John Edwards’ credibility issue

OPINION:

By any number of standards, John Edwards, the one-term Democratic senator from North Carolina, has earned his place at the front of the line of the “not ready for prime time” presidential contenders.

Exhibit A in the “not ready for prime time” indictment concerns his campaign’s over-the-top response to a minor-league leak. Mr. Edwards recently demanded that all Democratic candidates return donations from employees of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which recently purchased the Wall Street Journal. Charles Hurt, Washington bureau chief of Mr. Murdoch’s New York Post, mischievously reported that Mr. Edwards in 2005 had received a $500,000 book advance and $300,000 in expenses from a News Corp.-owned publisher for a fourth-tier coffee-table book that predictably tanked. In a conversation with us, Chris Kofinis, communications director for the Edwards campaign, complained bitterly about the apparent News Corp. leak and repeatedly charged the whole matter was a “right-wing media” attack on his boss. Refusing to release any evidence, the Edwards campaign claimed the Murdoch-tainted $500,000 advance was donated to charities like Habitat for Humanity and — surprise, surprise — College for Everyone, which Mr. Edwards founded.

The Politico newspaper, hardly a right-wing organ (considering The Washington Post alumni who edit it), then reported that Mr. Edwards’ daughter and his deputy campaign manager shared in the $300,000 expenses for the book. On CNN’s “Late Edition” last Sunday, Mr. Kofinis, who had been talking about battling lobbyists for “transformational change,” sat in silence as Howard Wolfson, a spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s campaign (hardly part of the right-wing conspiracy), cited the hypocrisy of Mr. Edwards for accepting $800,000 from Mr. Murdoch while demanding that the Clinton campaign return about $20,000 (less than 3 percent of $800,000) in donations from News Corp. employees.

Two days earlier, the Wall Street Journal identified “34 New Orleans homes whose owners have faced foreclosure suits from subprime-lending units of Fortress Investment Group.” Fortress is a New York-based firm that operates its hedge funds in the Cayman Islands, an offshore tax haven that Mr. Edwards condemned throughout the 2004 campaign. Fortress paid Mr. Edwards nearly $500,000 in 2006 as a consultant, as it dramatically expanded its subprime mortgage empire. Throughout the current campaign, Mr. Edwards has been condemning many features of subprime lending that he characterizes as “predatory.” The Wall Street Journal reports that many of those predatory features were contained in the loans by the Fortress subprime units, which later foreclosed on dozens of Katrina-ravaged properties in New Orleans.

Mr. Edwards, who has $16 million invested with Fortress and who has received more than $150,000 in donations from Fortress employees, learned as early as May that Fortress was involved in Katrina foreclosures. In July, he “suspended” his presidential campaign in order to take a three-day “poverty tour.” The tour began in a New Orleans neighborhood that included a Fortress foreclosure. The poverty tour neared its end in a Cleveland neighborhood featuring three homes scheduled for foreclosure in August. The lender? Fortress.

“I intend to help these” 34 families, Mr. Edwards told the Wall Street Journal. He will either use his own cash to help them, he said, or he will collaborate with a charity that specializes in repairing homes — which sounds very much like Habitat for Humanity. Thus, not only will Mr. Edwards have used Mr. Murdoch’s money to fund his own charity, College for Everyone, which he has used as a constant campaign prop, but Mr. Edwards now seems poised to use the Murdoch money that he allegedly gave to Habitat for Humanity. (The Edwards campaign refuses to release checks or tax returns, which would detail the tax benefits the Edwards family realized by diverting Mr. Murdoch’s money to the candidate’s charity.) Meanwhile, the well-coifed Democratic contender will continue to keep millions invested in Fortress, the offshore tax-haven specialist.

Here is how Jessica Yellin, a Washington correspondent for CNN (which hardly qualifies as part of Mr. Kofinis’s imagined “right-wing media” conspiracy), described Mr. Edwards’ hypocritical fix last Sunday. “The problem is the messenger. Right now, John Edwards is the champion of the underdog,” she said. “But there are all these marks against him. He had the $400 hair cut. … Now all this talk of how he invested in a hedge fund that invested in loans that foreclosed on Katrina victims. It goes to the core of his message,” Mrs. Yellin said, concluding that Mr. Edwards “doesn’t have the credibility on that issue.”

Having never stopped running for president since 2003, Mr. Edwards still is not ready for prime time.