Can you keep a secret?

John Edwards is a world-class schmuck.

Oh, he didn’t cheat on his wife while she was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer. Woohoo, give the guy a medal. He waited until she wasn’t fighting a life-threatening disease before he set his eyes (among other things) on another woman.

Edwards is just another in a long line of political sex scandals these days. Forget Bill Clinton – in the last couple of years, former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer had sex with prostitutes and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford disappeared without a word and flew down to Argentina to have an affair. It’s been one affair after another, and they sparked the hit CBS drama ‘The Good Wife’ about the wife of a politician caught in a sex scandal (which by the way, is very good).

Everyone is all over these guys – with good reason. People want the dirty little details of the scandal, and the people involved are more than willing to oblige. Spitzer’s girl was happy to get her 15 minutes of fame. Andrew Young, the man who claimed paternity of Rielle Hunter and John Edwards’ daughter, just released a tell-all. Elizabeth Edwards published an autobiography last May.

Why is this so fascinating? Do we enjoy seeing self-righteous people fall? Is it nice to think that politicians are just like the rest of us? Are the titillating bits of information about the nature of the scandal just too amazing to be true?

Regardless, it hooks us all – don’t pretend you didn’t talk about Spitzer and Sanford or that you don’t know Edwards recently publicly claimed Hunter’s daughter. For whatever reason, these peoples’ lives and mistakes are riveting.

In the end, they’re just normal people. Okay, normal people don’t sleep with hookers or hop on a plane to South America to get some. And I’m far from defending them – as far as I’m concerned, the negative attention and potentially losing their wives is completely deserved.

But why the hell do the people involved feel the need to make such a public deal about it? If you were involved, why would you want people to know all the details?

I don’t blame Elizabeth Edwards for wanting to share her side of the story. But it’s not anyone’s business. The contents of Andrew Young’s book, which supposedly has a bit about him watching a sex tape of Edwards, certainly isn’t.

There’s no doubt Edwards and the others deserve negative press, but the attention has an effect on someone besides the politicians and their wives. What does 27-year-old Cate Edwards think about all of this? In 20 years, what will Frances Hunter think about being photographed by paparazzi just for being born?

The children of politicians won’t be able to go anywhere without everyone knowing what their fathers did. And if the others involved in the situation had any decency, they’d make it easier on these children, who had something to do with it and are involved anyway – they’d keep the details private.


E-mail: hanns@indiana.edu