The gotta-read political book on the 2008 campaigns, “Game Change,” is hotter than Tiger Woods’ wife — and rightly so. John Heilmann and Mark Halperin have produced a fantastically gripping narrative full of juicy revelations, and none of the players quoted — embarrassingly, hilariously and infuriatingly — have denied any words attributed to them. Many hundreds of writers got press credentials — but Heilmann and Halperin got the goods.
But there were so many goods to be gotten that you have to wonder: Where were all the other reporters?
Some of the most devastating reporting in the book is about the six-foot trail of oozing amoebic dysentery formerly known as Sen. John Edwards — and his crazy-ass wife, Elizabeth.
While the national media were portraying Elizabeth, a breast-cancer victim, as a shining light of liberalism, they evidently were covering up what the authors dub “the lie of Saint Elizabeth.”
Here she is telling staffers, “Why the f – – – do you think I’d want to go outside a Wal-Mart and hand out leaflets?” When a snafu delayed the transfer of her health-care coverage to the campaign’s PAC, she, a millionaire many times over, snapped, “If this isn’t dealt with by tomorrow, everyone’s health care at the PAC will be cut off. I don’t care if nobody has health care until John and I do.”
Reporters thrilled to Edwards’ demands for government takeover of health care, his total repudiation of the war he once supported in Iraq, and his poverty pimping, so they coddled him, and dismissed that Edwards’s girlfriend was more than six months’ pregnant with his child.
The affair with campaign videographer Rielle Hunter, who filed webisodes “filled with so much flirty banter and overfamiliarity between her and Edwards,” was an open secret. Edwards blamed one staffer — for not stopping the affair. “Why didn’t you come to me like a f – – – ing man and tell me to stop f – – – ing her?” he bellowed.
Could other reporters — the people who traveled with the campaign, ate with staffers, who talked to top aides all day long — really have been ignorant of all this drama?
The National Enquirer had run two cover stories containing rock-solid reporting about the Edwards affair. The Edwardses had fully expected the scandal to rock their campaign, and had been surprised when, as the authors put it, the Enquirer’s exposés “gained zero traction in the traditional press.”
Every reporter on the campaign knew or should have known about the affair before the Iowa caucuses, and if they didn’t they could have simply invested in a copy of the Enquirer. But no. Heilmann and Halperin (who note that the first Enquirer story appeared after about five months of “whispers” about the affair on the campaign trail) make clear that reporters don’t dig up negative information about candidates they like. Instead they dig their fingers deeply into their ears whenever they risk overhearing a tidbit that might ruin the latest great liberal hope.
These supposedly hard-nosed, world-weary cynics simply wait placidly to be spoon-fed the next leak from campaign operatives. If they concealed the Edwards story from us, what are they hiding now that a candidate who elicited even more media drooling is in the White House?