John Edwards and the Scandal Nobody Wanted

If you only read Respectable Newspapers and avoid the morally corrupting influences of blogs, tabloids and Jay Leno, it might be news to you that Democratic boy wonder John Edwards is the alleged star of a creepy sex scandal.

The story has everything a cable-news producer or magazine editor or soap-opera writer could ask for: adultery, political power, a monstrous mansion, betrayal, cash transfers, terrible lies, vanishing evidence, a fall guy, a saintly wife dying of cancer, a late-night hotel rendezvous in Beverly Hills, even a "love child." And it's perfect for the middle of summer, when there's very little real news because the newsmakers are all on vacation.

But nobody wants to touch it, and not just because the unseemly National Enquirer is the main source. The scandal is unmentionable because it's a story that makes everybody look bad -- nobody gets any political points for advancing the strange tale of John Edwards and Rielle Hunter.

Since 2006, there have been stories about Edwards and the New York woman he hired to produce little web videos for his campaign website. The news first appeared in Newsweek, which is not a tabloid, and which noted that Edwards met Hunter in a New York bar. The "webisodes" he hired her to make were notable enough to earn a mention in Business Week (also not a tabloid), which even posted one of the now-rare segments. Then the videos she produced -- for a reported $114,000, which is pretty good money to make some clips for a website -- were all mysteriously removed from Edwards' political action site. That was reported last September by political reporter Sam Stein at the Huffington Post, not by a tabloid.

Then, as the strange tale turned into a southern gothic melodrama, all the media went quiet -- all but the hated National Enquirer, which reported in October that Rielle Hunter (also known as "Lisa Druck") was pregnant, and the father was John Edwards. This actually got a denial from Edwards.

"It's completely untrue, ridiculous," Edwards told reporters on October 11. "I've been in love with the same woman for 30-plus years and, as anybody who's been around us knows, she's an extraordinary human being, warm, loving, beautiful, sexy and as good a person as I have ever known .... So the story's just false."

It got a denial from Hunter, too, through her attorney: "The fact that I am expecting a child is my personal and private business. This has no relationship to nor does it involve John Edwards in any way. Andrew Young is the father of my unborn child."

Andrew Young, a married father and longtime Edwards' loyalist who had most recently been the campaign's North Carolina finance manager, soon had a new neighbor in his gated North Carolina neighborhood: Rielle Hunter and her baby. What Young's wife and kids think of this arrangement has yet to be explored. The Edwards campaign headquarters was just five miles away. What poor Elizabeth Edwards thought of all this, as she fought incurable cancer in the baronial estate built with John's lawyerly riches, is also a mystery.

Edwards' stuttering non-denial last week -- awkwardly preserved on video here -- was just an attack on the Enquirer as "tabloid trash, full of lies."

Yes, John, fine. But what were you doing hiding from Enquirer reporters in the bowels of the Beverly Hills Hilton at 2 a.m. last Tuesday, the same hotel where Rielle Hunter was allegedly occupying a pair of suites? And whatever the merits of the Enquirer, it has had success breaking salacious stories about political figures: Gary Hart and his girlfriend on the "Monkey Business" yacht, Rush Limbaugh doctor-shopping for his pill addiction, Jesse Jackson's illegitimate child and Monica Lewinsky's stained blue dress, to name a few.

Eight days after the bizarre encounter in Beverly Hills -- an encounter Fox News now claims to have confirmed, by interviewing security at the hotel -- there's still nothing in the Respectable Press about the Edwards' scandal. If editors and news producers are hoping the tale will quietly fade away, they're wrong. The Enquirer reporters have now sued the Hilton, claiming they were falsely detained by the guards. (The reporters were registered guests, while Edwards was not.)

The Democratic convention is a month away, and while he wasn't anybody's top choice for Obama's running mate, Edwards was expected to give a prime-time speech at the Denver rally. After all, he won more delegates than anyone but Obama and Hillary Clinton. The unmentionable scandal won't fade after the conventions or even after the election, as Edwards has long been talked about as a potential "anti-poverty czar" in an Obama administration. One day, between now and January, this alleged scandal will have to be addressed -- and if John Edwards did nothing more than pay a friendly late night Beverly Hills hotel visit to his former videographer who was impregnated by his married loyalist friend, so be it. He can explain himself and go back to helping the Two Americas or whatever.

Why is everybody so squeamish about this story? Because it ruins the 2008 campaign narrative, which is all about the grizzled old war veteran vs. the hopeful young star. Because, if true, it is a tawdry and tragic ending to a political love story that was nothing but an empty media performance.

It reminds us that John McCain left his wife, after she was disfigured in a car accident, so he could chase women in bars until he met the beer heiress of his congressional-district dreams.

It reminds us that Bill Clinton squandered a successful second term in a prosperous, peaceful America by shaming his family and the country with his dumb redneck inability to keep his pants on, and it reminds Hillary supporters that she would likely be the Democratic nominee today if Bill wasn't such a self-centered jackass.

It reminds us that the last Agent of Change in Washington was an ambitious young legislator named Newt Gingrich, who divorced his first wife while she was fighting cancer, and left his second wife after she was stricken with multiple sclerosis, and carried on an adulterous affair with a young congressional aide -- now his third wife -- while leading the charge to impeach Bill Clinton for having "sexual relations" with Monica Lewinsky.

It even reminds us that Barack Obama and his picture-perfect wife and kids on the cover of People magazine are not "normal" at all. They are the idealized American family, successful and attractive, somehow rising from modest backgrounds and all the American prejudices against single parents, minorities and mixed-race kids.

It reminds us that politicians in Washington are creeps and weirdos, and whether they're Senator Larry Craig cruising for gay sex in an airport bathroom or ex-Senator John Edwards hiding from tabloid reporters in a Beverly Hills hotel bathroom, they are twisted little Caligulas pretending to be statesmen, on your dime.

Ken Layne is the editor of Wonkette.