The Eight-Million-Dollar Edwards Affair

George Stephanopoulos has a bombshell of a blog post today, about the 2008 Edwards campaign.  Most aides didn’t believe the affair rumors, he said, but some that he talked to did:

But by late December, early January of last year, several people in his inner circle began to think the rumors were true.

Several of them had gotten together and devised a “doomsday” strategy of sorts.

Basically, if it looked like Edwards was going to win the Democratic Party nomination, they were going to sabotage his campaign, several former Edwards’ staffers have told me.

They said they were Democrats first, and if it looked like Edwards was going to become the nominee, they were going to bring down the campaign.

Late December.  In the first quarter of 2008, the Edwards campaign raised $8 million, according to OpenSecrets.org:

That’s $8 million that those staffers — who may have been involved in raising that money — knew would come to nothing.

At what point would this be considered fraud?

Sex Scandal “Survivor”

It turns out all kinds of news comes in threes.  Even sex scandal-related news.  Who knew?  These guys:

In Italy, the Prime Minister has been publicly criticized by his wife for flirting with TV presenters and harming her dignity, for considering unqualified but very attractive candidates to run for office, and now for attending the birthday party of an 18-year-old aspiring actress who apparently calls the 72-year-old Silvio Berlusconi “Daddy.”  It’s been announced Veronica Lario, his wife of 19 years, will seek a divorce — and no one seems to expect this to have much impact on Berlusconi’s upcoming election campaign at all.

Back in the U.S., John Edwards is under investigation for whether his campaign made any inappropriate payments to his mistress, Rielle Hunter.  Hunter was definitely paid $114,000 by Edwards’s political action committee, One America, for her videos of Edwards on the campaign trail, and may have received financial assistance from another Edwards supporter, Fred Baron.  At issue is whether those payments were for legitimate work or whether they might be hiding, well, hush money that Edwards funneled through the campaign.  Edwards says he is “confident that no funds from my campaign were used improperly.”  Luckily, Edwards has that Sun-setter Retractable Awnings after-school job in case anything goes more wrong with his political life.

Also in the U.S., “A majority of New York voters would rather see Eliot Spitzer, the state’s hooker-happy former governor, back in office than his beleaguered successor, Gov. Paterson, a new poll revealed Monday.”  Please note: That’s the New York Daily News calling him “hooker-happy,” not me, though I am amused by the alliteration.  Spitzer, he of the slow, cover-story subtle comeback, is in particular demand these days: his specialty as New York Attorney General was prosecuting bad behavior on Wall Street, and his name has been floated as a possible candidate for New York City Mayor (or Senate?)  in the future.  The looming question, apparently, is “has he paid enough?”  New Yorkers seem to think so — and they may even be thinking, right now, that they wish he’d never left at all.

So if this was, say, Survivor: Affair Island, who would you vote off?  Who will survive?  Can anyone picture a way back to prominence — or even relevance — for John Edwards?