John Edwards... as you have never known him.

[Danno 1,228]

It's a rather long read but as it takes you inside the inner working of a campaign and the self destruction of one huge phony (thats an understatement), you realize what candidates can control ( The media) and can't control (Themselves and others)

If this story could be suppressed for as long as it was, there is no telling what the Mainstream press can conceal or ignore, if they want to.

At the terminal, the couple fought in the passenger waiting area. They fought outside in the parking lot. Elizabeth was sobbing, out of control, incoherent. As their aides tried to avert their eyes, she tore off her blouse, exposing herself. “Look at me!” she wailed at John and then staggered, nearly falling to the ground.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Saint Elizabeth and the Ego Monster

A candidate whose aides were prepared to block him from becoming president. A wife whose virtuous image was a mirage. A mistress with a video camera. In an excerpt from the new book Game Change—their sweeping account of the 2008 campaign—the authors reveal that, inside the Edwards triangle, nothing was too crazy to be true.

One early evening in February 2006, John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator then gearing up to launch his second presidential campaign, was hanging out in the bar of the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue with one of his donors and his young traveling aide, Josh Brumberger. A woman sitting at a nearby table with some friends walked over and introduced herself.

“My friends insist you’re John Edwards,” Rielle Hunter said. “I tell them no way—you’re way too handsome.”

Adapted from Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin.

Copyright © 2010 by the authors. Reprinted by permission of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

“No, ma’am. I’m John Edwards,” the candidate replied.

“No way! I don’t believe you!”

Brumberger saw this kind of thing all the time. Women were always hitting on his boss. He and Edwards had a well-oiled system in place for dealing with these situations tactfully and politely.

“He is John Edwards,” Brumberger interjected, “and I’m sorry, but we’re in the middle of something. Thank you.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Hunter said, and retreated to her table.

Brumberger thought that she was trouble from the get-go. She looked like a hybrid of Stevie Nicks and Lucinda Williams, in an outfit more suitable for a Grateful Dead concert than an evening at the Regency. A few minutes later, after Edwards departed for a dinner around the corner, Hunter came back over to Brumberger and started quizzing him about his job. “I think I can help you guys,” she said, and handed him her business card. The inscription read, BEING IS FREE: RIELLE HUNTER—TRUTH SEEKER.

After Hunter left, Brumberger sat there chuckling, having another glass of wine with one of his colleagues from Team Edwards. A little while later, he looked up through the window and clocked Hunter and one of her friends cornering his boss on his way back from dinner. “Holy ######, that crazy lady just cut him off!” Brumberger yelped and sprinted outside, where he broke up the scene, leading Edwards back into the hotel.

“Thank you,” Edwards said, apparently relieved. “I’m lucky you saw that, because those women, I don’t think they would have quit.”

Looking back on it later, Brumberger would always wonder about that evening: Was Hunter’s presence really an accident? Had she and Edwards met before? Did she slink back into the hotel and spend the night with him? The questions would plague him, and with good reason—for that night at the Regency was the moment when Edwards’s cataclysmic implosion began.

For all the tabloid headlines that have dogged Edwards in the years since then, most of the details of the circumstances that led to his fall have remained shrouded in mystery. After his turn as John Kerry’s running mate in 2004, Edwards was among a small handful of politicians with a credible shot at occupying the Oval Office. He was popular and charming, with serious rhetorical skills, a wife beloved by the public, and the same basic profile—a white, southern, moderate male—as the previous three Democrats who’d proved capable of winning the White House. Today, according to a recent NBC News–Wall Street Journal poll, Edwards stands as the “most disappointing” public figure of 2009, having collected twice as many votes for that dubious distinction as Tiger Woods. And hard as it is to imagine, the coming months may debase his image further still.

Philandering is hardly a novel vice among presidential wannabes—or presidents, for that matter. Nor was the Edwards campaign the only national operation in 2008 for which the actual or rumored extracurricular activities of the candidate (or the candidate’s spouse) posed a significant political problem. John McCain’s campaign expended vast amounts of time and energy dealing with accusations that the senator had had an affair with a lobbyist and preparing to confront stories that his wife was carrying on a liaison of her own. Hillary Clinton’s team established a “war room within a war room” to douse potential flare-ups in the press surrounding her husband’s personal life. Indeed, among the top-tier contenders, only the eventual Mr. and Mrs. 44 were untroubled by such matters.

Yet it was Edwards who stepped so far across the line that his career and life were reduced to rubble. For all the high drama of the Obama-Clinton battle and the historic import of the former’s general-election victory over McCain, Edwards’s story is equally, lastingly resonant: an archetypal political tragedy in which the very same qualities that fuel any presidential bid—ego, hubris, vanity, neediness, a kind of delusion—became all-consuming and self-destructive. And in which the gap between public façade and private reality simply grew too vast to bridge.

Unlike Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, both of whom wrestled for months with the question of whether to run in 2008, Edwards indulged in no to-ing or fro-ing. Before the dust had even settled on 2004, he was planning for four years hence. On the day he and Kerry conceded defeat, Edwards discovered that Elizabeth had breast cancer; a few days after that, he was on the phone with his pollster and close friend Harrison Hickman, gaming out the campaign ahead.

Read more: An Excerpt From John Heilemann and Mark Halperin's 'Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime' -- New York Magazine http://nymag.com/news/politics/63045/#ixzz0dUmfFTnU

[one...two...tree 2,762]

That book is one hot item right now. I'm surprised that Elizabeth didn't leave him after what he put her through.

[Danno 1,228]

That book is one hot item right now. I'm surprised that Elizabeth didn't leave him after what he put her through.

That might be the impulsive thing to do but in the end, she has to ask herself.... "Would I be happier"?

I knew John Edwards was a fake, with all his two Americas BS.. all the while he is building that grossly huge house. To use poverty as a spring board to personal goals is "low down" in my book.

I have a seriously leftist Bro and he was a John Edwards fan, he was drinking all the populous syrup up like a sponge.

You have to admit, any candidate I would vote for has been gone over with a fine tooth Comb by every media source, apparently not all candidates get such attention.

[Pinocchio Liberal 268]

That book is one hot item right now. I'm surprised that Elizabeth didn't leave him after what he put her through.

To who? Planned parenthood?

[scandal 951]

JFK had Marilyn Monroe, and numerous others.

FDR had Lucy Mercer, and quite possibly Missy Lehand.

There is of course, bubba Billy and Ms. Lewinsky

You can go right back to Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings.

Presidential ex-marital liasons are nothing new, nothing very surprising.

Edwards was a sleazeball to have lied about it all, and even lied about having a child while confessing to the affair.

He's a sleazeball deluxe.

But frankly the sex lives of our public officials doesn't interest me, so long as they can deliver the policies they're charged with.

Quite honestly, who cares if J Edgar Hoover was gay and a cross dresser? What does that have to do with his record - for bad and good - in creating and shaping the FBI for 4 decades?

[spookyturtle 9,466]

JFK had Marilyn Monroe, and numerous others.

FDR had Lucy Mercer, and quite possibly Missy Lehand.

There is of course, bubba Billy and Ms. Lewinsky

You can go right back to Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings.

Presidential ex-marital liasons are nothing new, nothing very surprising.

Edwards was a sleazeball to have lied about it all, and even lied about having a child while confessing to the affair.

He's a sleazeball deluxe.

But frankly the sex lives of our public officials doesn't interest me, so long as they can deliver the policies they're charged with.

Quite honestly, who cares if J Edgar Hoover was gay and a cross dresser? What does that have to do with his record - for bad and good - in creating and shaping the FBI for 4 decades?

Would it interest you if they were banging sheep and goats?

[scandal 951]

Would it interest you if they were banging sheep and goats?

ABSOFUCKINLUTELY!!

[spookyturtle 9,466]

What makes Edward's look so foolish is all of his lying. He lost all credibility. All over a piece of a$$.

[scandal 951]

What makes Edward's look so foolish is all of his lying. He lost all credibility. All over a piece of a$$.

Yeah. Makes me really respect ol' Slick Billy Clinton. At least he had the decency not to lie.

“I did not have sexual relations with that woman…Ms. Lewinsky.”

[spookyturtle 9,466]

Yeah. Makes me really respect ol' Slick Billy Clinton. At least he had the decency not to lie.

“I did not have sexual relations with that woman…Ms. Lewinsky.”

But he only lied once and he was already President. Edwards ruined his career.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

JFK had Marilyn Monroe, and numerous others.

FDR had Lucy Mercer, and quite possibly Missy Lehand.

There is of course, bubba Billy and Ms. Lewinsky

You can go right back to Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings.

Presidential ex-marital liasons are nothing new, nothing very surprising.

Edwards was a sleazeball to have lied about it all, and even lied about having a child while confessing to the affair.

He's a sleazeball deluxe.

But frankly the sex lives of our public officials doesn't interest me, so long as they can deliver the policies they're charged with.

Quite honestly, who cares if J Edgar Hoover was gay and a cross dresser? What does that have to do with his record - for bad and good - in creating and shaping the FBI for 4 decades?

Great post.

[Nagishkaw 510]

To who? Planned parenthood?

[NickD 203]

Another example of selecting a candidate based on looks instead of brains.

[Gary and Alla 3,694]

It is pretty ibvious that he was a fake when he talks about "two America's" while living in the (certifiably) largest mansion in North Carolina. The guy was as phony as a $3 bill from the get go and only a phony woman coul dbe associated with such a phony man for her own personal gain. Typical "do as I say, not as I do" liberal.

[Danno 1,228]

JFK had Marilyn Monroe, and numerous others.

FDR had Lucy Mercer, and quite possibly Missy Lehand.

There is of course, bubba Billy and Ms. Lewinsky

You can go right back to Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings.

Presidential ex-marital liasons are nothing new, nothing very surprising.

Edwards was a sleazeball to have lied about it all, and even lied about having a child while confessing to the affair.

He's a sleazeball deluxe.

But frankly the sex lives of our public officials doesn't interest me, so long as they can deliver the policies they're charged with.

Quite honestly, who cares if J Edgar Hoover was gay and a cross dresser? What does that have to do with his record - for bad and good - in creating and shaping the FBI for 4 decades?

What was it Ross Perot said? something like; "If a man can't keep a promise to his wife, what right do I have to expect he will keep his promise to me?"

John Edwards is the prime example of a sleazy ambulance chaser, turned Politician.

I'm much more troubled by what he did in public, and how the via the Medias cover-job, this guy could be running the country right now. (Some how Barack starts to look more palatable)

I was stunned that more democrats couldn't see through this platform of -running down America to elevate himselfism.

But "People believe what they want to believe".