The scandals surrounding John Edwards’ association with Fortress might jeopardize his position in Iowa. TPM Election Central reports that “Fortress companies foreclosed on sub-prime mortgage borrowers in Iowa — 107 of them, to be exact — while Edwards worked with the firm.”
Once again, Edwards denied knowledge of the foreclosures by Fortress. As I previously noted, Edwards’ defense based upon pleading ignorance of the activities at Fortress only reinforce questions that he is a lightweight who is unqualified to be president. Edwards has claimed he worked for Fortress “primarily to learn” the business but came away without much knowledge of what the company was doing.
Edwards has attempted to reduce the political harm from this scandal by claiming to assist those harmed by Fortress but his trivial response looked far more like attempted damage control for PR value than a meaningful response. Today’s response from Edwards does not help his cause:
Edwards told the Des Moines Register that he did not know about the Iowa foreclosures until they told him about it. “If you look at the context of everything I’ve done since the last election, it’s absolutely clear where my heart is and what I care about,” he said.
Yes, in observing Edwards’ career it is very clear what John Edwards cares about: Making money for John Edwards and acquiring political power for John Edwards, and he is willing to say or do anything to achieve these goals.
“But look at what I’ve done. Look at what I’ve done”
–John Edwards
Yes, I see you have worked on poverty issues in the past couple of years in order to cover up the other things you have done, John.
Don’t forget that Edwards’ poverty center turned out to be a means to keep his staff on the payroll and avoid FEC regulations, allowing him to unofficially campaign after 2005.
Actually, I believe he funded two “poverty centers”–and only one of the them was the front for campaign workers. The other really does study poverty at UNC-Chapel Hill. But for that one, at least according to press reports I read, Edwards drew a salary of $40,000 for turning up one day a week (which must have been at about the same time he was taking in multithousands from the hedge fund company and from the Murdoch-subsidiary publishing his “book”). As if there weren’t plenty of established academic centers devoted to study poverty, Edwards had to set up a vanity center and “earn” a salary from it instead of contributing to one of those many established groups.
Yeesh…and now the Beltway Intelligensia has been telling us that Edwards is the real alternative to Hillary, saying that Barack Obama hasn’t attacked her enough. Why must the pundits/media work so hard to constrain our choices?