After Obama had won the nomination, the mainstream press splashed on his affair with an aide, and the rumours that he was the father to her child (rumours we now know to be true). This is what happened after the notorious photo of him and the baby appeared, according to a new book about the election:
Edwards, panicked, assembled a handful of his former staffers—Ginsberg,
Prince, and Jennifer Palmieri, his press secretary from 2004—to
strategize, and settled on the idea of performing a mea culpa on Nightline. Don’t do this interview unless you plan to tell the whole truth,
Palmieri urged him, because if you lie, you’re going to make things
infinitely worse. Edwards replied that he was going to confess to the
affair, but deny paternity of the child. He didn’t want to jeopardize
his chances of being Obama’s attorney general, he said.
“That, John?” Palmieri said in disbelief. “That was gone a long time
ago.” Palmieri had been on the phone with the Obama campaign, which was
sending the clear, if gentle, signal that there was no longer a slot
available for Edwards to speak at the convention. “You have to call
Obama right now” and back out, Palmieri said. “I don’t want to give up on that yet,” Edwards insisted.
A man's gotta have hope, right? Right?
And the scoop on Elizabeth from her former aides:
The nearly universal assessment among them was that there was no one on the national stage for whom the disparity between public image and private reality was vaster or more disturbing.
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