In the book, Edwards says her husband, John, admitted just days before announcing his run for president in 2006 to his now widely publicized extramarital affair. According to the New York Daily News, she writes that she then asked her husband not to run for president in the 2008 campaign, to protect their family from public scrutiny.

Edwards eventually finished second in the Iowa Caucuses to Barack Obama before dropping out and endorsing him. Clinton finished third and was dealt what many consider a fatal blow to her presidential aspirations. Now, former Clinton pollster Mark Penn tells ABC News that it would have been a very different race if Edwards hadn’t run.

“Most likely it would have been a two-way race and would have released a lot of voters who focused on demographics . . . voters who would later vote for Hillary Clinton.”

This isn’t the first round of former Clintonites blaming their loss, at least partially, on Edwards. When news of the affair first broke last August, former Clinton Communications Director Howard Wolfson said if Edwards had been forced from the race earlier his candidate “would have won Iowa” and been the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee.

But polling data from the night of the Caucuses does tend to contradict Penn and Wolfson’s points.

In an interview with former Iowa Independent writer John Deeth, University of Iowa political science professor David Redlawsk said a Caucus night poll showed 82 percent of Edwards supporters said they would support another candidate and 18 percent would not.

“When we asked which candidate they would then support, 32 percent said Clinton and 51 percent said Obama,” he said. “Had this actually happened statewide, Obama would have been even further ahead of Clinton.”

Now these were voters who spent the campaign listening to all three before deciding on who to support, so their opinions could have been much different if Edwards were never involved in the race from the beginning. But as Deeth pointed out back in August, the Clinton campaign’s focus on experience and being “ready to go on day one” was in stark contrast to the campaigns of Edwards and Obama, where change from the status quo was the rallying cry.

The Clinton that emerged later in the 2008 campaign that garnered support from mostly older and working class voters might have done better in Iowa, but that campaign message seemed to evolve because her defeat in Iowa and several early states, so it didn’t do her much good in the Hawkeye State.

In the end, it’s impossible to know what might have been.

Dianne Bystrom (Iowa State University photo)

The first part of a lengthy study comparing coverage of presidential hopefuls in two newspapers — one in Iowa and one in New Hampshire — is complete, and the statistics it unearthed should give female journalists pause.

The study, which compares newspaper coverage of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Sen. Barack Obama and former Sen. John Edwards leading up to this year’s first two presidential nominating contests, found that 57 percent of the stories that focused on Clinton were written by female journalists, and that more of the coverage Clinton received was negative as compared to Obama and Edwards.

Titled “Gender and U.S. Presidential Politics: Early Newspaper Coverage of Hillary Clinton’s Bid for the White House,” the study remains a work in progress for Dianne Bystrom, director of the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University. But Bystrom presented an initial report to the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association based on her work thus far, and she agreed to speak with the Iowa Independent about her findings.

“When I’ve talked with one of my reporter colleagues about [women being more likely to cover Clinton], he claimed that was because a lot of female reporters asked to cover Hillary Clinton,” Bystrom said. “And that could very well be the case.”

Women journalists often want to cover female candidates, but also often over-compensate against perceived biases in their reporting.

“In looking at past research, one of the things that we’ve found is that women reporters are harder on women candidates than male reporters are,” Bystrom said. “What we theorize about that is that women don’t want to be charged with going easy on a woman candidate. At the same time, we think that male reporters are fearful of being charged with sexism if they go hard on a woman candidate.”

In November, Bystrom will present an updated version of the study to the National Communications Association. She hopes to offer that organization more of a comparison piece of the coverage in the two states, based on her analysis of reporting from The Des Moines Register and Concord Monitor.

“One of things I’m interested in looking at, for example, is if Clinton was portrayed as less viable by The Des Moines Register than the Concord Monitor because of the different results in those two states. … I also want to look at the male and female reporters’ coverage of the candidates in terms of issues and negativity in coverage,” Bystrom said.

“Although this is just hypothesis, and may or may not be a part of our results, it could be that Hillary Clinton’s coverage in those papers is more negative than that of the males because it is mostly women covering her and the female journalists are feeling the need to go hard on her. That could be a factor.”

Initial Study Results

To prevent a personal bias from corrupting data, two undergraduate students coded the newspaper articles collected from the Monitor and Register. A graduate student then entered the collected data and ran the statistical tests. In all, 137 articles from the New Hampshire newspaper and 126 stories from Iowa newspaper are represented in the study.

From the pool of 263 news articles, Clinton was the primary candidate focus of 51 and received the most overall primary news coverage. When looking at the two papers separately, however, Clinton received slightly less coverage than Obama and Edwards in The Des Moines Register. A total of 18 articles in the Iowa paper focused on Clinton, while Edwards and Obama each had 20. A significant amount of coverage — 13 percent in New Hampshire and 10 percent in Iowa — focused on the Clinton versus Obama candidacies.

Of those 51 articles focusing on Clinton, however, 22 percent were coded as negative. Comparitively, just one story, or 2 percent, of the 41 articles focusing on Obama was considered negative. None of the 31 articles focusing on Edwards were coded as negative.

While 66 percent of the news articles focused on Obama and 61 percent of those focused on Edwards were considered to be positive, only 33 percent of Clinton’s articles were coded as positive.

It’s All About Image

“One of the good news things is that I really was expecting more image coverage of Clinton in those two newspapers,” Bystrom said. “And really — at least on the overall theme of image — there were not significant differences.”

While on the surface the trend of less statistical difference between male and female candidates in terms of image coverage appears to be a good thing, Bystrom said it is likely an indication of men garnering more image coverage.

“It’s not that women are being covered less in terms of their image, but what’s happening is that men are being covered more in terms of their image, which basically takes the statistical difference away,” she said. “So, it’s not that papers are covering a woman’s image less, but that they are covering a man’s image more. It makes the statistics appear more equitable.”

There is little doubt that image continues to be a media focus for women candidates and, according to Bystrom, the entrance of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin into the national mix has brought the issue once again into the forefront.

“I haven’t done any studies on Sarah Palin, so anything I say would just be based on my personal observations,” she said. “although I’m also sure there will be a lot of studies on her candidacy. People will argue that the media is talking about her children because she’s putting them on center stage, or that the media is discussing her family because she put her family out there. But Joe Biden has told fairly provocative stories about his family, about how he lost his wife and raised his two sons. Although I remember that being discussed in the media, I don’t recall it being the focus of his coverage. I do think that Palin is also being covered a lot in terms of her appearance.”

Bystrom said that a female reporter recently contacted her for comment on an article about Palin.

“A reporter from a large, respected newspaper that was not in Iowa sent a request wanting political science experts to contact her because she was doing on a story on how we would make-over Sarah Palin,” Bystrom explained. “Would we give her a new haircut? Would we change her glasses? Would we change her wardrobe? Although I didn’t respond, what I wanted to respond was how we might wish to make-over Joe Biden. Or, what about John McCain? Or even Barack Obama?”

A different female reporter wanted to know about Clinton’s color choice.

“Another time I was being interviewed by a woman reporter from a respected newspaper and the focus was on Hillary Clinton,” she said. “We were talking about the research, about how woman are often covered based on appearance. This reporter said, ‘This research is all very interesting, but do you think that Hillary Clinton is trying to telegraph to voters different things by her choice of color of pantsuit?’”

Women candidates, according to Bystrom, are told the same things that men candidates are told about color. “Wear what is comfortable and in a color that looks good on camera,” she said. “Clinton and other candidates aren’t telegraphing things to voters with their color choices. They are doing what we train candidates to do — wear colors that look good on you and look good on camera. It’s the same reason you see male politicians sporting red and ice blue ties.”

Of course it’s difficult to write about how the media reported on Clinton’s image without mentioning the now infamous news report about her lower-cut shirt.

“There was the long story in the Washington Post about Hillary Clinton’s cleavage and what she might be trying to tell voters with it,” Bystrom said. “We would just be appalled if there was a story about a man and a part of his body and what he might be trying telegraph to voters. Like if a man wore tight pants. What does that mean to voters?”

Doesn’t Clinton = Negativity?

It’s commonplace for Bystrom to be asked if negativity in the media is focused more on Clinton as an individual than it is on women in general.

“Hillary Clinton is Hillary Clinton,” she said. “She’s going to get some negative coverage just because she is Hillary Clinton and has been in the public eye for as long as she has been. But she’s gotten equitable and good media coverage when she ran for U.S. Senate, even in 2000 when she first ran. She received even more positive coverage in 2006.

“Another reason that I say this is not just Hillary is because of the media coverage Elizabeth Dole received when she sought the Republican nomination. This was at a time when women were receiving much more equitable coverage whether they were running for governor or for senate. We were seeing trends of more equitable coverage, beginning in 1998. But then we looked at Elizabeth Dole. She got less media coverage, more negative coverage and more image-related coverage than all of her male counterparts — even those who were polling below her.”

That leads to the hypothesis that when women seek the highest office, they are going to be treated in stereotypical ways.

“It’s disturbing trend because we’ve taken a step back,” she said. “What we’re seeing is the type of coverage that women were getting in the 1980s and early 1990s when we look at Hillary Clinton’s presidential run. And I think we’re going to see the same type of thing with Sarah Palin.

“I’ve studied Hillary Clinton’s media coverage since she was First Lady. What I can tell you is that Hillary Clinton is capable of getting good media coverage. Where she gets negative media coverage is when she was First Lady and when she runs for president. My theory on that is that we, as a society, have become more accepting of women running for legislative and statewide executive offices. But it seems to be that when someone like Hillary Clinton doesn’t behave in a way that we think a First Lady should behave, or she is running for the nation’s top office, that she gets more negative coverage.”

Bystrom says that study after study has shown the Clinton was treated differently by the media.

“I think Clinton’s campaign was covered in every city, including my own, differently than her male opponents,” she said. “Every single study I’ve seen — be it newspapers, be it television, be it radio, be it magazines — has concluded that Clinton was covered differently than her male opponents, with most studies focusing on the difference between her coverage and Obama’s. The thing that stands out is that she was covered much more negatively than Obama. Of course, that wasn’t the only factor in her race — but it did affect her race. I would say that one of the factors that hurt Hillary Clinton throughout her candidacy was her media coverage.”

Former U.S. House Speaker Sam Rayburn

Hairdo narcissist John Edwards, who ended up being the cliche John Grisham-novel character he resembled outside the paperback pulp for two campaign cycles in Iowa, is now one more casualty in a parade of family values politicians.

The Edwards cheating episode, full of stature-sucking and biography-diminishing details, such as his purported mad dash for a bathroom in which to hide when confronted by a reporter at a California hotel early one morning after a reported meeting with his mistress and alleged lovechild, provides great evidence of what the United States is sorely missing: more single politicians.

Enough with politics as Christmas-card photos. Ditch the wives, kids and dogs and start living for God and country.

Some of the most effective political advocates have been, believe it or not, single.

One of the top legislators this nation has seen was the late Speaker of the U.S. House Sam Rayburn of Texas, a man who served in that position for 17 years during World War II and after.

He was a bachelor who could be found smoking, drinking moderately and reading Westerns when he wasn’t shepherding through legislation or advising presidents. But he was always on the clock. If a reporter found him in a hotel at 2:40 a.m., Rayburn no doubt would have been smoking a cigarette with his mind on a meeting with John Kennedy or a strategy to bring southern and northern Democrats together — not the couching of lies about bedding a former Manhattan party girl.

Sam Rayburn’s lifestyle sure wasn’t the fluffy stuff of family centered television commercials. But his work, his 48-year career in Congress and his commitment to the nation made him a legend. The most prestigious House Office Building in Washington, D.C. is named after him, and in 1961 he was the only speaker in history to earn a standing ovation.

Here is The New York Times obituary on Rayburn:

He was 30 when first elected to Congress in 1912.

In 1927, Mr. Rayburn married Matze Jones of Valley View, Tex. They separated almost immediately and the marriage was dissolved a year later.

Mr. Rayburn subsequently lived a bachelor’s life but, contrary to some reports, it was not a lonely one. A moderate drinker, he enjoyed parties and accepted many invitations, particularly if the event was to be a small dinner where politics would be the main conversational topic.

It was an almost daily ritual for him to “visit with” a few close friends, as he put it, in a hideaway that he maintained on the ground floor of the Capitol.

Rayburn’s integrity was exemplary. He never took campaign money from lobbyists. He viewed the people of his district and his valued colleagues as his “family.”

And the nation is better for him.

Rayburn would surely get my vote over the current cast of “family men” running for offices in Iowa and across the nation.

Former U.S. Sen. John Edwards

Former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack says the revelation of two-time Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards’ infidelity has destroyed the North Carolinian’s career.

And it won’t be easily forgiven in a public sense, Vilsack, a Democrat, said in an interview during a fund-raiser for 5th District congressional candidate Rob Hubler at Crossroads Bistro in Carroll.

“It’s extraordinarily disappointing,” Vilsack said. “His public career, I suspect, has been damaged irreparably” as it should.

In an interview with ABC News and in a subsequent statement, Edwards admitted to having an affair with a former New York City socialite who shot videos for his campaign. Allegations that the former U.S. senator is the father of a lovechild remain outstanding, although Edwards has denied the claim.

Vilsack said the affair is freighted with extra baggage because of Elizabeth Edwards’s high profile battle with cancer — and the fact that as a candidate he portrayed him-self as a family man.

“It’s one thing to do this,” Vilsack said. “I think the context and the circumstances and the timing of it and the attitude that he projected during the presidential race, I think, creates some very serious problems for him in terms of being able to redeem himself.”

Former Gov. Tom Vilsack

Vilsack was a strong supporter of U.S Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., in the presidential race. But the governor said he wasn’t angry at Edwards, who finished a strong second in the Democratic Iowa caucuses, as some Clintonites who are speculating that the former First Lady would be the Democratic nominee instead of U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., had Edwards been out of the race or outed as a cheating husband earlier.

“I guess I have a different attitude about that,” Vilsack said. “I am constantly thinking about Elizabeth Edwards and his children. This is a woman who is struggling to stay alive and kids who are seeing their mother struggle to stay alive and now they have to deal with this.”

Vilsack said it is not inconsistent to campaign for Hillary Clinton “whose victory would have put her famously philandering husband in the White House in a historic role as First Gentleman” and to judge Edwards’ public life as dead.

“He’s not elected to that position,” Vilsack said of Bill Clinton as a potential first spouse. “That’s a position that he would have assumed simply because his wife was elected president.

Vilsack doesn’t see any cabinet appointments or high-profile roles for Edwards in any Democratic administrations soon.

“I think that that might have been possible before this,” Vilsack said. “I don’t think it’s likely, at least for a while.”

That’s impossible to definitively answer, of course. But a caucus night survey indicates that most Edwards caucus goers had a second choice other than Clinton, and his absence would likely have meant a bigger Iowa win for Barack Obama.

“I believe we would have won Iowa, and Clinton today would therefore have been the nominee,” if Edwards had dropped out before Iowa, former Clinton Communications Director Howard Wolfson told ABC News.

Iowa’s delegate totals — the Democrats refuse to release actual vote counts — were Obama 37.6 percent, Edwards 29.7 percent and Clinton 29.5 percent. Wolfson’s assertion assumes that two-thirds of Edwards’ supporters had Clinton as a second choice, rather than Obama or one of the second-tier candidates.

Wolfson said internal Clinton polls showed “our voters and Edwards’ voters were the same people. They were older, pro-union. Not all, but maybe two-thirds of them would have been for us and we would have barely beaten Obama.”

University of Iowa political science professor David Redlawsk conducted a caucus night survey on second choices. “We asked people ‘If your candidate is not viable, what will you do?’ 82 percent of Edwards supporters said they would support another candidate and 18 percent would not,” said Redlawsk. “When we asked which candidate they would then support, 32 percent said Clinton and 51 percent said Obama. Had this actually happened statewide, Obama would have been even further ahead of Clinton.”

“As the campaign progressed few Edwards people gave any indication that Clinton was their second choice,” said Redlawsk, who was himself elected as an Edwards national delegate and now supports Obama. “And obviously a campaign without Edwards would have had a totally different dynamic, with different foci, with different media coverage for all of the candidates, and so on. The great thing about Wolfson’s quote is that it seems like it might be right, but of course can never be proven one way or the other.”

Clinton’s Iowa campaign emphasized her experience and a “ready to lead on day one” theme, rather than the economic issues Edwards emphasized. Clinton shifted toward economic themes later in the campaign, after Iowa.

While attention in the late primaries and early general election campaign has shifted to the economy, the Iraq War was on the front burner a year or so ago when Iowa’s party activists were making their choices. Edwards and Clinton took different approaches toward their October 2002 votes authorizing the war. Edwards explicitly apologized for his vote, saying, “I was wrong to vote for it. I have to take responsibility for that and I do.” At the same time, he said, “There’s not a single voter in America who doesn’t understand that their president is human, and their president will sometimes makes mistakes” — ironic in retrospect.

Clinton merely said she would have voted differently on the war if “I knew then what I know now,” and in February 2007 said, “If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from.”

Edwards also tried to emphasize his electability, but dropped the argument after he was accused of subtle racism and sexism. But the electability theme was still on the minds of many of his supporters. The evidence may be anecdotal, but at an October Edwards debate watching party, viewers seemed more hostile to Clinton than toward Obama, at a time when Clinton was still the national frontrunner. The comment, “she can’t win” was overheard more than once.

Edwards was out of the race by the time Iowa county conventions met in March, but in many counties the Edwards group stayed together. In places where they didn’t, the shift was overwhelmingly toward Obama. In Marshall County, the Edwards group en masse joined the Obama group.

Edwards himself endorsed Obama in May and was considered a long-shot possibility as a running mate, or more likely for a position in an Obama cabinet, until news of the affair was revealed Friday.

As she asks the press and public for distance and decency in the wake of revelations about her husband’s infidelity, I recall Elizabeth Edwards’s response from five years ago to a question about allegations that California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger mistreated women.

Elizabeth Edwards

There is, of course, a canyon of a difference between groping unwilling women on movie sets — as Schwarzenegger was alleged to have done in a swirl of sensational stories before his election in 2003 — and cheating on one’s wife with a willing partner as John Edwards admits to doing. But in an interview with me in 2003, Elizabeth Edwards had strong words about how women should be treated by men that seem strikingly applicable to her husband today.

I asked Mrs. Edwards about her reaction to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s election as a Republican governor of California in the wake of news reports about the action movie star’s mistreatment of women. The L.A. Times has published stories with allegations that Schwarzenegger “groped” and “humiliated” women on movie sets and in other locations over three decades.

The allegations didn’t factor heavily into voting as Schwarzenegger cruised to victory.

“It concerns me greatly,” Mrs. Edwards said. “I think what we look for in leaders are a number of things, but I think that a basic prerequisite is somebody who has respect for women, for the various races that make up our nation. That lack of respect is something that people ought to take into consideration.”

Mrs. Edwards said Schwarzenegger’s dismissive attitude about the serious claims amounted to “further denigration” of the women.

“The Schwarzenegger campaign, one of the things that bothered me tremendously is his saying, ‘Well, we’ll talk about this after the election,’ instead of saying, ‘This is something that I understand,’” Mrs. Edwards said. “If he truly understood it was important, if he truly respected women’s rights, he would have said this is an important claim, and I feel that it is fair to address them.”

Our family has been through a lot. Some caused by nature, some caused by human weakness, and some – most recently – caused by the desire for sensationalism and profit without any regard for the human consequences.  None of these has been easy.  But we have stood with one another through them all.  Although John believes he should stand alone and take the consequences of his action now, when the door closes behind him, he has his family waiting for him.

Redlawsk said he will still register as an Edwards delegate at the June 14 Iowa state convention, and urged the Edwards group to stay together and elect more Edwards supporters to the national convention in Denver. “The delegate selection process in Iowa is not over,” he said.

The sheets are changed to make way for new bedfellows, convenient partners in the day’s expediencies. The narrative we are getting now, the looped conventional wisdom, is that former U.S. Sen. John Edwards’ endorsement of likely Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is this: The folksy North Carolinian will help the black Illinois senator with Hillary Clinton’s  Mountaineer cheering club of “white” working-class voters.

This is a different tune from the one we were hearing up close and personal amid largely white Iowa audiences from Edwards last summer in the heat of the caucus season when betting men were going with Edwards here. In a June stop in Carroll, Iowa, Edwards made the case that both Clinton and Obama would be drags down ticket. Edwards played the gender and race card without exactly playing it.

Here is what Iowa Independent reported that June day:

Edwards warned Iowa voters about what he perceives as the perils of nominating a candidate who down-ticket Democrats in some parts of the nation may decline to appear with in their own campaign events.

Speaking in Carroll, Edwards made the observation after saying there are “three of us who are most likely to be the Democratic nominee.”

“It’s not just a question of who you like,” Edwards said. “It’s not just a question of whose vision you are impressed with. It’s also a question of who is most likely to win the general election. It’s a pretty simple thing. Who will be a stronger candidate in the general election here in the State of Iowa? Who can go to other parts of the country when we have swing candidates running for the Congress and the Senate? Is the candidate going to have to say, ‘Don’t come here. Don’t come here and campaign with me. I can’t win if you campaign with me.’”

He added later, “I think it’s just a reality that I can campaign anyplace in America.”

In an interview with Iowa Independent and The Carroll Daily Times Herald, Edwards strongly rejected the suggestion that his comments about being the most electable candidate in the Democratic field were a way of saying America won’t vote for a black man (Obama) or woman (Clinton) without actually saying it – to a largely white, elderly rural audience in Carroll with no national media present.

“No, I think there are differences,” Edwards said. “First of all, if you look at who led on the big issues that America will be faced with I came out with a universal health-care plan first. I am so far the only candidate with a truly universal health-care plan. I came out with an aggressive energy plan to deal with global warming, to transform the way we do energy.”

Several sources reported Wednesday afternoon that Edwards is expected to endorse Obama tonight at a Grand Rapids, Mich., joint appearance.

“At the same time, it probably makes no real difference at this point in the primary campaign,” Redlawsk added. “I would expect Edwards to campaign actively for whoever was the nominee in any case.”The Michigan site is significant, as both Obama and Edwards took their names off the Jan. 15 Michigan primary ballot because the state violated party scheduling rules. Obama has been making Michigan visits in recent days as he tries to work through the issue of seating the state’s delegates — an issue Hillary Clinton repeatedly raises. (Our sister site, Michigan Messenger, liveblogged the event.)

Last Friday, Edwards was grilled at length on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program and said he would endorse the candidate he had voted for in the May 6 primary in his home state of North Carolina. Edwards repeatedly evaded the question of who he had voted for, but near the end of the interview appeared to say, “I just voted for him this week.” He later denied he had said “him,” saying the syllable was an “‘em.” But it clearly was not a “her.”

Edwards joins fellow former candidates Chris Dodd and Bill Richardson in endorsing Obama. Joe Biden and Dennis Kucinich have not yet endorsed, while Mike Gravel has (1) endorsed a Green candidate; (2) changed his affiliation to Libertarian, and (3) continues to appear on Democratic primary ballots.
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