Yes, it's unseemly that John Edwards had an affair, especially with his wife struggling with breast cancer. It's also easy to snicker about Edwards, who so frequently held himself as more ethical than others, yet relentlessly lied about his affair.
But please, do not let this issue be used as a weapon against the Democratic party.
This is not the exhortation of a partisan Democrat--I more often vote Libertarian or Republican, but I do not want yet another irrelevancy to affect voters' decisions about whom to vote for. (For example, whites voting for Obama to prove to themselves and others that they're not racists.)
Look at the candidates' track record and positions on the issues that will most affect America. A non-partisan summary of those is at www.votesmart.org.
4 comments:
Most of the voters do not pay attention to the voting records of our elected leaders. What matters to most voters is who makes them most comfortable, and the candidates' voting records often have nothing to do with it. Nor their personal lives, in many cases.
In the long run, the most and least relevant issues don't matter nearly as much to the voters as who they like better and who promise to give them what they want. Just like a job interview.
It's always instructive to expose the moral hypocrisy of our politicians who presume to tell us how we should live are lives.
Dr. Michael R. Edelstein
www.ThreeMinuteTherapy.com
As a woman, I cannot ignore the hypocrisy of the Democratic party when it comes to feminist issues. I noticed the great feminists such as Gloria Steinem were silent about Bill Clinton's many affairs. Didn't Steinem and the feminists of the 60's used to say that the "personal is the political?" If a CEO in the private sector had behaved like Bill Clinton, he would have been sued.
I agree with the call to ignore this affair in so much as you should never let the stupid acts of one person taint the reputation of a whole party. Focus on the real issues.
That said, I wouldn't support Edwards in anything until he had wrestled with these demons for a while.
I believe that everyone in power, everyone thrown into extraordinary circumstances, makes mistakes. It takes incredible discipline to maintain integrity. When you combine addictive fame or status with a feeling of fatigue or deprivation, you create an environment where an individual feels entitled to put his/her fingers in the cookie jar. In these times, one feels justified in feeling above the law. And they hang themselves in the end.
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