John Edwards' sincerity has been questioned before

The revelations the last couple of days about the romantic affair that former senator, former vice presidential nominee and former presidential candidate John Edwards had with Rielle Hunter outside his marriage prompted our blogging colleague Jim Tankersley over at the Swamp to pull out a profile he wrote on Edwards last year.

Even today, his words seem pretty prescient. At the end of this item be sure to watch the video on Rielle Hunter.

Edwards' admissions -- that he had an affair while his wife Elizabeth battled cancer -- break sharply from the family-man image the former senator has cultivated his entire political career. They also crystallize many detractors' long-held worries about Edwards' sincerity and authenticity.

As I wrote in a profile of Edwards last year:

(Former John Kerry consultant Bob) Shrum's memoir, published this year, hints at what rivals say could keep Edwards from the nomination: a question of authenticity.

Shrum writes that Edwards, interviewing with Kerry for the vice-presidential ...

Senate candidate Al Franken holds townhall, one person shows

Al Franken is trying to turn his former fame as a comedian into the gain of one U.S. Senate seat for Democrats by upsetting incumbent Republican Sen. Norm Coleman in Minnesota.

But he probably didn't intend his town hall meeting on veterans issues yesterday to turn into the joke.

Only one person attended.

Ouch!

Well, every vote counts. So Franken sat down in Brigitte's Cafe in St. Cloud with the lone voter interested in veterans issues, the theme Franken's staff had established for that public appearance.

Franken spent an hour listening to the woes of Navy veteran Josh John, trying to navigate the medical system for former military members.

Franken also promised to improve veterans benefits, criticized his Republican opponent and the Democratic Congress for inaction and said he hoped to serve on the same veterans committee as the late Sen. Paul Wellstone.

Then, Franken headed off for the county fair, where there was likely to be a slightly larger crowd.

-- Andrew Malcolm

Photo credit: Associated Press

Who's your daddy? Rielle Hunter says no paternity test on John Edwards or anyone

Well, so much for Sen. John Edwards' offer to take a paternity test to prove he did not father the infant daughter of his mistress, Rielle Hunter.

Edwards admitted a 2006 affair this week, said according to his timing he could not be the father of the five month-old infant, Frances Quinn Hunter, and said he'd not paid any money to Hunter or the married former Edwards staffer who has said he's the father.

Saturday, Hunter's lawyer, Robert Gordon, issued a statement for his client saying she wanted to forever protect the privacy of her daughter, whose birth certificate from Feb. 27 carries no name on the father line.

“Rielle will not participate in DNA testing or any other invasion of her or her daughter's privacy now or in the future," Gordon said.

Be sure to watch the Rielle Hunter video at the end of this item.

Edwards, who publicly denied the affair until he admitted it, has said, and his wife Elizabeth has confirmed, that the former Democratic senator and presidential candidate told her about his liaison with Hunter in 2006 and it was a difficult period for them.

Edwards says the affair was brief and occurred while his wife's breast cancer was in remission.

In his statement and an interview with ABC, Edwards said, “I am and have been willing to take any test necessary to establish the fact that I am not the father of any baby, and I am truly hopeful that a test will be done so this fact can be definitively established.”

Looks like not. For now.

-- Andrew Malcolm

Photo credit: Chris Hondros / Getty Images

Pres. Bush declines to slap Misty May-Treanor's bikinied butt

President George W. Bush, who played baseball, coached Little League, owned a big league team and watches the Texas Rangers at every opportunity, can't stay away from the U.S. teams at the Beijing Olympic games.

Today, as the busy crowd over at our Olympics blog notes, after an hour's brisk bit of mountain-biking himself, Bush paid another visit to the American athletes, watching the women warm up for softball, regretting the disappearance of that sport from the next Olympics ("It's good for the world to have girls playing softball and these women are going to show young girls how to win") and trying his hand, so to speak, at volleyball.

Bush knuckled off a couple of lobs, but defending gold medalists Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh gave the chief executive some pointers. Then after a good play, in the tradition of female volleyballers, May-Treanor turned, bent over slightly and offered her bikinied rear-end for the 43rd president to slap.

"Mr. President," she said, "want to?"

Want to has nothing to do with it in public life.

As the son of a president, a husband of nearly 37 years, the father of two daughters, the subject of some attempted tabloid exposes and a seasoned political veteran, who is not a female athlete but knows that every camera for a half-mile is trained on him, Bush wisely chose instead to brush his hand across the small of May-Treanor's back. (See photo.)

Darn!

That did, however, lead to a hilarious Reuters photo caption and immediate correction (hat tip to Mike Allen's Saturday Playbook).

Original photo caption: “U.S. President George W. Bush playfully pats the backside of U.S. Women's Beach Volleyball team player Misty May-Treanor (L) at her invitation while visiting the Chaoyang Park Beach Volleyball Grounds at the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, China, August 9, 2008. Team mate Kerri Walsh (R) watches.”

Corrected caption, eight minutes later: “ATTENTION EDITORS - CAPTION CLARIFICATION U.S. President George W. Bush playfully pats the back of U.S. Women's Beach Volleyball team player Misty May-Treanor (L) at her invitation while visiting the Chaoyang Park Beach Volleyball Grounds at the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, China, August 9, 2008. Teammate Kerri Walsh (R) watches.”

That English language can be tricky, can't it? "Back" and "backside" are so similar but seem to have completely different connotations.

-- Andrew Malcolm

Photo credit: Gerald Herbert / Associated Press 

Mediocre J.V. athlete John McCain eager to watch Olympics

Sen. John McCain thinks it's a swell idea that his Democratic opponent Barack Obama is taking a week off now with his family in Hawaii. And not just because it leaves the publicity all to the continuously campaigning underdog Republican candidate.

In another one of his chats with a few reporters traveling with him last night, according to The Times' Bob Drogin, McCain admitted an eagerness to watch as much of the Olympics as possible without the imminent threat of some incoming political shells. Although he still plans a full week of campaigning.

All McCain's got to do like the rest of us is figure out how this bizarre tape-delayed NBC time fits in with the standard time zones that humans are accustomed to.

"You've got the Olympics," McCain said. "You've got vacation. You got people on the beach. If you were going to take a week off, this is probably an intelligent time to do it. I'll be watching the Olympics. I'll be watching the Olympics as much as possible."

Like millions of American armchair sports enthusiasts, McCain will focus on the world's highest-paid "amateur" athletes, the NBA stars on the U.S. Olympic team.

"I'll be interested in seeing the basketball team," McCain added. "It's sort of the standard ones. I'll be interested in seeing how the basketball team does. How the baseball team does. You know. I like it all.

"We're all caught up in the excitement of it, especially us mediocre high school junior varsity athletes."

Now, there's something that many voters can identify with.

-- Andrew Malcolm

Photo: Sen. John McCain with his daughter Meghan; credit: Getty Images

John and Elizabeth Edwards. Rielle Hunter. And a marriage poll.

We just could not resist this.

For the very first time in its 14-month, 2,800-item history The Ticket is republishing an item. It was first published in this space on Oct. 15.

It concerned a Ladies' Home Journal poll of 502 women about which prominent politician at the time had the "happiest marriage." By now, you may have guessed which couple won that poll competition.

It's the same couple -- or at least husband -- who's been prominent in the news the last couple of days, but not for happy things, as The Ticket has reported here and here and here and here and here.

Anyway, they may be fun to read at the time. But let this be a lesson to all of us about how much stock to put in polls like this involving public perceptions of private affairs, er, matters.

The Ticket, Oct. 15, 2007:

Which presidential couple has the happiest marriage?

"True, it may be absolutely none of our business. But as Americans go through the peculiar political osmosis of evaluating all the candidates who want to be their president, they slowly make a series of personal judgments about the candidates -- and their families.

"And, according to a new poll for the Ladies' Home Journal, a majority of American women (52%) have decided that right now of the major political contenders, Elizabeth and John Edwards have the happiest marriage, whatever that means. Whether that is true or not, who knows?

"But a majority of both Republicans (52%) and Democrats (58%) felt that way. Opinions about the marital happiness of the rest of the couples tended to break along party lines, with their own party members feeling they were happier than opposing party members did.

"Last month's poll of 502 women over 18 (with a margin of error of 4.4%) found they felt the second happiest candidate couple was....

Ticket Notice: Sunday guests -- Jindal, Paulson, Kaine, Davis

ABC's This Week: Govs. Bill Richardson (D-N.M.) and Bobby Jindal (R-La. -- see photo), and a round table with George Will, Cokie Roberts, ABC's Torie Clarke and New York Times Magazine's Matt Bai. Note: ABC's Jake Tapper guest hosts.

Bloomberg's Political Capital with Al Hunt: David Maraniss, author of "Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World."

CBS' Face the Nation: Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine (D) and Karl Rove.

CNN's Late Edition: T. Boone Pickens, founder & chairman of BP Capital Management, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (D), New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Gov. Charlie Crist (R-Fla.) and a round table with CNN's Ed Henry, Joe Johns and Jessica Yellin.

Fox News Sunday: McCain manager Rick Davis. The "Power Player" is White House Social Secretary Amy Zantzinger.

NBC's Meet The Press: Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and a round table with the Washington Post's David Broder, CNBC's Erin Burnett, Washington Post's E.J. Dionne and the Wall Street Journal's Paul Gigot. Note: "Meet" will air at a special time in D.C. (9 a.m.) due to the Olympics.

-- Andrew Malcolm

Sex and politics: A Ticket photo gallery of Edwards, Spitzer, Craig, Vitter et al

And the beat goes on.

The recent revelations about former Democratic senator, former vice presidential nominee and former presidential candidate John Edwards and what he said was a brief affair with videographer Rielle Hunter in 2006 brings back a long list of other familiar names.

Eliot Spitzer. Remember him? Used to be New York's Democratic governor. And Ashley Alexandra Dupre, who, judging by her reported fees, apparently charged her clients by the second? (See photo of her celebrating something with V-for-victory signs.)

And Larry Craig, who used to be a Republican senator from Idaho until some toe-tapping in the men's room of the Minneapolis airport led to his arrest last summer and his announced resignation when that got out and he said he wasn't gay.

But, oh wait, right, he changed his mind. He still said he was not gay. But he decided not to resign. So he's still a Republican senator from Idaho until his term ends after this year. The state party surely loves that. 

Sex and politics, there's something about that mix -- or maybe it's not really a mix -- that sends an endless array of characters across the public stage having somehow misbehaved according to hypocritical American customs that require we condemn public people for doing what so many others do themselves.

So to commemorate these dramatic public moments, The Ticket has arranged a special Sex and Politics photo gallery of some of the more recent cases. We could probably go back to ancient Greek times for more examples. But the photography then was just awful.

One of the most striking characteristics of this photo gallery are the faces of the spouses, standing by their man and often unsuccessfully hiding the pain. As was asked after the Spitzer affair, why do they do it? At least the Edwards couple issued separate statements, and not in public, to provide yet another apologetic husband and stoic wife.

--Andrew Malcolm

Photo credits: Extra via Associated Press (top); MySpace via AFP / Getty Images

Rob Tully, John Edwards loyalist, reacts to his adultery admission

Rob Tully qualifies as an absolute John Edwards stalwart.

A longtime Democratic activist in all-important Iowa -- he ran unsuccessfully for a House seat there in 1998 and then served a stint as state party chairman -- Tully first sized up Edwards as a prospective presidential contender in 2001.

A trial lawyer like Edwards, Tully said he told the then-little-known freshman senator from North Carolina that he could count on his help should he launch a White House race.

Tully was true to his word, serving as campaign co-chair for Edwards' 2003-04 run -- where the candidate's surprise second-place finish in the Iowa caucuses set the stage for his eventual selection as John Kerry's running mate -- and assuming the same role for Edwards' 2007-08 bid.

Tully was totally committed, as he related in an interview with NPR almost exactly a year ago. So his reaction was worth checking following Edwards' revelation Friday of an extramarital affair.

"I'm disappointed. That sums it up," he told The Times' Seema Mehta, who frequently covered this cycle's Edwards campaign.

He said he believed Edwards last fall when the candidate emphatically denied the first National Enquirer reports of an affair. "I do my own shopping, I read that stuff going out the checkout line. Half of it's crap."

As he reflected on the news of the day, his thoughts turned to Edwards' wife and children. "This is a family situation and obviously, regardless of the family involved, whether it's someone you know or not, it's a very difficult situation. It's tough being in politics ...the whole world watches. It's still a private matter.

"They have all of our concerns and prayers in dealing with this. I'm hopeful that however it comes out, that everyone can move on. But it's a tragedy in anybody's life, in any family. ... Everybody's human and people make mistakes. I at least am glad he admitted his mistake. Now is the time for both he and his family to deal with this in whatever matter they see fit."

As for Edwards' future, Tully said: "I think the question of whether this affects his political career -- that's something that has to be seen. The thing he has to ride out now is a number of supporters such as me that are disappointed in him over this."

-- Don Frederick

Sometimes John McCain sleeps in as late as 7:30 a.m.

So what time did you get up this morning?

Everybody's got their own routine and their own idea of what's "early" and what's "sleeping in."

Let Barack Obama hit the gym at 6:30 a.m. if he wants -- even on his vacation that started yesterday. John McCain, like many of us, especially on these slow summer weekends, likes his shut-eye.

"If I can sleep in to about 7:30 or 8, then it really helps me," the presumptive Republican presidential nominee said late Friday night as his campaign jet hurtled west from Arkansas to Nevada.

"When I get up real early, like 5:30 or 6, [and] you don't go to bed until 10, 10:30 or 11, it helps me to get up a little later in the morning," he said.

Presidential campaigns are punishing affairs for everyone involved, especially the candidates, who are "on" virtually nonstop. Long days of shuttling from one time zone to another and numbing hours on planes and buses add to the grind.

This week alone, McCain campaigned in Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Michigan, West Virginia, Ohio, Iowa, Arkansas and Nevada.

Next week promises more of the same.

"I kinda can tell," McCain added. "If I put in three or four 18-, 20-hour days in a row, then I'm not sharp. It's just a fact. I can be sharp if I get a little more rest."

McCain, who turns 72 on Aug. 29, is in excellent health. On most days, he appears an indefatigable campaigner. Sometimes, after eight states in five days, the strain shows. At a press conference earlier Friday in Rogers, Ark., he appeared visibly fatigued.

And at a fundraiser shortly afterward, he stood beside former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who had also sought the Republican nomination, and clearly said, "I met with him last night."

But McCain apparently misspoke. Reporters promptly asked campaign staff if they'd snuck Huckabee in for a secret audition as vice president the previous night, when McCain was in Cincinnati, and they insisted it hadn't happened.

After checking, an aide said that McCain had simply met with Huckabee before the Arkansas fundraiser, not in Ohio.

-- Bob Drogin