be better then we are. I believe it was the late great Groucho Marx who said "I would not join any club that would have someone like me for a member."