Flippin’ the Word

News of John Edwards’ affair has the entire commentariat proclaiming the death of his political career, the inanity of which was best demonstrated by Edwards’ reply that he isn’t sure he ever had a place in future politics at all. I’d go one step further to say that he didn’t have much of a past political career either - just a sporadic, hyped-up presence easily deflated by a curious lack of gravitas.

Seriously, it seems like Edwards’ political imprint is best remembered as profoundly disappointing. He’s bobbed in and out of the political sphere, emerging in the throes of a big election and then retreating until the next one. The declaration that this affair has finished him glosses over the disappointment that has defined his career. The fact is that Edwards’ never had much of a political career, and any semblance of one was overshadowed by the reality of his hype.

Until now.

For the first time in a long time, Edwards’ political stock is on the rise. While certainly counterintuitive, the truth is that Edwards - with his careful coif and earnest empathy  - stands to benefit from an infusion of bad-boy.

That’s because women are born gluttons for punishment, in love-hate with the heartbreakers. Edwards’ infidelity has handed him what he’s been lacking all along: That boy-from-the-mill image that he’s flailed to cultivate is now kind of believeable, his wrong-side-of-the-tracks image buoyed by the female penchant for just that.

And, naturally, there is a distinct measure of sexuality that factors in too. Every woman occasionally fancies herself a homewrecker. Dating back all the way to Eve, it’s empowering to think that we can seduce - even if we never actually would. And the seduction is sweeter when its subject is righteous - like Edwards - because there is nothing more raw to a woman than being that irresistible. We’re all Jezebels, at least in our fantasies, and Edwards, with his Tom Cruise-esque appeal, is the perfect canvas on which to project our homewrecking illusions.

And this effect is only heightened in a political environment that’s all about women, like the kind we’re in now. Ostensibly it is feminism that fuels current politics, though that is a sentiment that is at once naive and cynical - naive in that it presumes that women vote for the politics and not the politician; cynical in that it presumes that women’s and men’s politics are at odds. Like always, it will be feminine - not feminist - values with which women vote.

To have an affair was probably the shrewdest political move Edwards ever made. Sure the reaction is icy and indignant - but just superficially. After the dust has settled, Edwards’ indiscretion has the potential to propel him - finally - into political success, Elizabeth beside him as the couple enters the world from which its long been sidelined.

Republicans are effed: Primary turnout was down, voter registration is way down, and conservatives kind of hate their presidential candidate. Meanwhile, Democratic primary turnout was higher than ever, voter registration has skyrocketed, and progressives literally worship their candidate.

But why are the elephants on the endangered species list? Mostly because conservatives have quit acting like conservatives, the latest example of which is the mad dash to out-green the Democrats at the Republican National Convention.

Both parties have deployed “greening directors” to turn the conventions into models of efficiency, using wind and solar power, hybrid cars, and recyclables.

But while Democrats come off as hip and with-it, Republicans reek of effusive gratuity. Planetary doom is the legion - and legend - of the left, and when conservatives try to co-opt it, it just seems insincere. Like the last one to laugh at a joke, or the last kid picked for basketball, Republicans are left looking like a shrinking violet, a wallflower who can’t quite get it right.

And just as the one who laughs last laughs loudest, the Republican party is desperately trying to prove itself, to out-green the party which defined green as a movement rather than a color. In doing so, the right is losing a little more of its identity - and highlighting the left’s identity.

As part of my series on the curious state of the U.S. economy, one of the things I’m looking for is the possibility that the Piper has come a-knockin’. So far I’ve highlighted how bad it ain’t, an inconvenient truth you’re apparently not supposed to talk about.

Today, though, I came across some evidence which may indicate that the tides are turning, potentially marking an important shift in the series, the significance of which is in fact the reason for the series - to show in microcosmic snapshots why the financial doomsday refrain is overblown, sounded as a last-minute alarm before our penchant for prodigality catches up with us.

Bottled water is the ultimate status symbol, signifying a nation’s prosperity by gentrifying that most basic of substances. In the past decade, Americans have shunned free tap water for the costly bottled stuff - a luxury made feasible only by an economy in full bloom. Or by credit cards. Whichever.

Anyway, it looks like some people are turning back toward the proletariat, opting for tap water instead of its bourgeois counterpart. What was last year a $17 billion industry is gearing down as Americans are forced to revamp their budgets.

And, despite what the media and the government want you to believe, this is a good thing. We’ve been in desperate need of a shake-up to rid us of the notion that we’re somehow entitled to the best of the best simply by virtue of being an American.

I have high hopes that current financial straits will finally get people to live within their means - and I believe that the decline in bottled water purchases is a harbinger of the shift from frivolity to frugality.

Of course, as long as welfare recipients can use food stamps to buy bottled water, I probably shouldn’t expect the rest of us to settle for the stuff from the sink.

The story is not that bottled water sales are down. It’s that they were ever up so much in the first place.

In response to a recent article I wrote, South Carolina political blog Not Very Bright is hosting a contest to see who can come closest to mimicking my dazzling verbal stylings. Click here to have a go at it.