What The NYT Didn’t Bother To Tell You About John Edwards And Andrew Young

Well Politico has done the dirty work! Have they ever, and the Andrew Young picture they paint is not so pretty (nor is the Edwards’ for that matter). What the article does do, however, is what the NYT should have at least attempted to do in their piece — that is provide some sort of character sketch of the person (“butt boy”) they opted to rely so heavily on for many of the damaging details they published concerning John Edwards. Because Andrew Young doesn’t sound like such a great guy either! From Ben Smith’s piece:

When John Edwards returned to North Carolina in the course of his long quest for the presidency, Andrew Young always met him at the airport in Edwards’s big black Chevy Tahoe. Young drove, and Edwards rode shotgun, silently raising his left hand whenever he wanted a Diet Coke, which Young would wordlessly supply.

When Edwards and his family arrived home, Young had made sure there was fresh milk in the fridge, a neatly trimmed lawn and neatly folded dry cleaning. When he arranged their vacation to Disney World in 2004, he naturally booked himself a ticket. And when Edwards’s mistress became pregnant, Young — at the cost of his reputation, his wife’s and his minister father’s — stepped forward to say the child was his.

Young sometimes described himself as Edwards’s “special assistant” and dreamed of serving in an Edwards White House. Other aides, with a combination of disgust — and, perhaps, a bit of envy — referred to him as Edwards’s “personal servant,” or worse, Edwards’s “butt boy.” The relationship was so intense, at least on Young’s side, that it generated friction between him and Elizabeth Edwards. But if Elizabeth and John Edwards sometimes seemed to feel that Young — at 40 no longer an eager kid, with three children of his own — had gotten too close, there was no getting rid of him. He had made himself indispensable.

May have been nice for the Times to include one or two of these details in their piece, no? More importantly it would have been relevant. Not so much because knowing about Young makes John Edwards look less despicable but because it demonstrates the culture of despicability he (and political life in general?) existed in, and also lets us know that hey, maybe Young is not actually coming from a place of well-balanced sincerity. Nice of Politico to complete the picture.