I’m not at all surprised that John Edwards was acquitted on one charge and had a mistrial on the others. The feds’ case against him was highly suspect from the start. When even the head of the FEC says that the law being used to prosecute him didn’t apply to his case, you know you’ve got an uphill battle to convict him. Edwards is a first-class scumbag, but that doesn’t make him a felon. I doubt the DOJ will bother to refile the charges that resulted in mistrial.
Jun 03 2012
Edwards Likely to Go Free
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Dr X
June 3, 2012 at 10:55 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I’m reluctant to label Edwards a scumbag from afar. I bet there are more than a few readers who can relate to the complexity and pressures of romantic relationships that have led them to behave in ways that they consider troubling and out-of-character. Paradoxically, some of the more psychologically resilient people can end up in these situations because the behavior of the disturbed spouse incinerates relationships with weaker specimens. Edwards, being a public figure in an extraordinary position, had his family drama play out in an especially ugly way. He may be a huge jerk, or he might be someone who is reasonably decent or somewhere in between.
My comments on John and Elizabeth Edwards.
Thomas
June 3, 2012 at 11:07 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
In 08, he was my favorite candidate. I liked that his campaign was focused on economic inequality. I still wonder, if the voting public didn’t care about his personal indiscretions, if he would have made for a great president.
That being said, he is a scumbag. We can’t know everyone’s personal motivation for what they do, but we can safely say its wrong to cheat on your wife who’s dying of cancer. I can’t make excuses for someone because I liked them or agree with their politics.
It was a total waste of taxpayer money to go to trial with this.
gingerbaker
June 3, 2012 at 11:47 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Exactly what makes the man a “scumbag”?!?
Please, enlighten us.
rmsc
June 3, 2012 at 11:57 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
In my opinion, this is less about what kind of person Edwards is, and more about how incredibly easy campaign contributions can be manipulated. But, I’m sure that is exactly how both sides like it.
marcus
June 3, 2012 at 12:59 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@3 gingerbaker and 1 Dr X As a lifelong slut please let me enlighten you. What makes him a “scumbag” in this situation is not that he had a sexual relationship outside his marriage while his wife was being treated for cancer. What makes him a “scumbag” is that he had a sexual relationship outside his marriage while his wife was being treated for cancer without telling her about it and used misappropriated campaign fund to finance it. If he had confided in his wife about what was going on and used his own funds to pay for it then it would have been a different matter. Letting the person you love and presumably care for learn that you are having an illicit affair from the fucking media is something only a “scumbag” would do. Her illness and the misappropriation of funds just seals the deal. Any “ethical slut” (as I aspire to be) can tell you that including you partner in the reality of what you are doing is of paramount importance (and keeps you from being a scumbag, at least in that instance).
Ed Brayton
June 3, 2012 at 1:19 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I’d like to hear someone explain why John Edwards would not be a scumbag for what he did — cheating on his wife, and while she was battling cancer no less, and trying to hide it while pretending in public to have a perfect family and be the dutiful husband standing by his long-suffering wife — but Newt Gingrich is a scumbag for cheating on his wife while she was battling cancer and telling her he wanted a divorce while she was in the hospital. Is this okay if you’re a Democrat but not if you’re a Republican? Both men are scumbags.
Azkyroth, Former Growing Toaster Oven
June 3, 2012 at 1:30 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
So, if he was up-front about it but she still objected and was upset, then it’d be okay? Or might there be something else in order?
marcus
June 3, 2012 at 2:22 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@7 Azkyroth Then it would have been something for the two of them to work out together within the confines of their own relationship. In that case I would not deem to make any moral judgement at all.
Dr X
June 3, 2012 at 3:20 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Ed,
For me, this has nothing to do with party affiliations. This is about how I look at character. I’m not an Edwards admirer and I don’t care for his economic populism.
In the case of Gingrich, I don’t judge the entire man based on one bad constellation of behavior. I judge his character based on many things he has said and done.
Why do I reserve judgment on Edwards? Because other than this one period in his life, I haven’t seen the guy repeatedly be an awful human being. He may be just that, but I haven’t seen the evidence, so I stand by my judgment that you can’t just look at one horrible situation in a marriage (the rest revolves around that situation), knowing nothing about the rest of the marriage, and assume that you can safely dismiss the person as a scumbag.
Was it an awful thing to do? Yes. Does it define the man’s character? Taken alone, no.
Marcus,
Now that you’ve “enlightened” me, let me enlighten you: decent people can, in certain situations, become frightfully indecent, later having great difficulty fathoming why they did what they did because even they find it reprehensible, out of character and utterly inconsistent with what came before.
In marriages, there are sometimes partners who have character organizations that relentlessly erode the coping and defense mechanisms of a decent partner until the decent partner acts in a primitive or reprehensible way. Moreover, that is the objective of the “wronged” party, who is actually an emotional batterer and sometimes a physical batterer. Some people are extraordinarily able to batter a partner emotionally to the point that they do awful things. The “wronged” party is desperate to get rid of their own sense of badness and they have desperate a need to pressure the other person into bad conduct–to locate the bad out there, in the other. They attack and attack and attack the defenses of the other, relentlessly, leaving no emotional escape. If you’ve ever been subjected to it (people in my line of work get to experience it), you become loathe to judge a reprehensible act committed by their partner without knowing far more about the partner.
Some decent people stay in these situations, stay, paradoxically, because of their good character and emotional resilience. They take their marriage vows seriously, and they genuinely worry about what leaving would do to their children, especially if the kids are likely to be left at the mercy of the other parent. So they stay and endure it, and endure it and then they break–they compromise themselves in ways that they’d never imagine they would have.
Put a decent person in a relationship with another person with a histrionic personality organized at the borderline level and over a length of time and I can promise you, you’ll see reprehensible behavior emerge from the other partner–eventually. I’ve seen many of these situations over the years in my practice.
Would you call a woman who has been emotionally and physically battered by her husband for 20 years “scum” if she met someone very appealing and had an affair and a child and covered up while her husband had cancer? Think about it. What if that person treated them much better than the abuser? What if she thought to herself, I’m not going to leave now, with my husband having maybe a year to live. I’m not going to put the family–my kids–through this. But could you understand why they might have the affair and cover it up? Would you call this battered woman a scumbag?
Dr X
June 3, 2012 at 3:44 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Ed,
There is one other aspect of this that I think explains some of the differences in the way people might judge the same behavior differently based on politics. When a candidate has promoted gay-hate and then it turns out he uses the services of rent-boys, he’ll usually be treated more harshly by people who found his views offensive, versus someone who is outed but never had a war on gays. Likewise, a candidate who espouses “family values” and denigrates the moral corruption of liberals is going to be shown far less mercy when he gets into bad behavior connected with his multiple marriages.
The element of hypocrisy over years living as a family values politician while being a serial philanderer could, as well, bear on the character issue. Specifically the ability over a long period of time to present a false self to the world requires some fancy mental footwork that is probably more characterologically based than a very ugly, one-off period of time in a life otherwise unmarred by habitual, cruel public hypocrisy.
marcus
June 3, 2012 at 4:00 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
DR X You bring up very specific and pathological series of behaviors. My comment was in reference to a simple ethical treatment “all other things being equal” as in: two reasonably competent, mentally healthy individuals engaged in a consensual, committed relationship. Assuming that they have made agreements to be “faithful” (according to their own definition) and “honest” then it would seem that engaging in lying, deception and theft would be outside the ethics of those agreements. I have no reason to believe that Elizabeth was a “histrionic (a term fraught with sexism as you know)personality at the borderline level” nor that John feared for his physical safety. These of course would be mitigating contributions to a moral judgement of “scumbagness” or “scumbaghood” if you will. (So of course I would not label the poor woman you describe as scum.) I generally refrain from making value judgements about other people lives, but barring any evidence of mental illness or threat of physical retribution on the part of either John or Elizabeth I will let my opinion of John stand as “scumbag”. If I did the same thing to my wife that John did to his I would consider myself a scumbag as well.
ps I was pretty much raised in a composite of the situation you describe, a “histrionic” (though I hate that word) mother and a physically abusive father. Let me just say it was no picnic, but I know whereof you speak.
Dr X
June 3, 2012 at 6:28 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Marcus,
One thing that I think is worth mentioning is that Elizabeth Edwards was diagnosed with cancer in 2004. She was treated and in remission. In 2006, the affair with Hunter began. Mrs. Edwards’ cancer returned in March 2007. So the cheating while she had cancer isn’t quite like Newt serving divorce papers on his wife who was laying in a hospital bed, stricken with cancer.
Leaving that aside, though, we have only this situation and no other evidence of such behavior being characteristic of John Edwards, so it raises a question about whether this is a manifestation of enduring moral character or an example of decompensation — that is, is it a case of his ordinary coping and defenses being compromised? We’ve seen nothing to indicate that Edwards was in the habit of behaving like this or that he was running around, a la Bill Clinton, like horn-dog looking to get laid.
Now to the abusive spouse question: in what I linked earlier, the characterization of Elizabeth Edwards points in the direction of a more borderline-level of personality organization–eerily so, and the particular manifestation suggested by that piece is more often associated with a hysterical style. If what is described in that article is true, it would also constitute serious emotional battering. Physical safety isn’t the end all and be all of harm and safety. Psychological safety matters a great deal. Psychological abuse can be as bad and as damaging as a black eyes.
If that account of Elizabeth Edwards is true–if that’s how she treated her husband in front of other people, if that’s how she deals with people outside of her family–then I would feel quite confident in saying that this woman emotionally battered her husband.
So you say there’s no evidence of Elizabeth Edwards being any of those things, but I don’t cavalierly dismiss that account. The writers are respected journalists. It’s too specific and strange in the context of who this woman is publicly to simply dismiss. Why on earth would they portray her this way if it wasn’t true? Why single her out of all the candidates’ spouses for this treatment–a dying woman? Maybe the reports aren’t true, but I wouldn’t dismiss it as very real possibility.
But my point is not to moralize about Elizabeth Edwards; it’s to emphasize the limits of ethical legalism in very complicated relationships. As I said in the post I linked, there is a question here about whether psychic autonomy is something of a fiction in close relationships. I believe more fictional than most people want to believe. People mistreat each other. People lie. Spouses lie. Spouses have affairs. There are often powerful contexts and lots of blame to go around. The temptation is to locate all the evil in one person; sometimes that person is awful, but sometimes they are effectively a scapegoat. Or the aggregate mistreatment on both sides is essentially bad enough that assignment of moral responsibility has more to do with the person who needs to assign it than the couple themselves.
BrianX
June 3, 2012 at 7:11 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Dr X:
Even John Edwards admitted he was doing very bad things. When even the perp admits he fucked up that much, trying to find a reason to label his actions as not scummy is really kind of pointless.
marcus
June 3, 2012 at 7:28 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Dr X I went back and read the article you posted. I understand what you’re saying. I do not have enough information to disagree with you. I must say, however, that as a human being, I can only act as if I have autonomy and personal integrity. As a person who grew up in a situation that I have seen described (accurately I think) as “emotional incest” I had to work very hard to attain the former and now work very hard maintain the latter. Not saying this to seek online counseling or approbation, more to say I didn’t just fall off the pumpkin wagon. Thanks, marcus
democommie
June 4, 2012 at 8:00 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
“Psychological abuse can be as bad and as damaging as a black eyes.”
I can attest to that. My dad was a champion verbal abuser, without, I think, genuinely harmful intent. Our relationship was one in which there was never much more than tolerance/cordial wariness and often much less than that. I loved him (as I’m sure he loved me) and I’ve missed him every time I think about him, since his death–forty years ago this November. My dad said some genuinely awful things to me but, were he alive today, he would still be part of me.
I don’t know what John Edwards thinks. I do know that his life has been examined quite thoroughly by hundreds of reporters over the last eight to ten years. Those reporters and their employers would have used anything that they could dredge up to “sell the papers”. If he’s done other things that are reprehensible (ala Newturd Gingrich) they’re still well concealed.
I think that Dr. X is the Michael Heath of commenters in his area of expertise, dealing with people’s emotional/mental difficulties–or perhaps Michael Heath is the Dr. X of polity dissection*; dispassionately passionate about explaining why stupid shit happens. Except the Reagan thing! {;>)
dingojack
June 4, 2012 at 8:07 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Demo – if Dr. X ‘invites you upto his lab, to see what’s on the slab’
Just say no.
(Just some friendly advice).
:) Dingo
——-
PS: it was the astertix after dissection that prompted this rambling.
PPS: I think your right (especially about St Ronnie and MH)