Why We Love to Loathe John Edwards: It's Science

Time ^ | Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2012 | Jeffrey Kluger

[presidio9]

John Edwards is the putrefied meat of the American political system — literally, as far as your brain is concerned. Think about Edwards for a moment — the perfect hair, the honey voice, the oleaginous smile. Your lip curled ever so slightly, didn't it? A teensy bit of bile may have risen in your throat. The lip curl is a threat display, the bile is an attempt to purge a toxin. Both were triggered at least partly by your prefrontal cortex and your temporal lobes — and both would have also occurred if you'd smelled a piece of food gone bad.

Edwards, the one-time North Carolina senator and serial presidential candidate, was back in the news last week, as he motioned for another postponement of his campaign finance trial, set to begin Jan. 30 on charges that he illegally used campaign donations to cover up his affair with a staffer — with whom he later had a child. While his wife was dying of cancer.

Nasty stuff, to be sure, more than enough to exclude a man permanently not just from the political arena, but even from polite company. And yet there's a certain deliciousness to the way we loathe Edwards. We dismiss a mass killer like Osama bin Laden with a simple "rot in hell." We dismiss O.J. Simpson with a simple "rot in jail." And before you say that the difference is that both of those thugs have at least been dealt with, consider that the thrice-married and repeatedly unfaithful Newt Gingrich behaved nearly as despicably as Edwards, yet even now he is making a credible, if fading, run for the White House. Edwards, by contrast, can't walk into a restaurant without the risk of getting pelted by dinner rolls.

There are

[mountainbunny]

I have been including a MLP pic with every John Edwards thread for the past ten years or so.

Sorry I missed them. I once lived in NC, and still have several good friends in NC. They all dislike Edwards so much, especially the ones from his district in NC. I have no idea how he got himself elected, if their venom toward him is any indicator.

I am disturbed by the fact that you can identify individual ponies by name.

Several horse-crazed daughters will do that to a person. What has been learned cannot be unlearned.

[Tublecane]

“Since all money is fungable, any campaign money he received from donors or the government(you and I) must be spent on the campaign only.”

My question is, how can you say the hush money wasn’t spent on his campaign? Seems to me scandal is the most relevant thing possible. Had the story broke he’d have been deader than Lincoln. We must get this insane notion working backwards. Keeping her quiet must be illegal, because it’s so yucky; therefore, it wasn’t related to the campaign. Even though it so painfully obviously was.

By the way, why the heck do we hgave public financing of campaings, anyway? To keep corruption out, or something? How’s that working? But that’s another question.