Associated Press' Ron Fournier: John Edwards Seems Genuine To Me, But He Might Be A Phony, Anyway
September 20, 2007 -- 6:50 PM EST // //
Oh, man -- we've got a live one here. This piece by the Associated Press' Ron Fournier is one of the most desperate efforts to breathe life into the "John Edwards is a phony" narrative that I've seen yet.
Here's the headline:
It says a great deal about our discourse that the question, "Is Edwards real or a phony?" is described without irony as "analysis," but let's put that aside for a sec.
At the top of the piece -- which tells us that there are "two John Edwardses," the real one and the phony one -- we get the obligatory mentions of the expensive haircut, the big mansion, and his moneymaking at hedge funds, even though those are all old news. The justification for mentioning them is that Edwards' unnamed rivals are trying to make an issue of them -- as if that automatically makes them something worthy of yet more coverage.
The piece goes on and on in that vein, rehashing just about every single attack we've heard on Edwards throughout the campaign. And then, in the 27th paragraph, we get hit with something truly astonishing: Fournier himself spent time with Edwards, and he came away convinced that he just might be genuine, after all!
Spending time with Edwards can leave the most cynical person believing that he's still fighting for those people, driven by the hard knowledge of how short life can be. His son, Wade, was killed in a car accident in 1996 ("I think of him every day.") and his wife, Elizabeth, has incurable cancer ("There have been two huge events in my life").So, is the verdict that Edwards just may not be such a phony? Nope! Writing about this potentially genuine Edwards that he actually spent time with, Fournier concludes:
That is one John Edwards.But where did this other fake Edwards that voters need to ask themselves about come from, anyway? Why, he's the one Fournier and his colleagues are working so hard to create in pieces like this, of course. Truly, the media hall of mirrors is a bizarre and unsettling place.The question voters need to answer is whether it's the only one that matters.