Monday, August 11, 2008 - Posts
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Meghan, maybe you're right that we should turn away—but not quite yet! First we get to trounce him a bit. Here's Kerry Howell of Reason magazine and me agreeing with Mickey about covering the story. And now I agree with Hanna that Elizabeth doesn't get to call off the bloodhounds when she feels like it. I know, this is six shades of awful for her. But she knew about the affair and went along with him continuing to run for president. That was a lot of potential risk loading onto the Democratic Party.
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Meghan, I couldn’t agree more about how depressing the “I’m suffering!” political apology has become. Elizabeth Edwards has terminal cancer; John Edwards has terminal narcissism. Let’s call it a tie? But the more we pick at the threads of rampant narcissism here, the sadder the whole story gets. Melinda points to the weird Newsweek account by Jonathan Darman in which Rielle Hunter emerges as a patchwork of reality show clichés: part actress, part “spiritual adviser,” “New York party girl,” screenwriter, part married, and part divorced.
Her “webisodes,” in which John Edwards drones on and on about John Edwards, manage to be all about Rielle.
The most astonishing part of the Darman piece is Hunter’s disclosure that “she and novelist Jay McInerney were working on a ‘genius' idea for a television show about women who help men get out of failing marriages by having affairs with them.” She apparently “wanted to pitch this idea to Darren Star, creator of ‘Melrose Place’ and ‘Sex and the City.’ ” Betcha $15,000 it’s in production by September.
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XX Factor blogger Melinda Henneberger will be chatting online at Washingtonpost.com today at 2 p.m. Send her a question. We'll post a link to the transcript here when she's done.
Melinda wrote about the Edwardses' marriage for Slate back in December, in advance of the primaries. (Also the Obamas, the Huckabees, and, yep, the Clintons.) She's a frequent contributor here at the XX Factor, and you can read a previous chat transcript here.
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This is rich: Now Hillary Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson, who might as well have an "Is it 2012 yet?'' bumper sticker, is undermining Obama's candidacy by complaining to ABCNews.com that if only John Edwards' affair had come out sooner, Clinton woulda been the nominee. Only, is he really so sure that had that happened, nobody woulda then jumped out of Bill Clinton's post-presidential closet? Guess what this quote from Wolfson really means is that his boss has been told we're not going to get a text message from Obama announcing that it's Hillary for V.P.
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It's been hard to feel much shock about John Edwards' affair with Rielle Hunter: Every other month, it seems, we receive the revelation that a powerful politician has risked his career to get a bit on the side. Edwards would almost seem to be the norm rather than the radical exception. But the literary critic in me is interested by one new-ish element: the plea of "narcissism." Whereas political mea culpas have often been cast in the language of sin and redemption, this one was explicitly cast in the language of disease and recovery. On Friday, Edwards told Bob Woodruff on ABC's Nightline that he "went from being a young senator" to "running for president ... becoming a national public figure, all of which fed a self-focus, an egotism, a narcissism that leads you to believe you can do whatever you want; you're invincible."
From one perspective, it was a perfectly spun rationale for our recovery-story ridden age, filtering Machiavelli through Freud, so that what we end up with is the idea that power doesn't just corrupt, it makes us narcissists. (We are all patients now.) From another perspective, though, it's a flop of an excuse: You can't forgive narcissists, you can only learn to live with them—or not. Do we really need to know whether Hunter's child is his? Do we really need to wax on about the harm Edwards would have caused if he had been elected and the affair had come out? No, we already know that he is a narcissist. that he had an inflated sense of self-importance that obscures the worth of those around him—campaign staffers, donors, volunteers. And so in a sense the perfect retort to Edwards would be to respond to him as one might to a clinically diagnosed patient: You thrive on attention and drama. So we're not going to be your enablers anymore; we're just going to turn away.
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