Q&A with 'Game Change' authors

Even before John Edwards acknowledged paternity of his mistress' child, Edwards was the subject of renewed water cooler chatter because of a new book by journalists John Heilemann and Mark Halperin.

"Game Change," a behind-the-scenes account of the 2008 presidential campaign, portrays Edwards as profoundly delusional about whether his political career could survive the extra-marital affair. It portrays his wife, Elizabeth Edwards, as belittling, profanity-prone and mean-spirited.

Heilemann and Halperin talked separately to Dome on Thursday about Edwards, the hubris of presidential candidates, the new-found credibility of the National Enquirer and why people won't tell the truth on the record.

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DOME: Edwards' statement seemed apologetic, contrite and humble. How do you square that with the portrait your book portrays of Edwards — a delusional man who was still gaming his political future even after acknowledging the affair?

Mark Halperin: The circumstances I think have left him very little choice but to acknowledge paternity. As we reported in "Game Change," Andrew Young told everybody in the world that he'd had a vasectomy long before he was claiming paternity of this child. This was a hard thing for [Edwards] to admit personally. It's a hard thing for him to admit politically to the extent that he thought he had a chance to have a career in politics. He is boxed in by this coming book [Young's book "The Politician"] and by our book which make clear the reality of what he did. ...

Plenty of people have extra-marital affairs. The existence of a flesh and blood human being creates a complication that magnifies the difficulty a thousand fold.

John Heilemann: Every presidential candidate, in addition to their salutary qualities, has a degree of vanity and ego and hubris and neediness and delusion. But Edwards is like an extreme case of all of those things and they became for him all-consuming and self-destructive. On the statement today, it certainly has all the hallmarks, he's saying the right things...It's a model statement under the circumstances, under the extremely bizarre circumstances that have overtaken his life. ... A well-crafted statement like the one he put out today it's impossible to know what mixture goes into that. It's a well-crafted document for public relations purposes. It also could reflect a real sense of him having finally having a reckoning with the truth of what he'd done and how much of his potential he destroyed himself. He was not brought down by forces outside himself. His own flaws caused his downfall. It's possible that some of the contriteness in that statement is genuine.
It's also the case, just to be politically realistic about it, if Reille Hunter's lawsuit, that child-support lawsuit, if it went into open court, it would subject them to further public humiliation.

DOME: Why were mainstream media outlets, including publications such as The N&O, so slow to aggressively chase the story?

MH: Edwards denied it, Hunter denied it and Andrew Young claimed paternity. ... If you have a political conspiracy like that then there's not much the press can do. The press is always a little bit squeamish, even in this age of freak show media, to go into someone's personal life that way. I think sympathy for Elizabeth Edwards inhibited people from pursuing the story as aggressively as they might. In addition, at least part of this situation was lubricated by a lot of money from [Edwards supporter and fundraiser] Fred Baron.

JH: The Enquirer story was denied up and down .... I think there was a lot of people in the Obama and Clinton worlds who couldn't believe the story who thought it was just too crazy to be true. The National Enquirer at that point had not quite established its record, as in a funny way the Edwards story has, as being quite reliable when it comes to its reporting on some of these political matters dealing with the personal lives of these candidates. You have to hand it to the Enquirer, they were right on the money about everything dealing with the Edwards situation.

DOME: Your book relies entirely on interviews conducted on a "deep background" basis in which the sources are not named. Would this book have been possible on the record?

MH: If people want the true, real life high drama of this campaign, they're going to have to accept the fact that these are things that no one is going to say on the record.

JH: The Edwards story is in some ways an exemplar of why the technique is necessary. It's painfully evident that the people who run political campaigns are very good at keeping the truth, keeping stories out of the press that they don't want to have in the press and concealing the unvarnished truth of the campaign from reporters. ... We didn't come to this without full knowledge that when you're writing a book like this, if you screw up and you get stuff wrong using this kind of technique you're going to come in for criticism.