When Barack Obama retires after his second term democrats will be looking for a new team to take the White House. Might I suggest a John Edwards / Sam Adams ticket? They have a lot in common. Read this from Politico's Ben Smith:
In the fall of 2006, John Edwards’ political high command began hearing disturbing reports from aides on the road. The candidate, they were told, was spending too much time with an eccentric filmmaker named Rielle Hunter.
So when Edwards and Hunter returned from his trip to Africa in early October, his former campaign manager Peter Scher confronted him: If Edwards was having an affair, Scher told the candidate flatly, he couldn’t run for president.
Edwards denied the affair, but Scher and other loyalists from his 2004 campaign doubted his word, made excuses and stayed out of the 2008 presidential race when Edwards launched his campaign after Christmas.
A few days later, Edwards made a partial confession to his wife, Elizabeth, of a single, regrettable encounter with Hunter. Like Scher, she asked him to drop his bid, to “protect our family from this woman, from his act,” she writes in her book.
But Edwards went ahead with the campaign — and his wife put her reluctance aside to drive his campaign forward.
John Edwards’ decision to keep running turned an ordinary, private drama into a public spectacle that consumed a presidential campaign, destroyed Edwards’ political career and dragged hundreds of staffers and thousands of supporters down in its bitter undertow.
Sounds like Adams took Edwards' playbook and used it to his own advantage. They'd make a great team in 2016.
Bill Clinton ran on the theme "I Still Believe In A Place Called Hope" and President Obama declared that "Yes, we Can!" solve America's problems. It turns out that Clinton really mostly believe in a young girl named Monica but I still have high hopes for the current President - a man of faith and honor, I believe.
What Edwards and Adams have in common is they put their own ambitions above the needs of the nation (Edwards) and the city (Portland). This isn't about sex. It's about judgment and integrity and neither one of these two once promising leaders clearly had (or has) the judgment to hold public office. But at one point they both had me fooled.
If they escape jail time for the cover-ups of their affairs they really ought to team up in 2016.
They're a match made in heaven.
