The two-time Democratic presidential candidate acknowledged Sunday that investigators are assessing how he spent his campaign funds -- a subject that could carry his extramarital affair from the tabloids to the courtroom. Edwards' political action committee paid more than $100,000 for video production to the firm of the woman with whom Edwards had an affair.
You would think that a story involving the former vice presidential and presidential candidate of a major political party fathering a child with his mistress while his wife died slowly from breast cancer would rate a little more attention. You would think the press would be curious about an effort to cover up the existence of the mistress and child by shuttling the "family" around the country during the presidential campaign before they landed in Beverly Hills, with an earnest campaign staffer playing the role of the "real" boyfriend and father. (No one seems to remember this detail anymore). You would also think that a wealthy lawyer, who ran a populist campiagn in which he professed to be concerned for the poor and powerless would be treated as the cynical opportunist that he was revealed to be, and that such professions of concern from the Dollarcrats who run the so-called Part of the Common Man would similiarly be suspect. You would think so, but it's not.
The tawdriness that lay at the heart of one of the Left's favored sons has been wiped clean from the notebooks of the nation's stenographers, and the scandal reduced to little more than a matter of "technical violations" of campaign finance laws by a guy (Fred Baron) who is conveniently dead.
If it makes anyone feel better, the rumor and innuendo suggests that Edwards was benefiting from the largesse of his wealthy friends, rather than using $20 donations from small donors to pay off his mistress.
While Edwards focused his comment on campaign funds, he also had a range of other fundraising organizations -- including two nonprofits and a poverty center at his alma mater -- that have come under scrutiny.
Chief among them was the PAC that paid Rielle Hunter's company for several months in 2006 for Web videos that documented Edwards' travels and advocacy in the months leading up to his 2008 presidential campaign. The committee also paid her firm an additional $14,086.50 on April 1, 2007.
Edwards acknowledged the affair with Hunter last year, months after dropping his presidential bid.
At the time of the 2007 payment, the PAC only had $7,932.95 in cash on hand, according to records filed with the Federal Election Commission. That day, according to the records, Edwards' presidential campaign paid the PAC $14,034.61 for what is
listed as a ''furniture purchase.''Willfully converting money from a political action committee for personal use is a federal crime.
The furniture money was one of just five contributions to the political action committee between April 1 to June 30, 2007. The other four were on June 30, the last day of the reporting period, including a $3,000 contribution from the wife of Edwards' finance chairman, Fred Baron.
One of the oddities of the 2008 campaign for the Democratic nomination was how Edwards could never gain traction, despite his being the party's golden boy and VP nominee just one cycle earlier. Obama and Hillary drew a lot of attention away from him, of course; but, still, he had a populist message that should have naturally worked on Democratic primary voters. It certainly worked for people like Jim Webb and Sherrod Brown. But, Edwards could never get anywhere.
In restrospect, there must have been insiders among the Dems' big donors and policy elite who knew exactly what was going on, and stayed away from Edwards, even while maintaining the famed Left wing omerta that protects Democratic politicians from scandalous revelations that would have landed the most obscure Republican on the front page of the NY Times as a symbol of the "culture of corruption."
The GOP has a lot of self-imposed problems right now, but surely it is also a problem that it must face this sort of permanent headwind of media double standards. (and surely it is a business problem for the media that it seems to go out of its way to avoid reporting an entertaining "Stop the Presses" sort of stories like this one because it invovles one of their favored candidates. If anything, Edwards getting a well-deserved "full Monica" during the campaign would have sold a lot of papers!)
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