The notion that John Edwards could have won the nomination or the presidency (or more to the point, that he would have even tried) with his paternity scandal hanging over his head is preposterous.

You write:

• Could Edwards have won? Possibly. If, somehow, the news had never leaked. If Rielle Hunter had been bought off or mysteriously disappeared. If the McCain campaign somehow botched the oppo.

This is a silly premise for a hypothetical question. Here's how we know John Edwards would not have tried to win!

Keep in mind what did happen even without the scandal being confirmed in the mainstream media. Edwards dropped out before Super Tuesday. He would not have done so but for the lurking scandal. People forget that the democratic primaries were not winner take all and that Edwards would have certainly picked up a few hundred delegates had he stayed in the race through May.

(Especially when the Southern primaries started backfiring on Obama in favor of Clinton. Edwards would have easily won or been a factor in West Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, Texas, and several other states with a heavy white/blue collar demographic.)

As the primaries were unfolding it became clear that Obama and Clinton were going to split the delegates so closely that the Superdelegates would make the difference.

Put yourself in Edwards' place (assuming no scandal was brewing). Although he was a sure loser, Edwards would just have surely been the convention's power broker. Even though he was losing the three-way primary race before Super Tuesday, he still had a sufficient following and an argument to consistently draw 15% or much more of the vote in most prmary contests. Under Democratic Party rules, he would have kept gathering significant numbers of delegates and would have been the spoiler for either Obama or Clinton. He could have pulled this off with a shoestring budget -- don't forget he had opted for federal financing.

But he couldn't do it. Why?

The Enquirer had already exposed this affair and would eventually prove the love child connection. Edwards was dead meat and had to drop out out when he did, hoping that his status as a non-candidate would take the heat off him and allow the scandal to die quietly. (Didn't happen.)

Those of us working in the campaigns (I was working for Obama) knew as early as November 2007 about the scandal. All inside sources said it was true. We were just waiting for it to explode and knew full well that Edwards was not going to be President. And regardless of the what they claim, the entire Edward canpaign staff knew it too and must have had assurances from Edwards that he would drop out before Super Tuesday.

South Carolina gave Edwards the plausible rationale for quitting before Super Tuesday, but the reality is that Edwards would have carried on as a Huckabee-like spoiler if he didn't have the Rielle Hunter scandal secretly hanging over his head.

And the difference between Huckabee and Edwards is that Edwards could have actually kept both Obama and Clinton under the magic 50% number!

Everything Edwards did after the fall 2007 Enquirer story was dictated by the looming scandal. Why didn't Edwards endorse Obama even after if became clear that Obama would win in April 2008? Because he knew that the endorsement would be worthless once the full Rielle Hunter story was revealed. My guess is that neither Obama nor Clinton was actually interested even a little bit in his endorsement -- even though they pretended to be courting the Edwards's throughout the spring of 2008.

So... the whole idea of what would have or could have happened had John Edwards been nomiinated or elected...is a useless exercise. He proved through his behavior following the first Enquirer story that he had no intention of hanging around that long.

The better question is what would have happened had he kept his private parts in his pants and remained faithful to Elizabeth. His second place finish in Iowa demonstrated that he had a candidacy with real potential. How much did the personal tragedy of Edwards' lack of character affect his campaign? We'll never know because he was and is a nitwit.