John Edwards gives a lengthy interview to the Washington Post today, his first since he admitted last summer that he’d had an affair with a campaign videographer after lying about it for months and months. It’s not that we haven’t seen him around. Your Gaggler thinks Edwards doesn’t deserve much sympathy for cheating on his wife, but it was hard not to cringe when Oprah confronted him about it during her interview in May with Elizabeth Edwards, who recently published a memoir based in part on the whole icky situation.  (In fact, for the record, we’re pretty disgusted with everybody involved in that shoot: Bringing the Edwards kids out to hug Oprah when she pulled up in front of the house in the SUV? Just plain awful.)

But John Edwards can’t seem to let it go. The Post’s story today is about how Edwards is trying to lay low and be humble but he still aches to think of what could have been and how he wishes there was someone (someone like him?) speaking out for the poor people. "What happens now? If you were to ask people during the campaign who's talking most about [poverty], it was me," Edwards tells the Post. "There's a desperate need in the world for a voice of leadership on this issue. . . . The president's got a lot to do, he's got a lot of people to be responsible for, so I'm not critical of him, but there does need to be an aggressive voice beside the president."

Fair enough, but as the Post’s Alec McGillis reports in the story, Edwards has stopped helping a lot of the people he trotted out when he was running for president. That program he set up to pay for the first year of college tuition for students at a high school in North Carolina? Over. Edwards also pledged to help several families in New Orleans whose homes were in foreclosure but that assistance has dried up. Edwards says the problems in New Orleans are so “deep and widespread” that it couldn’t be fixed by an “individual presidential candidate.” Granted, Edwards is doing a lot of volunteering overseas these days. “He jokes about how it's obvious that the American people don't want him to be president,” one volunteer tells the Post.

So why is Edwards talking now? He insists he’s not trying rehab himself ala Eliot Spitzer. "The only relevance of it at all is my ability to help people. That's the only reason it matters. I'm not engaged in, or interested in, being in a PR campaign,” he insists. Yeah, right. But Edwards did own up to the fact that he thinks "every day" about his future, and he notably did not rule out a return to politics. “Sometimes you just keep your head down and work hard and see what happens," he tells the Post.