Hidden in plain sight: Edwards concubine was stashed in NC golf community

        The Governors Club in Chapel Hill, NC, is as refined as any golf community of the hundreds I’ve visited in the southern U.S., with a 27-hole Jack Nicklaus Signature layout at its core and a group of involved residents at its heart.  Aside from the occasional minor dust-up about a golf bet (happens everywhere), you would not expect a hint of controversy in The Governors Club.  But for a few weeks last year, Governors Club unwittingly played host to a bit part in a huge political scandal.

        Excerpts from the new best selling book Game Change, which started hitting the airwaves and

magazine stands last week before the book went on sale Tuesday, reveal many of the sensational (and salacious) aspects of the 2008 Presidential campaign.  Most of the coverage was dedicated to allegations of Sarah Palin’s ignorance about world events; Hillary Clinton’s ambivalence about getting into the race and, later, her mean-spirited approach to campaigning; and the self-destruction of John Edwards.  The book also turns on its head the popular conception of Edwards’ wife, Elizabeth, as a pleasant, stand-by-your-man spouse.

        The Edwardses are the subject of a long excerpt from Game Change that ran in this week’s New York Magazine.  In the piece, authors John Heilemann and Mark Halperin write about how Edwards’ girlfriend, Rielle Hunter, was stashed near The Governors Club home of Andrew Young, an Edwards aide.  When confronted by the National Enquirer on Governors Club property, according to the magazine excerpt, “[Young] first denied his identity and knowing Hunter -– this despite the fact that the car she was driving was registered in his name -– before announcing the next day through his attorney that he was the sire of [Hunter’s] unborn baby.”

        We now know that Young was covering for his boss who was forced out of the Presidential race a few months later.

        According to my own local sources, Governors Club residents first

got a whiff of the scandal after Young phoned the club’s security gate to report that National Enquirer snoops were staring through his home’s windows.  The local sheriff was called and the reporters, who had finagled an overnight rental in one of the club’s cottages, were removed from the community.   Later, residents learned, a wealthy Edwards supporter had paid to relocate Hunter and the Young family. 

        Most Governors Club denizens must have uttered “Good riddance.”