Edwards Takes It Back

John Edwards, the self-proclaimed multimillionaire champion of the middle class who lives in a humongous mansion and requires his campaign pay for his $400 haircuts as well as spa treatments, makes another campaign gaffe. The Democratic presidential wannabee, told a Google "town hall" on Wednesday that he had read the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, before he voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq:

"There was this National Intelligence Estimate, that was confidential, that only, that you had to have security clearance or members of the Senate could read. Did you have a chance to read that and was that part of...?" Google's Elliot Schrage asks Edwards.

"I read it. I read it," Edwards responds. "But the idea that somehow we had so much more information - having the information turned out to be bad, not good [emphasis added]"

Politico's Ben Smith says the Edwards campaign told him something different:

Last week Kornblau e-mailed, in response to my question of whether Edwards was among the six senators who reportedly read the NIE pre-Iraq, "[T]he answer is no. To elaborate, here's what you were looking for. As a member of the Senate Committee on Intelligence he was regularly briefed on the information that appeared in the [NIE], which is essentially a summary report."

The New York Times reports Edwards retracted his Google Town Hall "I read it. I read it," statement.

An Edwards spokesman "said the candidate had 'simply misunderstood the question' and noted that Edwards had read only a declassified version of the intelligence report."

How convenient for Edwards that he is able to avoid responsibility for failing to read the classified NIE, which was reportedly more heavily caveated than the public version, while claiming he was mislead into voting for the war. According to the Times, former Democratic Senator Bob Graham has suggested that if his colleagues had read the document, they, like him, might have been more skeptical of authorizing the Iraq war. Why isn't Edwards held to account for not using the best information available to him in 2002?