So this is some interesting, if moot, news that was reported on "This Week" with George Stephanapolous via the Huffington Post.
In the days leading up to the Democratic primary season last year, the field was still very much up in the air. We had Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, obviously, but John Edwards could have easily stayed competitive longer or even stood a good chance at winning under nearly identical circumstances.
As we realize now, an Edwards candidacy would have been catastrophic.
Of course, hindsight is 20/20, and pretty much everyone was shocked by the revelation that Edwards, champion of the poor and first-hand witness to a wife with cancer, had been cheating on that very same woman.
That revelation came out when the rumors of the allegations were proven increasingly convincing until Edwards himself made a statement in August. By early 2008, of course, it was clear that the contest was between Senators Clinton and Obama, and he had given up his campaign by the end of January.
As written by HuffPo:
On "This Week" Sunday, ABC's George Stephanopolous revealed that some on John Edwards' staff had devised a "doomsday" strategy to sabotage the campaign should he get close to the Democratic nomination.
Stephanopolous brought up the plan when his panel discussed Elizabeth Edwards' candid interview with Oprah about her husband's affair...
Stephanopolous then said that while many on the candidate's staff were oblivious, members of Edwards' inner circle had started to believe the affair rumors. The group secretly agreed to bring down their boss if it looked like he was going to win the nomination -- a "doomsday strategy" to "blow it up."
Do you think this is actually how it would have played out? This seems really questionable to me, and pretty self-serving by Edwards' staff members who never actually faced this reality.
Wouldn't it have been better for the staffers to just encourage Edwards to resign when they found out about the affair? Keeping Edwards out there as an option that would never make it to the ballot surely seems like it was misleading or dishonest to voters.
Again, fortunately political events played out in such a way that while this proved tragic and fatal to his career, it did not harm the Democratic Party in the larger sense of losing the General election or having an added element of drama to the Democratic primaries.
At first blush, it sounds really unselfish that these staffers claim to have had this plan to end Edwards' campaign, but again, I'm pretty skeptical. Such is politics.