Kausfiles: A mostly political weblog.

What Did Dave Matthews Know And When Did He Know It?

Good Neil Lewis NYT story on John Edwards today--not much news that a Carolina TV station, the National Enquirer and even kausfiles didn't have more than a month ago, except this fabulous nugget (from Ex-Fall Guy Andrew Young's book proposal):

Mr. Young says that he assisted the affair by setting up private meetings between Mr. Edwards and Ms. Hunter. He wrote that Mr. Edwards once calmed an anxious Ms. Hunter by promising her that after his wife died, he would marry her in a rooftop ceremony in New York with an appearance by the Dave Matthews Band. 

The book proposal also has Edwards conspiring with trial lawyer Fred Baron to conceal the Hunter story, even asking Baron "if he could find a doctor who would falsify a DNA report." ... Lewis missed the sex tape, though! ... P.S.: While John Edwards' ongoing agony about whether or not to tell the truth is riveting, he is rapidly becoming the Prinz von Anhalt of the Democrats**--a spectacle, but he won't be making policy in the near future. The more relevant angle is the complicity or lack thereof of Edwards' aides--and his wife--in constructing the Twin Edifices of BS with which the campaign attempted to snow the press. Jennifer Palmieri, Mudcat Saunders, Jonathan Prince and Elizabeth Edwards are still potential players in the party, after all. What did they know and when did they know it?***  Of course, they're also still potential future sources for the New York Times, which may make aggressively questioning their accounts a less urgent prirority for the paper. But maybe Andrew Young can fill us in. ...

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**--  ...whom we nominated for Vice President in 2004. Whoops.

 ***-- My impression is that the truth about Edwards and Hunter was well-known around Edwards HQ. During the campaign I was contacted by two non-campaign people who questioned whether I should push the story, but who checked with their friends in the Edwards camp and came back and told me they were surprised to learn that the allegations were true. ... 12:06 A.M.

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An Edwards Lie I'd Forgotten

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

This impressive timeline of the Edwards/Rielle Hunter scandal** alludes to an obvious John Edwards lie I'd forgotten about (it's hard to remember them all). In his alleged "confession" on Nightline, Edwards was asked by Bob Woodruff about a photo that seemed to show him holding a baby in the Beverly Hilton, when he was visiting Hunter [emphasis added]:

WOODRUFF: And that picture is absolutely you and you are holding that baby.

EDWARDS: The picture in the tabloid. I have no idea what that picture is.

WOODRUFF: But you've seen it right?

EDWARDS: I did see it and I cannot make any sense out of that. When I went to this meeting you've already asked me about, uh, I was not wearing a t-shirt, I was wearing a long-sleeved shirt with the sleeves rolled up. I don't know who that picture -- I don't know if that picture is me, it could well be, it looks like me. I don't know who that baby is, I have no idea what that picture is.

***

WOODRUFF: But are you saying you don't remember holding that child of Miss Hunter?

EDWARDS: I'm saying you asked me about this photograph, I don't know anything about that photograph, I don't know who that baby is. I don't know if the picture has been altered, manufactured, if it's a picture of me taken some other time, holding another baby -- I have no idea. I was not at this meeting holding a child for my photograph to be taken I can tell you that.

WOODRUFF: You did say you did meet her at a hotel in California.

EDWARDS: She was there, Mr. McGovern was present, and that's where the meeting took place.

WOODRUFF: But you don't remember a baby being there?

EDWARDS: No.

Does anyone believe this? Even if the baby is (as he claimed***) not his, how could he not remember the baby being there? If the pictures were from another visit, then he still knows perfectly well "what that picture is." ... Even his wife seems to have given up on this line of defense, resorting to the contradictory, but equally implausible 'politicians-hold-babies-all-the-time' response.

P.S.: Is it true that the Center for American Progress' Jennifer Palmieri, last seen emasculating poor Matthew Yglesias, really "helped [Edwards] prepare" for the dissembling Nightline interview, as reported by Walter Shapiro? There's a line she can put on her resume! ...

P.P.S.: Even the liberal New Republic is getting into the business of spotting St. Elizabeth's dissembling. Like Lee Stranahan yesterday, TNR's Jason Zengerle notes that on "Larry King" Mrs. Edwards said she "dismissed" tabloid reports of the Hunter affair on 'they-write-about-airplanes-on-the-moon' grounds, even though by her own account her husband had confessed to at least a one-night stand a year earlier. ...

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**--My main problem with this timeline is that, by focusing on Rielle Hunter and Edwards, it creates the appearance that Hunter was Edwards' only extramarital affair, something that's very much unclear at this point. If that's not true--if Edwards had been screwing around for years, for example--it would cast the subsequent agonizing and dissembling in a very different light, no? 

***--In his televised "confession," remember, John Edwards claimed not only that the baby wasn't his but that it couldn't possibly be his, a certainty Elizabeth now seems to have abandoned (she says she doesn know--"I don't have any information" -but that it might be "discovered" that the child is his.) ... 5:09 P.M.

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Who moved my juicebox?

Friday, March 13, 2009 

Pssst, C.A.P.! Your star blogger, Matt Yglesias, is giving his best stuff to Twitter! Maybe it's just a way to avoid the Palmieri police ... P.S.: It's still not as good as Ezra Klein's best stuff. ... 6:34 P.M.

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Single-issue labor: The AFL-CIO attempts to make Senator Specter an offer he can't refuse: Vote for "card check" and we will support you in 2010. Is this a sign of desperation? Not necessarily--what could a future Democratic senator from PA give labor that would be more important than "card check"? ... But what about all those other GOP senators labor was supposedly lining up? ... P.S.: Kos suggests this makes it much more likely that Specter will switch parties and run as a Democrat (in the process giving Dems their 60 vote Senate majority). Doesn't a Liebermanesque run as an independent seem more in keeping with Specter's self-image? ...7:32 P.M.

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Does free trader Jagdish Bhagwati really think increased unionization will solve the problem of "stagnation of workers' wages," or does he just like the way the "union decline" explanation takes the heat off the competing explanation that would blame free trade? It's hard to read his recent TNR piece without tending toward the latter conclusion. ...

P.S.: It's entirely possible, of course, that wage stagnation would take place even without trade--thanks to "domestic" factors Bhagwati cites (like  "labor-saving technical changes" that reduce the market for unskilled work)--without the decline of unions being a major cause. And Bhagwati doesn't say it is a major cause, only that Andy Stern, the SEIU, and "many labor economists" think it is. .. Note also that Bhagwati, like so many "card check" defenders, doesn't actually approve of  the "card check" part of the card check bill:

And it is, indeed,hard to defend the denial of an automatic secret ballot.

Does Bhagwati, as an ardent market-oriented free trader, find it easier to defend the mandatory government arbitration provisions of the "card check bill? If not, what's left? ... [via Yglesias]

P.P.S.: And if Lawrence Summers' tepid and abstract remarks on unions at the Brookings Institution this week were, as Sam Stein claims, "stronger than anything that has come from the White House since [the card check bill] was introduced," that's mainly a reflection of how watery the White House's support has been, something Stein (unlike Marc Ambinder) recognizes. ... Summers doesn't so much as mention fostering greater unionization in the text of his speech--not even in the parts about ensuring that growth is widely shared. He answers a press question on the subject by endorsing "some adjustment in an environment that has proven so problematic for labor union organizing." But he doesn't endorse the specific "adjustment" in the card check bill, and indeed warns that "we need to be mindful as we redress a pendulum that has swung of the risks of swinging pendulums too far." ... 2:39 A.M.

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