Embarrassing Moments 2009

There’s a lesson here: Loyal employees will cheerily accept being thrown under the bus—but only up to a point. After John Edwards finally admitted that he’d cheated on his wife with former campaign videographer Rielle Hunter, he still denied he was the father of Hunter’s baby. That honor, according to the Edwards campaign, went to staffer Andrew Young, who was bizarrely shipped off to California to live with Hunter and Young’s wife. This year, Young began shopping around a book proposal in which he says he often arranged hookups between the candidate and his mistress, and that Edwards knew he was Hunter’s baby daddy all along, but wanted news stories to be merely about an aide’s infidelity. Perhaps most disturbingly, Young says Edwards promised to marry Hunter (after his wife died) in a ceremony that would include a performance by Dave Matthews Band. Now that’s just…embarrassing.