What Might Have Been? (And What Might Be?)

August 11, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Democratic Party, Election 2008 

L’affaire of former Sen. John Edwards and Rielle Hunter continues to take odd turns. The latest appears at ABC News’ site, where Howard Wolfson, the former communications director of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, insists to ABC’s Brian Ross and Jake Tapper that had this scandal emerged before the Iowa caucuses and forced Edwards out of the campaign, then Hillary would have won and would now be the presumptive nominee. Wolfson follows that up with a rather ambiguous statement, which, unfortunately, Ross and Tapper do not give word-for-word:

“Wolfson said the Clinton campaign was aware of the issue, but did not try to fan the flames. “Any of the campaigns that would have tried to push that would have been burned by it,” said Wolfson.

The question here is: what exactly did the Clinton campaign know? That the National Enquirer was after the story, and that the larger media was ignoring it – that is, what everybody knew? Or was it something more specific than that?

And the suggestion that the Clinton campaign didn’t try to fan the flames out of the sheer goodness of Hillary’s heart sure doesn’t fly. As Alex Pareene has already noted at Gawker, if Hillary’s people had thought for one second that forcing Edwards out of the race before Iowa would sew up the nomination, there would have been plenty of ways to feed reporters the story. It would seem more likely that the Clinton campaign kept quiet because in those far-off times, before Hillary became the down-home tribune of the disaffected blue-collar masses, the reasoning was that Sen. Barack Obama and Edwards would split the left-leaning and mad-as-hell vote between them, and that it was therefore desirable to keep them both in the race.

But Wolfson’s comment somehow suggests to me that Hillary may see in Edwards’ fall a glimmer of opportunity. Even now, could it be possible to sit some superdelegates down and gently point out the parallels between the Edwardses and the Obamas? Both magnetic, good-looking men married to poised women of an intellectual temperament? Both the parents of two small children? And – the one that would count here – both without a hint of infidelity in the past, until the current scandal broke? (As opposed to the Clintons, of whom it can at least be said that after Gennifer Flowers, the electorate knew something of what had happened and could happen.) Would it be possible to suggest to wavering superdelegates that Obama’s good looks and charisma might inevitably lead to some problem down the road? Of course that would be a slim basis to conjure up unexpected scenarios in Denver, but then again the Clintons have a way of producing surprises.

Update: Brian Ross (with Rhonda Schwartz) now reports that a “former close friend” of Rielle Hunter’s, Pidgeon O’Brien (yes, this is a real name) has an explanation for why Edwards hired a “documentarist” with almost no experience to do the now-celebrated clips. Ms O’Brien says that Edwards and Hunter did not meet each other when his campaign was seeking a filmmaker, as he told Bob Woodruff on Nightline, but instead that their relationship started months before he hired her, when he met her in a New York hotel bar.  Tune in tomorrow for another chapter in the saga of “Love Lips.”

Comments