In the Right

"Basically, if it looked like Edwards was going to win the Democratic Party nomination, they were going to sabotage his campaign, several former Edwards' staffers have told me.

"They said they were Democrats first, and if it looked like Edwards was going to become the nominee, they were going to bring down the campaign."

One can only wonder what Stephanopoulos thinks of such plotting by a candidate's inner circle.

Stephanopoulos, of course, is no stranger to the dilemma faced by campaign advisers who fear that their own candidate has lied to them about having had extramarital affairs.

In 1992, he rose to fame and fortune as a senior strategist for then-Governor Bill Clinton, whose campaign victory in 1992 ended the Republicans' 12-year lease on the White House.

In this clip, taken from the award-winning Chris Hegedus/D.A. Pennebaker documentary "The War Room," we see Stephanopoulos, on the day before the election, spending phone time convincing an Illinois political operative named Steve Denari -- who was then the chairman of Ross Perot's Illinois presidential campaign organization -- that Denari should not hold a press conference to allege publicly that Clinton had had an extramarital affair and fathered a child out of wedlock.

And in his 1999 memoir, "All Too Human," Stephanopoulos wrote in detail of his take on the Gennifer Flowers episode -- when, for the first time in the 1992 Clinton campaign, a woman claiming to be a former lover of the candidate's held a press conference and played tapes of conversations seeming to prove her claims.

"There comes a time in every campaign when even a candidate you admire becomes your worst enemy," he wrote, before going on to quite Reinhold Neibuhr: "Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are not sure that we are doubly sure."

"I now had doubts about Clinton," Stephanopoulos continued, "had seen his flaws up close, which caused me to focus even more greatly on his strengths and believe even more fervently in his ideas. I didn't want to throw away what he could achieve as president and I could achieve by his side, and I didn't want our enemies to win. They'd stop at nothing to defeat him, so nothing would stop me from defending him. Now I was a true true believer."

Based on the real-time 1992 conversation with Denari and the 1999 look-back from the point of view of history, it would seem Stephanopoulos doesn't think much of campaign advisers who plot against their own candidate.

Not for he, the treachery of a Brutus.

What makes Stephanopoulos' 1999 commentary even more interesting is that it was being written at the very same time Clinton's lawyers were defending him against impeachment over having committed perjury about an extramarital affair.

In other words, by the time he wrote his 1999 memoir, Stephanopoulos acknowledges, the truth about Gennifer Flowers (and other former Clinton paramours) had become common knowledge, and even Clinton had been forced to admit to them.

Only Stephanopoulos himself knows what he would have done had he been a member of John Edwards' inner circle and had to face that particular conundrum.

But Stephanopoulos leaves unanswered the obvious question: WHY were Edwards' advisers plotting against him?

"They said they were Democrats first" gives us a hint, but not the full answer.

Did those members of the Edwards camapaign's inner circle fear that, should Edwards become the Democratic nominee, the dark knights of the Republican opposition research teams would discover and reveal his secret, destroying his campaign and blocking Democratic efforts to recapture the White House for another four years?

Or is he suggesting that loyalty to the Democratic Party over Edwards compelled them to hatch their plot because they believed that the affair -- and his duplicity in denying it to them directly -- was evidence of a character flaw so large that they simply could not allow the man to get anywhere near the presidency?

That is, would they have sunk the campaign out of fear that the issue would have led to his defeat at the hands of the hated Republicans, or out of concern for the country itself?

Experience would argue for the former interpretation -- that the motivation was rooted in the determination to avoid handing over of another presidential election victory to the Republicans.

Hope would argue for the latter interpretation -- that the people of whom Stephanopoulos writes were not Democrats first, but Americans.