The Fall of John Edwards, Would-Be Poverty Reformer

The cover story of this week's New York magazine details the spectacular political flame-out of the once-promising vice presidential nominee John Edwards. If you're not the type who's drawn to tawdry tales of wrongdoing (or not the type to admit that you are), it's also an important timeline of how, when and why this nation's most recent flirtations with serious poverty policy were derailed by one man's personal failings.

While "Saint Elizabeth and the Ego Monster," an excerpt of the campaign book Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, doesn't address Edwards's poverty platform -- after cataloging the candidate's every misstep, from the extramarital affair while his wife was battling incurable cancer to the ensuing political cover-up and unflagging megalomania, there was hardly room -- it does paint a picture of a man so focused on becoming president that he let his politics dictate his policy ("Hey, maybe harping on domestic poverty would set me apart...") rather than the other way around. Somewhere along the way, the reporters allege that Edwards became so self-absorbed that Elizabeth asked an aide, "Don't you think he's kind of messianic?"

"For all the high drama of the Obama-Clinton battle," the authors write, "and the historic import of the former's general-election victory over McCain, Edwards's story is equally, lastingly resonant: an archetypal political tragedy in which the very same qualities that fuel any presidential bid -- ego, hubris, vanity, neediness, a kind of delusion -- became all-consuming and self-destructive. And in which the gap between public façade and private reality simply grew too vast to bridge." You remember clues of the gap, don't you? The 28,000-square-foot house and the $400 haircuts?

After Edwards withdrew from the race, neither Senator Hillary Clinton nor Senator Barack Obama, both attempting to break the white male stranglehold on the presidency, was willing to put the cause of eradicating poverty before all else. Clinton did once pledge to appoint a cabinet-level "poverty czar" if she became president, but we all know how that turned out.

The trouble isn't over for Edwards; a grand jury will soon decide whether he misappropriated campaign funds in an attempted cover-up and he might claim paternity of the daughter his mistress Rielle Hunter had in February 2008. If he does, he owes child support. A former aide, once duped into claiming the love child despite having publicly announced his vasectomy, releases a tell-all book next month.

Last month, Edwards beat out Tiger Woods, Balloon Boy's parents and Jon and Kate for the title of most disappointing person of 2009 in a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. He earned it.

Photo credit: alexdecarvalho