John and Elizabeth Edwards have proven themselves the perfect match. On the one hand, you’ve got a lying, hypocritical, power-hungry narcissist. And then there’s her husband.
Yes, I’ve heard that she has cancer. I think it might have been mentioned on the campaign trail once or twice, in 2008. “Vote for me, my wife has cancer!” Actually, the argument was more sophisticated than that. It was, “My wife has cancer, so I’m an expert on health care, so the federal government should take over health, I’m really sorry I voted for the war, subject of course to changing conditions on the ground. Vote for me!” Though her cancer is terminal, she still has admirable personal strength and a vision of her family’s future. She writes that she dreams of living long enough to see her youngest child, born in 2000, graduate from high school, and I hope she lives much longer than that.
But because the Clintons bounced back politically from Bill’s adultery, she thinks she and her husband are going to do the same. The Edwardses are the only two people in America who still think he has a chance to be elected to any office higher than greeter at the Hustler club. Still envisioning herself as First Lady, she lards her book “Resilience” with slogans about “Being a small part of a collective effort that might change things,” “Fighting for causes more important than any of us” and “a more just world” in which John’s campaign donors are contributors to “his antipoverty work.” Antipoverty work? Quiz: between his presidential runs, was John (a) installing drywall for Habitat for Humanity, (b) Chief of Minestrone at a New Orleans soup kitchen; or (c) working for a hedge fund that used offshore status to dodge taxes and paid him an undisclosed sum for undisclosed services?
Her book is not advice for the cancer-stricken, nor is it a plea for health care reform. It could have been. She could have said, “As for private family matters, they are none of your business.” But fame is to Elizabeth Edwards what ambulances are to her husband, whose tooth and claw marks are still visible on the bumper of every emergency vehicle in North Carolina. Saying “no comment on that” wouldn’t have gotten her back in the spotlight (virtually the entire Oprah interview was about John’s adultery) to spin the story and start rebuilding.
We were all willing to forget about the Edwardses. Now her kids have to see their mom on Oprah selling sleazy details on what it’s like to be the wife of a guy who turned out to be a skirt- as well as ambulance-chaser. She tells how party girl Rielle Hunter spent hours staking out John at a Manhattan hotel and buttonholed him with the comment, “You are so hot.” Elizabeth then proceeds to whitewash a story that should be hosed down with Tilex. “I want to protect him,” she told Oprah. Why bother – unless she’s trying to save his career? “He wasn’t coy, but he wasn’t forthright either,” Elizabeth says about John’s persistent lie (for a year!) that he was guilty merely of a one-night affair. “I am certain,” Elizabeth says, “He wished what he said were all true.” She labels his affair “an indiscretion.” No. Kicking your golf ball out of the rough is an indiscretion. Cheating on your cancer-stricken wife, lying about it, and paying off your mistress with campaign funds is to indiscretion what bubonic plague is to toe fungus.
The Edwardses put their bizarrely enduring power grab above all else, which is why, when he got nabbed, she spun the story on liberal mouthpiece Daily Kos. She said Edwards was not the father of Hunter’s child, which was a lie since now she tells Oprah she doesn’t know. (And doesn’t care! Because it supposedly doesn’t affect her life.) On Daily Kos last year, she lashed out at “sensationalism and profit without any regard for the human consequences.” In other words, she was blasting the National Enquirer for doing what she is now doing. Except the Enquirer was doing a public service that led directly to a federal investigation of the $100,000 in PAC payments to Hunter.
Is Edwards’ book sensational? Yes. Profitable? Yes. Are there human consequences? Picture what it’s like for her kids in school this week.