Sex scandals are as old as Washington, what tends to make them interesting is the lengths to which the guilty parties go to create an effective cover-up. Occasionally, as with the Monica Lewinsky affair, the ensuing misdirections can take on a political momentum of their own, assuming a significance wildly disproportionate to the original transgressions. Washington’s latest sex scandal, however, will probably be remembered for something far more unusual: the mainstream press’ uncharacteristically restrained response to rumours that a former vice-presidential nominee and then presidential candidate had fathered a love-child with a campaign worker.
The liaison between Senator John Edwards and Rielle Hunter may turn out to be one of the more consequential Washington scandals, not because of the human details of the infidelity — which seem fairly humdrum by all accounts — but because of what didn’t happen when rumours of the affair began to leak out during the hotly contested Democratic primaries.
The media’s decision to overlook the story is all the more puzzling given the subsequent willingness of the New York Times and Washington Post to publicise details of John McCain’s alleged affair with a lobbyist. Like most political sex scandals, this one has far more to do with politics than sex, the political question being the hypothesis that a more vigilant press would have kept Edwards out of the Democratic primaries and that would have had a decisive effect on the final outcome.
Had the mainstream press publicised the affair earlier, would Democrats have chosen Senator Hillary Clinton? Some of her former advisers clearly think so. Howard Wolfson, Communications Director for the Clinton campaign, has said “We would have won Iowa, and Clinton today would therefore have been the nominee. Our voters and Edwards’s voters were the same people . . . maybe two-thirds of them, would have been for us and we would have barely beaten Obama.” This doesn’t quite square with the actual polling just before the Iowa caucus —CNN estimates that Obama would still have won by more than ten points— but it isn’t entirely fanciful either.
The real appeal of Wolfson’s rueful conjecture is that it would allow the Clinton campaign to create a much needed political fiction, namely a revisionist account of their many embarrassing internal failures, several of which are now coming to light. Prominent among these is a memo by senior strategist Mark Penn which advised Clinton that Obama’s exotic biography should be used against to portray him as someone with a ‘’lack of American roots.’‘ Penn even went so far as to advise Clinton that “[t]he right knows Obama is unelectable except perhaps against Attila the Hun…”
A damning article in the latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly shows that Clinton’s strategy went awry from the very beginning. In 2006, prior to her re-election to the senate, “she feared a backlash if she signalled her presidential intentions. If New Yorkers thought her presumptuous, they could punish her at the polls and weaken her national standing. A collective decision was made not to discuss a presidential run until she had won re-election, leaving the early pursuit of Iowa to John Edwards and Barack Obama.” This error was compounded by intra-campaign bickering that would not have been out of place in a kindergarten. Over time the rival factions settled into a sort of trench warfare and seemed to have spent far more time fighting each other than working towards their candidate’s success. On more than one occasion the squabbles led to disgruntled insiders leaking sensitive campaign information in the hope that it might destabilise their rivals.
Instead of taking control of these intrigues and starting afresh with a dismissal of her spendthrift campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle, Clinton dithered time after time. Even after her humiliating defeat in Iowa she “layered on still more advisers.” Quite early on, her campaign had squandered more than 100 million dollars and become insolvent.
In the desperate cutbacks that followed, the campaign stopped polling states where Obama seemed to be well ahead, but this had the unintended consequence of helping him to a long string of uninterrupted victories, and an insurmountable lead in the delegate count. There were other significant misjudgements too, such as the decision not to confront Obama early on his pro-Iraq voting record in the Senate — because they feared it would draw too much attention to her own vulnerability on the issue. These strategic errors sunk Clinton’s campaign far more decisively than the absence of a sex scandal. As did Obama’s refusal to be baited by negative attacks, and his maddening ability to out-manoeuvre them when caught in a tight spot.
The mainstream press was undoubtedly lenient towards Senator Edwards, but the idea that this failure to police the rumour mills of America could have altered the outcome of a gruelling six-month political campaign is too neat and too convenient to bear analysis. With hindsight the truth seems much less dramatic, that Clinton was doomed on several fronts, not least by Obama’s similarity, in terms of political instincts, to her own spouse. “She is a very talented politician” wrote the pundit Andrew Sullivan after her concession, “but it was her fate to find her career hemmed in by two even more talented ones: Bill and Barack … At any other moment, she would have won. But this is history and politics at the highest level. You cannot defeat such a moment if you are a Salieri. And she had to deal with two Mozarts.”
