The House that John Built

What person, with a heart and a Bible, doesn’t love the story of John Edwards’ rise from a dirt poor South Carolina mill worker’s kid to a brilliant career as a lawyer who battled big business and the health care/insurance industry on behalf of ordinary Americans like you and me? Who wouldn’t celebrate the success, socially, financially and politically, of such a Southerner; one who fought his way out of poverty? One who became a U.S. senator and a candidate for president?
And who among us (the big heart and Bible folks) is too hard, too selfish, to resist Edwards’ populist message? His passion for the poor, for the powerless? His whole life’s work, he tells us, is--and always has been--a fight for America’s poor. This battle, he says, is personal. He will raise up, from the depths, this nation’s needy like the wreckage of the Titanic. It’s a Herculean task he embraces because the poor are always with him. They are always foremost in his heart, in his mind.
You’ve got to love that message. For the unabashed bleeding heart liberal like me, his words resonate like a rare symphony. He can move me to tears.
But there’s something wrong with this melody. There’s a flat note running through the music. Something’s off.
It wasn’t the four hundred dollar haircut. That was easy enough to dismiss as a non-issue. If he wants to pay that kind of money to be well-coiffed, it’s his business. In this world you gotta look the part.
But John Edwards’ new home in North Carolina is another story. This populist with a heart of gold and a passion for poor folks built himself a 21,000 square foot mansion. Twenty one thousand square feet for two adults and two children still living at home. How much room do four people need to roam around in? How much does it cost to heat and air condition that thing? How much energy does it waste? When is so much personal wealth squandered for luxury morally offensive? How many Habitat houses could have been built with the excess cash if, say, the Edwards’ had opted for 5,000 square feet of opulence and invested the rest of that money in the battle for decent low income housing? How many bright poor kids could have been educated, lifted out of poverty permanently, with that kind of cash?
And that takes us back to the haircut, which becomes a bit of an issue after all. If Edwards needs his style maintained every two weeks at that price, he spends $800 a month on his hair. $9,600 a year for trims and blow-dries.
There is a dissonance here; a disconnect between the populist melody and the reality of the composer’s lifestyle. If the poor are always with him, if his avowed mission in life is the plight of those powerless, disenfranchised, needy folks ... how does he justify personal priorities which allow for selfish, excessive, conspicuous consumption in the face of such need? What’s the real message in such a life? What he says or what he does?
Voters need to give serious thought to the issue of a man’s personal priorities before going to the polls. This is the house that John built. Come primary day, I reckon he ought to have to live with it.

By Linda Hansen,
columnist