August 10, 2008

The Elephant in the Room: Josh Marshall, on what the Edwards Admission on Friday really means:
I have a very hard time seeing how Edwards' affair reflects on Obama. What I do know is that this is another of those cases where there is a tacit but uniform agreement among pretty much all reporters and close campaign watchers not to publicly state the obvious: that this is a perilous development for John McCain. Just as Bill Clinton's public undressing in the Lewinsky scandal led indirectly to the exposure of several high-profile Republican affairs, Edwards' revelation will inevitably put pressure on the press in general to scrutinize John McCain under something more searching than the JFK rules they've applied to date. I assure you that this dimension of the story occurred to every reporter even tangentially involved in reporting this race soon after the Edwards story hit yesterday afternoon.
What he's talking about, of course, is this incident, where the presumptive nominee dumped his ailing first wife in favor of a much younger (and richer) woman in 1979. It's hard to imagine an incident occurring thirty years ago to be particularly relevant in determining who should be Commander-in-Chief, but there it is.

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