Pretty much everyone who knows anything about John Edwards despises him.
With opening arguments in the trial of former U.S. senator and presidential candidate John Edwards set to begin on on Monday, a CBS News/New York Times poll shows that public opinion of him has plummeted since he was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2007. Now, he is now most known for cheating on his wife.
The CBS/NYT poll reveals that only 3 percent of those polled hold a favorable view of Edwards, who has been charged with misusing campaign funds. That is down from 30 percent in 2007 when he was running for the Democratic nomination, which is also the last time the question was asked among registered voters.
That three percent is statistical noise. Edwards’ unpopularity is about as universal as it can get. Women hate him even more than men do. People hate Democrat John Edwards for cheating on his cancer-stricken wife, and for using his friends and donors to help him cover everything up. One of those friends was the late Fred Baron. Texas trial lawyer Baron rushed to Edwards’ side when the Rielle Hunter scandal threatened to destroy his presidential run. Baron used his vast fortune to keep Hunter and Andrew Young, the Edwards aide who initially took the blame for Edwards’ and Hunter’s child, one step ahead of press inquiries. That turned out to have been mostly unnecessary: The same mainstream press that convicted George Zimmerman of murder by constructing its own narrative by creating its own facts, dodged reporting on Edwards’ scandal until the National Enquirer forced them to. If Edwards had been a Republican, his behavior plus roping his donors in on the scandal would have generated a media campaign to destroy the party root and branch.
Baron passed away in 2008, but his fortune lives on. Through his wife, Lisa Blue Baron, and through Matt Angle’s Lone Star Project, Baron’s money controls Democrat activism and the Democratic Party itself in Texas. Angle’s group, which in turn controls nominally non-partisan groups like Texans for Public Justice, claims to be about “good governance,” but the fact that it operates from the same trial lawyer money that covered up John Edwards’ scandal gives that game away.
Edwards’ criminal trial for misusing campaign funds is getting underway in North Carolina. He was John Kerry’s choice for vice president in 2004, despite Kerry confessing to being uncomfortable with the man:
Edwards had told Kerry he was going to share a story with him that he’d never told anyone else—that after his son Wade had been killed, he climbed onto the slab at the funeral home, laid there and hugged his body, and promised that he’d do all he could to make life better for people, to live up to Wade’s ideals of service. Kerry was stunned, not moved, because, as he told me later, Edwards had recounted the same exact story to him, almost in the exact same words, a year or two before—and with the same preface, that he’d never shared the memory with anyone else. Kerry said he found it chilling, and he decided he couldn’t pick Edwards unless he met with him again.
Had Kerry defeated President Bush in 2004, that chilling, ruthless and reckless man would have been a heartbeat away from the presidency.
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