I let out an audible sigh today upon reading about John Edwards’ admitted affair. I like him. I respected his passion during the primary despite the fact I did not completely buy into the sincerity of his populist rhetoric. Nevertheless, I respected his message and his platform and viewed him as an ongoing force in the Democratic party.
And I believe he will continue to be just that, but he should lay low for a little while. I can only assume the web now will come alive with gleeful little pachyderms gloating over a mighty Democrat surrendering to his own craven desires. The GOP minions will most likely break out their family values mallets and start banging us over the head with them.
There is, however, an interesting wrinkle here. For example, when the right wing starts to sling out appellations such as ‘lying, adulterous swine‘ they are walking a very fine line. Rumors, whispers, court documents and McCain’s own admitted romantic time line of when he and Cindy became an item all suggest that Senator John McCain may also be a lying, adulterous swine.
For a candidate who has tried to build a reputation of integrity and run on a platform of straight talk, McCain has suffered several damning articles over the way he behaved himself with his first wife Carol. Nicholoas Kristoff, of the NY Times, wrote in 2000 that:
Mr. McCain abandoned his wife, who had reared their three children while he was in Vietnamese prisons, and he then began his political career with the resources of his new wife’s family.
Elsewhere in the article Kristoff delves further into McCain’s marital problems:
Although he was still living with his wife, he was aggressively courting a 25-year-old woman who was as beautiful as she was rich…Mr. McCain has acknowledged running around with women and accepted responsibility for the breakup of the marriage, without going into details.
I do not want to go too far with this but the brief history is that John McCain married Carol Shepp, ‘a famous beauty and a successful swimwear model,’ in 1965. We all know that he was shot down by the Northern Vietnamese and then held prisoner and regularly tortured from October of 1967 until his release in 1973. What I did not know was that, as the LA Times reported last month, there was some slightly disturbing history to the end of his marriage:
On Christmas Eve 1969, while she was driving alone in Philadelphia, Carol McCain’s car skidded and struck a utility pole. Thrown into the snow, she broke both legs, an arm and her pelvis. She was operated on a dozen times, and in the treatment she lost about 5 inches in height.
After John McCain was released in March 1973 and returned to the U.S., he told friends that Carol was not the woman he had married.
Apparently Carol McCain was in a wheel chair for some time and had gained a lot of weight and bore little resemblance to her old self. She had to undergo intense physical therapy in order to learn to walk again.
According to his friends, John appeared every bit the family man, and no one suspected that there were any problems in the McCain household. Then, at a Honolulu reception in 1979, a 42-year-old McCain met a beautiful 24-year-old heiress named Cindy Hensley. By her own account, he literally began chasing after her:
In a recent television interview with Jay Leno on the “Tonight Show,” Cindy McCain joked about how the Navy captain had pursued her. “He kind of chased me around . . . the hors d’oeuvre table,” she said. “I was trying to get something to eat and I thought, ‘This guy’s kind of weird.’ I was kind of trying to get away from him.”
Perhaps he had enough of the overweight wife who was struggling to walk or perhaps there was something else wrong in the marriage. Regardless, he began to pursue the young beauty and would continue to do so, while married and living with his wife, until she married him.
The McCain camp has refuted the claim that he was still living with Carol when he began dating Cindy, but the same LA Time article points out:
An examination of court documents tells a different story. McCain did not sue his wife for divorce until Feb. 19, 1980, and he wrote in his court petition that he and his wife had “cohabited” until Jan. 7 of that year — or for the first nine months of his relationship with Hensley.
McCain then pursued a marriage license for he and Cindy roughly a month before his marriage to Carol ended. He was nice enough to wait five weeks after his marriage to Carol ended before he wed Cindy in a private ceremony.
So, back to where we started. John Edwards had an affair and now must suffer public humiliation for his indiscretion. How will the GOP, and especially McCain, handle this? What happens when some reporter asks McCain his thoughts on Edwards and infidelity? What happens when a Republican, in the middle of castigating Edwards, is asked about John McCain’s previous indiscretions?
We know that Republicans are itching to throw a stone but how careful will they be about the big glass house McCain is standing in front of?
