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By Bill Altreuter

Is "Dave Matthews at Our Wedding" the new "Hiking the Appalachian Trail"? Both are good, but the Edwards story strikes me as somewhat less hilarious, maybe because Edwards has been done like breakfast for longer than anybody really thinks. I was surprised to see the story on the front page of the Sunday NYTimes, actually-- who cares? Democrats sleeping around isn't news, is it? (It is only news when Republicans do it because they make such a big deal about not sleeping around.) Edwards has handled the whole thing badly, but that's not really a surprise either. He's been coming up small for years now, since at least the 2004 VP debate. He looked like he might be a contender in 08, and I'll admit that running to the left of HRC made him appealing to me, but that was the wrong year to be the White Guy-- history was going to be made one way or the other, and it wasn't going to be Edwards making it. Ray Acito used to tell me that a no-cause is hard to get because jurors want to do something big, and turning away a plaintiff isn't a big thing. He was right, of course, and the way the votes shook down last time was another way of illustrating the same point. Edwards' humiliation is self-created, but the fact that it remains this public seems odd. At some point washed-up pols are no longer interesting, and I wonder why John Edwards half-life is such a long one. He wasn't all that interesting in the first place.

Full post as published by Outside Counsel on September 22, 2009 (boomark / email).