Friday, August 17, 2012

The Map Room Speech: President Bill Clinton Finally Admits Monica Lewinsky Affair (August 17, 1998)


I'll dispense with the usual format and just link to an analysis posted on the old blog marking the tenth anniversary of this infamous speech, delivered 14 years ago today.  The post can be found here.

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

How Low Can He Go? John Edwards Admits Infidelity in ABC Interview with Bob Woodruff (August 8, 2008)


What was the deal?  John Edwards rose to political prominence as the vice-presidential nominee alongside John Kerry in 2004 and ran for the top spot himself four years later before dropping out of the Democratic primary in early 2008.  Edwards had been viewed as a strong presidential candidate based on his commitment to fighting poverty and benefited from an outpouring of public support during his wife Elizabeth's battles with breast cancer.  However, tabloid rumors circulated that Edwards had an affair with Rielle Hunter, a documentary filmmaker hired to work for his campaign.  The rumors included allegations that Edwards fathered Hunter's child and secretly provided Hunter with financial support.  In August, 2008, Edwards finally admitted his infidelity.  The admission stunned the public and media for several reasons:  (1) Edwards had long presented himself as an upstanding family man and champion of the impoverished, (2) the timing of the affair suggested that it occurred while his wife, a tireless and effective campaigner for Edwards, battled cancer, and (3) committing adultery while running for president seemed like a very reckless act.  Soon after his public admission, Edwards accepted an invitation from ABC for an interview with Nightline's Bob Woodruff on August 8, 2008.  Knowing that his reputation and credibility had been, to put it mildly, severely damaged, Edwards chose to answer questions about his behavior in an attempt to improve his public image and salvage his political career.

What did he say?   Transcript excerpts and video of the Woodruff-Edwards interview, conducted four years ago today, can be found here.

How did he do?  Because this is going to be pretty unpleasant, let's at least recognize a few things Edwards tried to do well.  First, he quickly engages in mortification, taking responsibility for his "mistake" and seeking forgiveness from his wife and God, although offering an explicit apology would help.  Also, although he doesn't deny the Hunter affair, Edwards does deny other troubling allegations, including the fathering of Hunter's child and the payment of "hush money" to keep Hunter quiet--behavior that would suggest a deeper level of recklessness and deception.  The Democrat reinforces his denial through use of attack the accuser strategy by making three references to "tabloid" journalism as the source of the supposedly false charges.

The thing about the denial strategy, however, is that its effectiveness is guaranteed only to the extent that one is not lying through their teeth.  Eventually, Edwards would admit paternity of Hunter's child and, frankly, even at the time of the Woodruff interview, I'm not sure a lot of people bought his denials.   For example, the way in which the former Veep nominee expresses his willingness to take a paternity test seems...oh, I don't know, a bit too eager ("I would welcome participating in a paternity test, would be happy to participate in one....Happy to take a paternity test and would love to see it happen....I can only do one side of the test, but I'm happy to participate in one.").  A person in Edwards's uncomfortable position, even if he thinks he's not the daddy and is willing to take a DNA test, probably wouldn't "love" to take one.

To his credit, Woodruff asked Edwards point blank the question most wanted to hear:  How could he cheat on his cancer-stricken wife?  Edwards gives two answers and they're both awful.  First, he uses a differentiation strategy by making the despicable distinction between cancer adultery and remission adultery.  I'm sorry, but there's just no other way to put that.  He states:  "First of all, it happened during a period after she was in remission from cancer."  I really don't need to delve into how troubling that statement is, so let's move on to his second explanation.  Edwards then launches into a surreal soliloquy about growing up a "small town boy in North Carolina" who "came from nothing" and "got some acclaim as a lawyer."  He goes on:  "People were telling me, oh, he's such a great person, such a great lawyer, such a talent, he's going to--no telling what he'll do."  Okay, for fans of the original The Office (UK) television series, Edwards is totally doing David Brent at this point, which is probably not a great choice for a real-life, high stakes rhetorical strategy.  Remember the question asked how he could cheat on his seriously ill spouse.  This cocky musing seems woefully misguided.  Anyway, Edwards basically gives a "too much, too fast" spin on his life, leading to "a self-focus, an egotism, a narcissism that leads you to believe you can do whatever you want." This bolstering strategy, in which Edwards tries to positively associate himself with his past success and with small town values, essentially argues that he did a bad thing because, well, he's become a really bad person.  Yeah, it's pretty weak.

As was often the case in his political rhetoric, Edwards comes across as too slick and lawyerly here.  On several occasions, he reframes Woodruff's questions to make them less incriminating as can be seen in the exchange about whether Edwards's associate Fred Baron paid hush money to Hunter:  Woodruff:  "Do you think it's possible he was trying to protect you?" Edwards:  "Do I think he was trying to help me?"  Or when discussing whether he informed Elizabeth about visiting Hunter in L.A.:  Woodruff: "That was a secret?" Edwards: "You mean did I tell her before I went?"  And so on.  The ex-veep nominee seems more concerned with being careful than contrite.

Final Call?  Bloodbath.  Under the circumstances, Edwards needed an extraordinary performance to have even a chance of improving his public standing.  His interview responses were extraordinary but for the wrong reasons, relying on a lethal combination of silly psychobabble, self-absorption, and straight-out lying.  He may have beat the rap this past May when a federal jury could not convict him of using campaign contributions to keep Hunter's silence.  However, it's impossible to envision a scenario in which he could revive his political career and his public reputation remains in tatters.  Finally, Edwards has to live the rest of his life in a world that knows he vehemently denied his own infant daughter on national television when trying to explain why he cheated on his cancer-stricken wife while running for our nation's highest office.  It doesn't get much worse.  So let's give the last word on all of this to the now-departed Elizabeth Edwards, who wrote a memoir in 2009 called, fittingly enough, Resilience.