Fooled by John Edwards

Walter Shapiro writes about his “political-journalistic courtship” of John Edwards “that now makes me cringe.”

“With Edwards on trial in North Carolina on charges of violating federal campaign-finance laws — after the disgrace of being caught with a mistress and denying being the father of her baby — I wish I had befriended a comparatively more honorable political figure like Eliot Spitzer or Mark Sanford… In hindsight, I feel like the jaded city slicker, bristling with self-confidence that he can never be fooled, who ends up hoodwinked by the smiling rural Southern confidence man.”