The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute

Meet the Have Nots: John and Elizabeth Edwards

By Annette Talis

Why is anyone surprised or confused by the latest twist in John and Elizabeth Edwards’ public life? Weren’t we all assigned F. Scott Fitzgerald in high school? Why didn’t we expect them to make a few bucks selling intimate details of their marriage? Money has been central to the Edwardses’ definition of the good life in America—their American Dream. To the Edwardses, it now seems, resilience means coming out ahead on the financial balance sheet at the expense of just about any other measure of success.

Edwards didn’t need to be poor to fight for the poor, but describing a large group of Americans as “have nots” in the face of his own personal and ethical impoverishment now exposes his politics as patronizing and exploitive. Donning blue jeans and work shirt to portray his 12-month, life-of-leisure tan as the rough-hewn complexion of a working man, Edwards never really fit his own story.

Edwards was not alone as CEOs and elected leaders from both parties attenuated an already shallow philosophy by doctoring balance sheets to depict economic prosperity without capital. Many Americans consumed more than they earned to likewise depict success and achievement under the most limited definitions.

If real or perceived financial success and material consumption were not primary and singular to Edwards’ view of the American Dream, he might have recognized earlier that it was satirical for him to expound about “two Americas” in a Democratic primary race against a woman and an African American. While Edwards and his opponents started on equal footing on financial measures and bootstrap experience, let’s face it, the eventual three-way race was hopeless for him.

Edwards’ propitious reappearance amid the present economic recession offers an opportunity to reassess both his and our definition of a good life and what it means to “have” or “have not.”

The Pew Research Center reported last month that Americans—not necessarily in connection to Edwards or the work of Fitzgerald—are presently reconsidering these issues at some level:

No longer do substantial majorities of the public say a microwave oven, a television set or even home air conditioning is a necessity. Instead, nearly half or more now see each of these items as a luxury. Similarly, the proportion that considers a dishwasher or clothes dryer to be a necessity has dropped since 2006. These recession-era reevaluations are all the more striking because the public’s luxury-versus-necessity perceptual boundaries have been moving in the other direction for the previous decade. For example, the share of adults who consider a microwave a necessity was just 32 percent in 1996. By 2006, it had shot up to 68 percent. Now it has retreated to 47 percent.

It is ironic that Edwards, apparently, had dinner with a potential donor to his anti-poverty work just before he made a series of reckless decisions that devalued his greatest assets: his wife, family, ethics, country and professional relationships. He spent his entire stock of social and political capital on a single narcissistic impulse.

“Rarely in the history of American politics has a politician risen so far, so fast only to fall purely as a result of his own selfishness, ego, dishonesty and vanity,” Matt Mackowiak wrote in the May 8, 2009, Chicago Tribune.
Edwards often used his own life as a metaphor for the American Dream. The Edwardses story is a metaphor for our times but consider it more of the Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan variety than as a source of inspiration.

-May 21, 2009

Content on this page requires a newer version of Adobe Flash Player.