John Edwards.  Geez.  The Rielle Hunter story was bad enough.  Compared to Jim O’Connor in Senator, Edwards acted like a complete clown — and in a presidential race.  There is probably an interesting story behind his actions.  Why does someone act that crazily?  The death of his son?  His wife’s cancer?  Because he’s been successful all his life and assumes he can get away with it?  Because he secretly wants to be uncovered as a fraud?

But the really interesting story belongs to his aide Andrew Young, the guy who initially claimed that he was the father of Rielle Hunter’s baby.  Married with young children.  A law school graduate.  How do you become so invested in another person’s success that you’d do something like that?

In the novel, O’Connor has an aide named Kevin Feeney who somewhat fits the Andrew Young type.  Kevin is described thusly:

There are two kinds of Irishmen in politics. There are the conventional hard-drinking ward heeler types, who are attracted to politics because so much of it involves simply sitting around and talking and doing favors for one another. And then there are those who are looking for a cause, who need to submerge themselves in an organization that is greater than themselves. These men don’t want to talk; they want to serve. Kevin is such a man.

In the old country, in another era, Kevin might have been a priest, preaching the Vatican party line about sex and marriage to village maidens, content to have his every thought and belief provided for him from on high. Until lately in America he would have ended up a Democrat, but the times are changing, much to my father’s chagrin. Kevin embraced the conservative philosophy as a young man, and then he embraced me. He was a volunteer in my first campaign, and he immediately made himself indispensable. I gave him a job in the AG’s office, and he has been with me ever since. He seems to disappear into the woodwork for long stretches, rarely speaking at our opinionated staff meetings, but he’s always there when I need him.

But I could never have imagined someone as committed to the cause, and as stupid, as Andrew Young.

Senator is filled with political consultants who invariably give the senator smart, insightful advice, such as “Don’t go messing around with that beautiful reporter who says she wants to write a book about you.”  In fact, everyone in the novel is pretty darn smart, including the senator, who knows he is screwing up even as he finds that he can’t help himself — that reporter is just too damn beautiful.

Life, you may be surprised to discover, isn’t like that.  One can easily imagine a politician making gaffes in the heat of the battle — you get tired, you’re talking all the time, you forget what your consultants told you….  But how do you explain Romney Communications Director Eric Fehrnstrom’s Etch A Sketch comment? The whole point of Eric Ferhnstrom’s existence is to keep the campaign on message, not to reinforce the criticism that all Romney’s opponents have been leveling at him. He gets paid not to get tired, not to forget the talking points (which he probably wrote), not to make gaffes.

By the way, Wikipedia, which knows everything, has an entry on Michael Kinsley’s definition of “gaffe,” which is “when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.”  What Fehrnstrom said was, of course, completely true, and everyone knows that it’s true.  (As a completely irrelevant aside, Kinsley lived upstairs from me freshman year at the World’s Greatest University.)

Here is the website etchasketchmittromney.com, which shows you how fast gaffes travel in the Internet universe.