Last week Richard Cohen lamented the rise of the "flash candidate." His column was mostly focused on John Edwards, but included references to Sarah Palin, Scott Brown, and Barack Obama. Cohen concluded:

We have substituted the camera -- fame, celebrity -- for both achievement and the studied judgment of colleagues. The political machine, the organization, even the parties themselves are gone, severely atrophied or discredited as (ugh) mainstream. They once served as filters, admission committees, but they have been replaced by a sham familiarity -- fame at its most beguiling and dangerous. This was John Edwards. He's not a scandal. He's a lesson.

Ironically, Cohen went the entire column without mentioning the culpability of the media in enabling John Edwards' meteoric rise and also the media malpractice that let the Democrats come within a whisker of nominating someone whose behavior was so mind-numbingly reckless it would have destroyed their chances of winning the White House.

Tina Brown gets it:

The truly shaming revelation here is how—except for the hound dogs of the National Enquirer—the press and the political establishment were duped by a candidate who, even before the Rielle Hunter craziness, was a giant phony. It should be collectively blush-making for the press to remember the newsmagazine covers, the fawning TV sitdowns, the op-ed boostings Edwards garnered in the course of his years as a crowd-pleasing, “Kennedyesque” candidate who supposedly cared for the underdog and coined the “Two Americas” catchphrase. It turns out that the cocoon of John Edwards' megalomania was a third America all its own.

As Byron York points out, when it came to the Rielle Hunter mess, the media simply wasn't interested in telling the story. The excuse is that the ever scrupulous MSM didn't want to risk its reputation on tabloid fodder carried by the National Enquirer. (Never mind the New York Times printed a front page, anonymously sourced story during the height of the campaign alleging John McCain had an affair with a lobbyist).

The truth, however, is that it was really a matter of priorities. While big media outlets dispatched dozens of investigative reporters to Alaska within hours of Sarah Palin being announced as McCain's VP pick, apparently no one could spare a single reporter to go out and verify the easily verifiable blockbuster story about John Edwards.

Long before Hunter appeared on the scene there were plenty of signs that John Edwards was a complete phony driven more by megalomania than anything else who shouldn't have been let anywhere near the White House.  The political class, including reporters, were enthralled by Edwards' populist rhetoric even though they many knew it didn't come close to matching reality.

Brad Warthen, a columnist and editorial page editor at The State in South Carolina, recounted his observations of Edwards' phoniness in February '07.  And Bob Shrum knew Edwards was a phony for the better part of a decade, but waited until 2007 to reveal some disturbing anecdotes about Edwards, including this one from the '04 campaign when John Kerry was mulling over his VP options:

Kerry talked with several potential picks, including Gephardt and Edwards. He was comfortable after his conversations with Gephardt, but even queasier about Edwards after they met. Edwards had told Kerry he was going to share a story with him that he'd never told anyone else—that after his son Wade had been killed, he climbed onto the slab at the funeral home, laid there and hugged his body, and promised that he'd do all he could to make life better for people, to live up to Wade's ideals of service. Kerry was stunned, not moved, because, as he told me later, Edwards had recounted the same exact story to him, almost in the exact same words, a year or two before—and with the same preface, that he'd never shared the memory with anyone else. Kerry said he found it chilling, and he decided he couldn't pick Edwards unless he met with him again.

So Richard Cohen is right, there is a lesson to be learned from the meteoric rise and fall of John Edwards. It's that the media fell down on the job by not sufficiently scrutinizing Edwards on his way up and then fell down again by ignoring a story that could have done catastrophic damage to the Democratic party and to the country.

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