John Edwards has fallen from political celebrity. A twice-failed presidential candidate, and a failed vice-presidential candidate during the 2004 Campaign with Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, Edwards varnished veneer of homespun charm wore off on very few voters outside of the Democratic fold.
A trial lawyer he floated through North Carolina politics on his humble, working class background, Edwards amassed a substantial fortune practicing a profession with an reputation as odious as his exposed private life.
Shamefully, the former U.S. Senator pursued an adulterous affair with one of his staffers, using a significant sum of money to cover up the fling from the press. While the tabloids offered to cover up the story if Edwards would swear under oath that he was not cheating on his wife, Edwards continued to campaign, pressing past a dragging third-place finish in state after state, while his supportive wife was dying of cancer. When his ill wife discovered that he had even fathered a child with this dilettante, Nancy Edwards divorced her husband, cut him out of his will, then wiled away her remaining months on the talk show circuit before succumbing to the illness.
The Edwards family indeed faced many hardships. The couple had fallen in love, had endured the stunning loss of an older son in a tragic car accident. They sired another child to replace the one which was so untimely taken from them, along with a doting daughter, who still stands by her father during a fraught media-frenzied trial.
John Edwards engaged in a despicable set of choices. Cheating on his sick wife, spending lavish amounts of cash to cover up his private perversion, the whole mess is a distasteful mesh of public and private failings.
Notwithstanding the shameful outcomes of his abortive campaign, Edwards does not deserve thirty years in prison for his immoral conduct. If anything, this trumped-up case in federal court makes the case for reforming or scrapping this nation's arcane campaign finance laws, the bulk of which assist incumbents, who commandeer a larger war chest, while weighing on grass-roots contenders who have very little knowledge about the legal trappings of campaign finance law, or the necessary connections to protect them from the damaging lawsuits of state and federal agencies who automatically serve the politicians in power and seeking to retain their incumbency.