St. Elizabeth's

The new Heilmann/Helprin book about the 2008 presidential campaign is already tripping people up. Most of the coverage is focusing on Sarah Palin, Harry Reid, and the Clintons. But, there's apparently plenty of good stuff in there. One thing that will undoubtedly be lost in the shuffle: Elizabeth Edwards is not the saintly suffering wife we have been led to believe: An Exerpt From "Game Change"

No one in the Edwardses’ political circle felt anything less than complete sympathy for Elizabeth’s plight. And yet the romance between her and the electorate struck them as ironic nonetheless—because their own relationships with her were so unpleasant that they felt like battered spouses. The nearly universal assessment among them was that there was no one on the national stage for whom the disparity between public image and private reality was vaster or more disturbing.

With her husband, she could be intensely affectionate or brutally dismissive. At times subtly, at times blatantly, she was forever letting John know that she regarded him as her intellectual inferior. She called her spouse a “hick” in front of other people and derided his parents as rednecks. One time, when a friend asked if John had read a certain book, Elizabeth burst out laughing. “Oh, he doesn’t read books,” she said. “I’m the one who reads books.”

During the 2004 race, Elizabeth badgered and berated John’s advisers around the clock. She called Nick Baldick, his campaign manager, an idiot. She accused David Axelrod, his (and later Obama’s) media consultant, of lying to her and insisted that he be stripped of the responsibility for making the campaign’s TV ads. She would stay up late scouring the Web, pulling down negative stories and blog items about her husband, forwarding them with vicious messages to the communications team. She routinely unleashed profanity-laced tirades on conference calls. “Why the fuck do you think I’d want to go sit outside a Wal-Mart and hand out leaflets?” she snarled at the schedulers.

Why the f***, indeed? There's 10 pages of this stuff - a comprehensive inside view of the implosion of John Edwards' personal and political life. Highly entertaining, both from a schadenfreude perspective and from the sheer spectacle of it all.

Of course, as long as Edwards was the least bit viable as a candidate, this information was impossible to come by, even though most of the Democratic establishment was apparently clued in, as was the respectable media. For months, only The National Enquirer and Mickey Kaus would discuss this story, and Kaus used it mostly as a vehicle to refine his concept of the undernews. (btw, I seem to recall that Kaus discussed rumors of another hush-hush affair involving the wife of a candidate that "everyone" knew about. H&H say it was Cindy McCain).

We've all gotten used to the double standard that transforms the peccadilloes of GOP back benchers like David Vitter and John Ensign into symbols of the Culture of Corruption, while those of Democrats receive the sort of discretion usually reserved for papal elections. But, the pre-scandal hagiography around Edwards was simply absurd. Edwards presented himself as the perfect West Wing candidate: handsome, intelligent, progressive, "son of a workin' man,"and with a great (for liberals) message with the "Two Americas" speech. His sainted wife was part of the package. And, it was all bull****; laughably so, in fact. But, until the Enquirer pulled off the near-impossible feat of publishing a picture of Edwards actually holding his love child, everyone was happy with playing along with the Edwards fantasy, rather than reporting the ugly reality.