What Was John Edwards Thinking?Plausible Deniability Revisited

What was John Edwards thinking when he sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, despite having had an extra-marital affair with Rielle Hunter in 2006? Everyone agrees that if Edwards had won the nomination, the affair would have eventually come out, and his candidacy and his party’s ambitions would have been dashed.

Political America believes that SEX IS TRUTH, that the rock bottom truth about a politician’s sexuality is the rock bottom truth about him or her (although we can’t, off hand recall any hers) as a person, literally, their character-- who they really are.

So, if Edwards cheated on his wife, who, as a cancer patient, was doubly vulnerable and doubly sympathetic, and therefore doubly violated, and lied about it to the American people—as they say-- then he is unfit for office and belongs in the dustbin of history. He’s not a man of his word. He lost his self-control. He was a hypocrite. After all, he had campaigned against lies, greed, and power, on behalf of a needy and unprotected other America. Unfit to be president. Even if Bill Clinton had survived 'right wing conspiratorial' efforts to remove him from the presidency on essentially the same grounds.

Edwards told ABC news that he “didn’t think anyone would ever know about it,” that his campaigning success had led him to believe “you could do whatever you want,” and get away with it, that he was a narcissist. In other words, that he had arrived at a point of radical self-love where virtually the entire world appeared as a reflection of himself. It is more likely that a pre-existing narcissism drove him to his candidacy than the other way around, but, either way, his grandiosity in the course of campaigning got the best of him.

Strange thing is, the tabloids were on to him long ago, and had confronted him about his fling with Hunter. He denied it, and that worked, for a while. There was, then, plausible deniability.

The term, plausible deniability, dates to the Church Committee of the 1970s, and the Watergate era. According to Wikipedia, plausible deniability refers to the situation or context surrounding the events that can help the responsible parties avoid blame for what they've done

Sometimes, higher ups responsible for any wrong doing deny any knowledge of an action they had, in fact, ordered; they then go on to blame the very subordinates they had ordered to carry it out. Their denial of any wrong doing is plausible if people think it is reasonable that the higher up would not have known about an act, let alone would have had it carried out on their behalf. It can also mean there’s just not much evidence left behind and so the responsible party enjoys the benefit of the doubt.

We believe, though, that in politics and government, sometimes the actions of the responsible party are so outrageous that the average, trusting citizen would not believe it possible that such an act would have been committed, and so, in that sense, any denial is plausible.

We believe that’s what was sheltering Edwards and protecting him—for a while. Who would believe that a man of his ambition, who had professed an array of virtues centered on empathy for victims, with a highly sympathetic figure in his wife on stage with him, would have ever been sleeping around with another woman? Not many. Only the persistence of inquiring minds brought about the truth. And there’s a lesson there.