Anna Marie Cox has decided that it's time to stop talking about John Edwards. He was never relevant anyway.
What is there to say? For all our tabloid obsessions, there is a point at which a public figure can be humiliated no further. There is a point at which celebrity and notoriety simply wash away and you are left with what passes for private.
Perhaps the defense's decision to keep Edwards off the stand was meant to underscore his irrelevance. His irrelevance in the 2008 campaign is probably what pitched the jurors' battle on such a high precipice they could not climb down. How do you find someone guilty of trying to influence a campaign when the campaign itself is of such marginal importance?
How soon they forget. Wasn't it just four short years earlier that Edwards was vice presidential standard bearer for the Democrats? Imagine if the Kerry-Edwards ticket had prevailed. We might have been spared the particular spectacle of this recently concluded trial. Who knows what different chain of events would have been set in motion? Whatever turns they might have taken, they would not have altered the character of the man.
Edwards would have been a heartbeat away from the presidency. He would have considered himself heir apparent to the Democratic nomination for the presidency, assuming he made it through two terms as vice president.
Those Democrats. They sure can pick 'em.
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