Elizabeth Edwards: Innocent victim?

Former Sen. John Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, really are the perfect couple, said Kyle Smith in the New York Post. “On the one hand, you’ve got a lying, hypocritical, power-hungry narcissist. And then there’s her husband.” Ordinarily, of course, I wouldn’t say such things about a woman facing terminal bone cancer at the same time she endures endless revelations about her husband’s extramarital, career-ending dalliance with videographer Rielle Hunter. But then most women in her position wouldn’t go on Oprah—as Edwards did last week—to peddle Resilience, a self-serving memoir in which she trashes Hunter as a predatory bimbo and portrays herself as a saintly victim. Edwards said that when her husband first told her of the affair, she vomited, said Jenice Armstrong in the Philadelphia Daily News. Watching her now trying to milk this ugly episode for money and sympathy, “that giant gagging sound you hear is the sound of America retching.”

Elizabeth Edwards is guilty of more than bad taste, said Michael Goodwin in the New York Daily News. The fact is that she “helped to perpetrate a fraud on voters, namely, that her husband was fit to be president.” Elizabeth apparently learned of the affair two days after John announced he was running for the White House. Instead of going public then, however, she strenuously campaigned with him through the primaries. Had Edwards won, said Kathleen Parker in The Washington Post, the affair would surely have come to light in the glare of the general election, dooming the Democrats to another defeat. Yet the Edwardses jointly decided to fight on, despite the then-secret affair, the terminal cancer, the two young children. Talk about “blind ambition.”

That’s not ambition—it’s denial, said Rebecca Traister in Salon.com. Edwards wanted to believe her husband’s claim that his affair was just a meaningless one-night stand, just as she continues to choose to believe that John isn’t the father of Hunter’s 1-year-old daughter, even though the girl strongly resembles him. This kind of self-deception will be “profoundly familiar to anyone who has been cheated on.” And now, by writing the book, Elizabeth is “trying to regain control,” said Mary Schmich in the Chicago Tribune. If getting even with her phony, blow-dried husband—and Hunter—helps this once-proud, accomplished woman as she struggles with both cancer and the truth about her marriage, then perhaps this book was worth doing. But please, let’s not call it “inspirational.”

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