Maybe we gave up on John Edwards too soon.  His hair still looks great, even though he now gets cuts for $12.95, not $400.  And the man clearly has a gift for multitasking under pressure.  In the winter of 2007, as Edwards campaigned for the presidency in Iowa, he still found time to check up on his pregnant girlfriend, Rielle Hunter, who was on the lam with fall guy Andrew Young and his family, zooming around in private jets to luxe resorts and haciendas in Aspen, Santa Barbara and Florida.  Even as the candidate schemed to lie to his cancer-stricken wife about a looming National Enquirer scoop on the “love-child bombshell” and finger Young as the baby’s father, Edwards made sure to call the fugitives on expense accounts to apprise them of the size of his crowds, his waits in green rooms, and his feelings about his TV gigs.  “That went very well,” he said of a guest spot on “Larry King Live” on CNN to discuss the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan. Before a rally in Waterloo, Iowa, he crowed: “We’ve got a big crowd, a huge crowd here.”  But hell hath no fury like a sycophant scorned.  In the equivalent of Monica’s blue dress, Young decided to save the “corroborating” cascade of fretting, preening phone messages from Edwards, checking on the paramour and courtier he had exiled and slandered in an insane attempt to stop his presidential bid from exploding.  As Edwards sat silently rubbing his neck and staring dolefully at Young, the lead witness for the prosecution in the government trial accusing the 58-year-old of accepting illegal campaign contributions to stash his pregnant mistress, his voice rang across the courtroom as those old messages were played.  “I hope y’all are O.K.,” perky Edwards said as pulverized Edwards listened.  The jury watched with interest as the former poverty crusader sat at the defense table while the prosecutor flashed pictures of the ritzy places where Rielle hid out with carte blanche and a credit card made out in the name of R. Jaya James. Young noted that sometimes the New Agey Hunter would veto an expensive suite saying that the rooms didn’t have the right energy: “I took it to mean they weren’t nice enough.”  He said that he and Edwards plotted about where to get money to secretly support Rielle after a furious Elizabeth Edwards learned of the affair and had the former New York party girl fired as an overpaid campaign videographer.  “This was going to be a long-term problem,” Young said dryly. “Miss Hunter had good taste.”  Young testified that Edwards’s rationale for not hearing details about the checks used for the “cover-up” — $1 million solicited from two wealthy donors, the late Fred Baron and the 101-year-old Bunny Mellon, who sent “Bunny money” through an interior designer with red herring notations about antique furniture — was that he didn’t want to have to lie in case he was ever sworn in as attorney general. (Another hallucination, since Barack Obama never had any intention of giving that post to a man he considered a pretty boy.)  It was a pathetic measure of his vertiginous fall that he once thought he could be the boss of the very prosecutor pushing for him to go to jail for up to 30 years and pay up to $1.5 million in fines.  Sitting behind Edwards, as Young described the fortune lavished on Rielle, was his family, who once thought he would be in White House: his 30-year-old daughter, Cate, a lawyer who is strategizing with her dad on the case; his elderly father, the former textile millworker; and his mother. His parents, disdained by Elizabeth as “hicks,” brought their own seat cushions.  Everyone’s arguing whether Edwards is a swindler or merely a swine.  He’s certainly the latter. Young testified about Edwards’s reaction when he told the candidate that Rielle was pregnant and threatening to go public: “He said she was a crazy slut and there was a 1-in-3 chance that it was his child.” He ordered Young to keep it from Elizabeth.  The case is supposed to be about exceeding a $2,300 individual campaign contribution limit, quaint in light of Citizens United. But it’s really a set of intersecting love stories. Andrew, a caricature of calculated servility, loved his golden boy boss — “more than he loved Cheri,” his wife, Rielle said.  Flaky Rielle loved the “hot” meal ticket Johnny. Bunny Mellon crushed on John because he reminded her of the Kennedys. And John, of course, loved John, growing so narcissistic that he was blind to Andrew’s bile and his own grand delusions.  Andrew, who has a law degree, fell out of love when John, Elizabeth and Rielle treated him like an errand boy. Elizabeth wanted him to change light bulbs and pick up dry cleaning while Rielle sent him for organic food but went shopping herself at Neiman Marcus. Did he think: Why shouldn’t I have some of that hush money for myself?  It’s a trial without heroes, just liars and an abhorrent trio of selfish people trying to spin the story their own way.
A man who seemed headed for the Oval Office may be headed to jail, raising the eternal question: Why is the flesh always weak?