Truth and Consequences

John and Elizabeth Edwards are back in the news this week and it isn't pretty. I've been watching the whole thing play out, just as I did last summer when the scandal first broke, and now there are two primary thoughts on my mind.

First, what did Elizabeth think would happen when her new book was published? I've wondered what her motives for writing it were - personal catharsis, trash the mistress, humiliate the straying husband, make money? Probably all of the above, to one degree or another, but did she understand that the reaction wouldn't be completely positive and supportive of her? By portraying John as completely without agency in the whole sorry mess, just an innocent old-fashioned man seduced by a wicked modern temptress, she has generated more ridicule than sympathy, not only for John, but for herself as well. Refusing to identify the mistress by name (and making Oprah promise not to either) doesn't seem to have made Rielle Hunter any less famous. If anything, Rielle has now jumped back into the spotlight too and is saying that she would like to do some DNA testing on her daughter, after all.

Second, and most important, it's the situation with the baby that bothers me the most. My gut feeling is that John probably is the little girl's father. There's no doubt in my mind that if John (and Elizabeth) were certain--absolutely, positively, beyond a shadow of a doubt certain--that he's not the father, they would have said so by now, and that hasn't happened. In his Nightline interview last summer, John said he wasn't the father and offered to have his DNA tested to prove it, but the next day Rielle said she would never invade her daughter's privacy by having her tested. That sounded a little too convenient to me - in fact, it smelled like a deal. John can have his DNA tested until hell freezes over, but if there's no test from the baby to compare it to, nothing can ever be proven.

I've been reading a lot about this story this week, and one facet of it in particular strikes me as being nothing less than unconscionable. One of John Edwards' signature issues is poverty in America, and I believe it's a genuine concern on his part. He has to know that one of the primary reasons children grow up in poverty is absent fathers - in other words, men who choose not to live up to their responsibilities as fathers. Of all the disappointing things we've learned about John Edwards in the past year, the possibility that he would make that choice is what saddens me the most.