Edwards Epilogue: Does The Press Really Vet Presidential Candidates?
Over the past few weeks, the world has learned quite enough about John Edwards – from the lies he told in trying to cover up an adulterous affair to the compulsive vanity that left some people close to him questioning his judgment and even his grip on reality.
Democrats who seriously considered making Edwards the party’s 2008 presidential nominee could be forgiven for asking: Now you tell us?
The revelations about Edwards, contained in two best-selling books, have undermined one of the favorite conceits of political journalism, that the intensive scrutiny given candidates by reporters during a presidential campaign is an excellent filter to determine who is fit for the White House.
While the media “usually does well” in vetting candidates, said presidential historian Michael Beschloss, “Edwards is a good case” in which it didn’t.
And that failure is worrisome in a changed political world where politicians - be they Barack Obama or Sarah Palin - can burst upon the national stage and seemingly overnight become candidates for higher office.
The media, according to Beschloss, now has “a much bigger responsibility than it used to.” In the past, he said, the political establishment “would usually have known the candidate for a long time, and if there were big problems, they probably would have known about those, and tried to make sure those people wouldn’t be nominated.”
That did not happen with Edwards, even though as a Senator he had run for president once before, in 2004, ended up on the Democratic ticket as John Kerry’s running mate, and was a known quantity to many top Democrats.
In 2008, there were conversations among some Edwards staffers, according to “Game Change,” the new book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, about the responsibility of coming forward with what they knew about Edwards, perhaps leaking to the New York Times or Washington Post, if it looked like he might win the nomination. But there is no evidence they ever did.
Two stories by the National Enquirer that ran before Iowa described Edwards’s affair with Rielle Hunter. But the mainstream media went to sources within the Edwards campaign to try to confirm the stories and got nowhere. No one in the campaign would confirm them.
Those staffers are the ones who should be held accountable, Marc Ambinder wrote in response to the question he posed on The Atlantic’s website: “Should Edwards Aides Be Shamed And Blamed?”
“It’s your responsibility to quit the campaign and not enable it,” he wrote. “If you enable it, you are responsible in some ways for the fallout. Your loyalty isn’t an excuse for that.”
The failure to follow up aggressively on the reporting by the National Enquirer, which has nominated itself for a Pulitzer Prize for its Edwards coverage, has served as fodder for conservatives and others convinced the media has a double standard when it comes to vetting Democrats and Republicans.
"I feel sorry for the liberals who were duped by Edwards,” said Cliff Kincaid editor of the right-leaning watchdog organization Accuracy in Media. “They were the real victims of the failure to vet Edwards.”
“Now we know that Edwards was a phony in more ways than one,” Kincaid added. “Our media, especially progressives in the media, were in love with Edwards because of his liberal views. But he wasn't in love with them. He was in love with someone else—and it turns out it wasn't his wife.”
Not everyone agrees that the media completely dropped the ball, including a former spokesman for Hillary Clinton, who might have had the most to gain from any Edwards disclosures.
“Edwards was pretty thoroughly vetted but there are limits to what the press can reasonably be expected to uncover, said Phil Singer, Clinton’s former deputy communications director, “and events that take place in the bedroom are probably at the top of that list.”
Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, said that there isn’t a “simple yes or no” answer when looking at whether Edwards was fully vetted. What news organizations can cover, he said, comes down to a question of resources.
“News organizations just don’t have the horsepower to go out when there’s fields of eight people in each party to do the level of vetting it would take to uncover that,” Lemann said of the Edwards affair.
And with numerous candidates in both parties to cover, it’s not surprising that news organizations largely ignored the report of a “love child” between Edwards and Hunter just a few weeks before the Iowa vote.
Still, simply because the media missed the affair doesn’t mean Edwards wasn’t given scrutiny as a candidate. Throughout 2007, there was a series of reports that undermined the image that Edwards had sought to project by contrasting his populist rhetoric and focus on poverty with the reality of a candidate with hedge fund ties and $400 haircuts.
“I thought we did a pretty good job back in ‘07,” said Washington Post reporter Alec MacGillis, “to the point where we were getting a lot of complaints from them.”
In April 2007, MacGillis and then-colleague John Solomon reported in a front page story how Edwards—who spoke of “two Americas” during the 2004 campaign—went to work for a hedge in October 2005. The Post story ran about a week after POLITICO’s Ben Smith reported on Edwards’s $400 haircuts at a top Beverly Hill stylist.
Then in August the Wall Street Journal reported that as an investor, “Edwards has ties to lenders foreclosing on Katrina victims.” It damaged Edwards not only because of the campaign’s anti-poverty theme, but because he announced the presidential run from New Orleans.
Christopher Cooper, who reported the story for the Journal, said that the theme of his story and others in 2007 was that “he was not the man his politics suggested.” And Cooper noted that Edwards “was in a pretty deep fade by October,” when the first Enquirer report appeared.
But the campaign went on, and staffers—largely unaware of the truth about Edwards’ relationship with Hunter—continued batting away infidelity rumors. Several former Edwards staffers told POLITICO that without direct knowledge of an affair, they passed on misinformation that came down to them from the top.
“I was told that it was not true by John Edwards and by others,” said one former staffer. “I fought back against the story going beyond the Enquirer; I just stuck with what I knew to be the facts. I didn’t make moral arguments.”
Andrew Young, the former aide who described his own efforts to help Edwards cover up the scandal in his book “The Politician,” said that based on conservations with top staffers, he believes knowledge of the affair was more widespread than ex-staffers will now admit.
“Anybody who was around Edwards and Rielle for those months,” Young said in an interview with POLITICO “it’s virtually impossible for any of them to claim they didn’t know something was going on.”
But he concedes they now have “plausible deniability” since Edwards staffers were not openly discussing anything specific about an affair.
Those within the Edwards orbit between 2004 and 2008 have gone on to a variety of careers in Democratic politics, advocacy organizations and the Obama administration: senior adviser Joe Trippi remains a top Democratic strategist: national press secretary Eric Schultz is now communications director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee; adviser Jennifer Palmieri is senior vice president for communications at the Center for American Progress; campaign manager David Bonior’s chairman of American Rights at Work, and deputy campaign manager Jonathan Prince is a spokesman for Special Envoy George Mitchell at the State Department.
POLITICO reached out to over a dozen former Edwards’ staffers who either would only speak without attribution, declined to comment, or were unavailable following multiple requests.
One former staffer said that in asking who should be shamed or blamed—the issue Ambinder raised on his blog—it’s difficult to draw a clear line of who knew and didn’t know.
“I’d say only a handful of people knew, and they didn’t truly know,” said the former staffer. “And those people, for whatever reason, were not involved in the campaign.”
Young as well as Heilemann and Halperin wrote that Josh Brumberger, Kim Rubey and David Ginsberg likely knew about Edwards’s affair with Hunter. All three stopped working for Edwards in 2006, though Ginsberg and Rubey came to Iowa in the days just before the caucuses.
Democratic strategist Bob Shrum, who ran the Kerry-Edwards campaign in 2004, doesn’t believe senior staffers should be held accountable for what they knew about their candidate’s behavior. “I would cast no harsh judgment on most of these folks, many of whom I know,” he said.
“I would assume that with the exception of a couple of people who did seem aware of the problem, and actually tried to do something about it, most people were either not aware or didn’t want to be aware,” Shrum said.
One former staffer thinks most people would agree with Shrum.
“I think, for the most, part people understand that we worked on the campaign for the right reasons, that we were trying to make a positive contribution to our country and to progressive causes,” the staffer said, “and that we weren't responsible for the bad personal (and public) judgment of the candidate.”
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Sources: Politico, ETOnline, Google Maps
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