A few (OK, maybe not so few) words about the Edwards debacle

At first I thought I'd just let this sit, because a) the story is finally, mercifully starting to fade in the press, and b) we don't practice tabloid blogging here. But I was talking to someone the other day about how disappointing Barack Obama has been in so many ways, and I said, "Well, what do I know? Look who I supported in the primaries."

In August 2007, I received an e-mail from an old friend from the 2004 Dean campaign, informing me that Elizabeth Edwards was doing a book signing in Ridgewood, and they wanted to have a fundraiser for the Edwards campaign beforehand, and did I know anyone who'd be willing to host it. And before I'd even had a chance to think, I'd the reply button and said I'd host it.

Here's the thing: my house is not at all set up to host something like this. We bought it in 1996, a house where nothing had been done with it at all since 1975. Most of the money we put into it until this year was on structural things -- siding, windows, furnace, electrical work, gutters, etc. The cosmetics inside are still a disaster after almost 14 years. I still have a half-unfinished cabinet reface job going in the kitchen, we still have the ugly red carpet from the previous owners of the house, both bathrooms are in desperate need of not just updating, but gutting and replacing, and so on. All this will be taken care of at some point, but the point is that the interior of my house is hardly the kind of place that makes one want to invite in a bunch of strangers plus the wife of a presidential candidate, especially when said wife and said candidate live in the kind of bigass house that now appears they built specifically so they would not have to be together in it.

And so on an August night, cars were lined up all along my block, two volunteers from the Edwards campaign came over and decided how to traffic people around, two dear friends from town who used to have a deli brought a coffee pot, a table, and other things to set up food, and Elizabeth Edwards came to my house. And she was just as nice as can be. She didn't care one bit about the half-finished reface job or the ugly red carpet or the newel post that needs refinishing. And at the time, as all the cars pulled away, I said, "That may be the single coolest thing I have ever done." Somewhere in my house, I forget where at the moment, is a photograph of me with Elizabeth Edwards. It's one of the few photographs ever taken of me in my adult life where I don't look like a troll.

The book Game Change paints an extremely unflattering picture of Elizabeth Edwards as some kind of shrieking harpy who deserved to have her husband out fucking some flake who believes her baby is the reincarnation of a Buddha. Judith Warner in the New York Times seems relieved that the idea that you can't be loved if you aren't thin, young, and botoxed remains intact, going along with the new myth that Elizabeth Edwards was so intolerable that she drove her husband into the arms of another woman.

I'm not sure why it's become so necessary to take Elizabeth Edwards down. I don't think any of us ever bought that she was a saint. What she was for those of us who are middle-aged and not beauties is a high-profile exception to the rule that once you are older and no longer beautiful, and not resorting to false means in an ultimately futile attempt to look young, you are worthless. And that's why the viciousness of the very same media that dismissed her husband as a lying, cheating scumbag (which we now know he is) turning so equally viciously on her strikes me as piling on.

As always in such cases, we rely on Kate Harding as a rare voice of sanity:

A Public Policy Polling survey taken after "Game Change" came out found Elizabeth Edwards' popularity at 46 percent, a 12-point drop since May. (Small consolation: Hubby's now at a record-breaking low of 15 percent.) So now, just as she's finally getting free of that philandering son of a millworker (and, after the tequila shots are digested, facing single motherhood and a fatal illness at age 60), she's also dealing with an unprecedented hit to her own reputation. It just seems so unfair. Tracy Clark-Flory wrote of the Edwardses' split yesterday, "She's better than this absurdly tawdry scandal, and it isn't hers to endure." But it has been hers to endure for ages now, and the final insult is the latest buzz -- that actually, maybe she isn't better than all this.

Maybe she is and maybe she isn't -- how would most of us ever know? Books like "Game Change" and "The Politician," regardless of their accuracy, remind us that the public faces of politicians and their families can be worlds away from the private ones, and our opinions about who's fit to lead the country are often based at least as much on carefully manipulated emotions as facts. It's entirely possible that the image of Saint Elizabeth was nothing but the smartest, most effective P.R. move the Edwards campaign ever pulled off. But I find it hard to believe it was all an illusion -- they can take away her reputation as a gentle stoic, but not the intelligence or demonstrated fortitude or public grace upon which her compelling persona was built. And while I'm still irritated that people are trashing her even as her soon-to-be-ex-husband's list of confessed and alleged misdeeds grows ever longer and more headsmackable -- a sex tape, are you kidding me, John Edwards? -- maybe losing a pedestal you've been forced to stand on for years can ultimately be as liberating as losing an endlessly thoughtless and embarrassing spouse. You can't be an acknowledged saint and a living human being at the same time, after all. So maybe all of this -- the separation and the wave of public criticism -- will clear the way for Elizabeth Edwards to be more fully herself, whatever that really means. I'm pretty sure I'd still like to have a beer with her.

I don't know why we as a society so cruelly judge women whose husbands are cheaters. Perhaps it's the way we insulate ourselves against the uncomfortable notion that our own husbands could cheat too. If we can somehow make it HER fault, then we can avoid HER mistakes and inoculate ourselves. WE won't be controlling. WE will get botox and somehow find two hours to spend at the gym every day. WE will never gain weight. WE will never look old. WE have control.

Except that we don't.

I think one of the reasons that Hillary Clinton took such crap when her husband cheated on her so publicly is because if we could blame it on some idea that she too is a harpy, a castrating bitch, it means she "deserved" to have her husband cheat on her. And if we can paint these high-profile women as deserving of being treated like crap by her husbands, there's something we can do to prevent it in our own lives. There ARE things we can do, of course, but they have to do with attention and caring and affection, not botox and Pilates.

Look, we're all guilty of taking our marriages for granted at times. And when we do, that's what opens the door for someone else who's willing to pay attention to step in. It takes work to make a marriage work; it doesn't just happen. And one would hope that for those of us not in the public eye, if there's something we need that we're not getting, we trust our spouses enough to ask for it. But I don't know if high profile public marriages work the same way. It's like being the wife of a professional athlete (see also: Tiger Woods). It's almost as if cheating goes with the package and you're tacitly signing on to look the other way when it happens. But when you marry a law student, you don't necessarily know that he's going to run for President. So neither Elizabeth Edwards nor Hillary Clinton signed onto that bargain the way Elin Nordegren could have realized she was doing.

What bothers me most about l'affaire Edwards, and what sticks in my craw most, is how John Edwards bounded into a breakout session at Yearly Kos 2007 and the first words out of his mouth were "I just talked to Elizabeth, and she's doing great" -- and the room erupted in cheers and applause. And he knew then it was a sham. And then I think about Elizabeth Edwards, standing on the stair landing in my house, talking about "John's vision for a better America" -- the vision that at that time neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton was addressing, and I think "She knew even then, and she continued to campaign for him." And then I'm tempted to feel betrayed by her too, until I remember further how fast she was talking, as if she was in some kind of a race -- a race against time, a race against her illness, a race against the reckoning of the wreckage of her marriage that she knew she would inevitably have to face.



In that summer of 2007, when I longed for another true progressive candidate like Howard Dean, and Barack Obama hadn't yet started with the kind of progressive rhetoric we'd see later (the kind he abandoned immediately upon taking office), and Hillary Clinton was at Yearly Kos saying "Lobbyists are Americans too", John Edwards was the closest thing we had at that point.

And what I remember most about that August evening is how gracious Elizabeth Edwards was and how she didn't even seem to notice the ratty carpet and the grubby, loose newel post and the half-finished reface job in the kitchen.

FEMA Trailers to be Seized By a Rutterless Agency; Elizabeth and John Edwards Again

First, I want to reiterate what Tata said here about the repossession of FEMA trailers in Louisiana by the end of May, and before most of the projects to restore housing are fully in place. This is another example of the bold insanity of our government at work. Contact the FEMA Leadership here, and Vitter, to urge him to stop blocking Obama's nominee for the post of FEMA head, here. This is storm season and, as Jill says, no one is in charge of disasters and emergencies. This sort of thing just makes you wonder where the media is considering the story below and this.
There are people in office who are seriously kinky and caught in ignored scandal, and the media is obsessed with the most irrelevant moral implications of what amounts to straight sex in the primary season, in their quest for ratings. Meanwhile the long suffering people of Louisiana and areas effected by Katrina are still not back in reasonable housing...and now will be on the street if the rudderless FEMA has its way. Is anyone paying attention? Again, go here and tell them what you think!


Yesterday I found myself absorbed in the (DVRed) Elizabeth Edwards edition of Oprah that aired this past Thursday. Elizabeth Edwards has alot of important things to say to us as human beings and as a country in her new book Resilience, but the whole thing ultimately made me just a little uncomfortable. As much as I like the Edwards' regardless of the disingenuous air that surrounds them these days, and the seemingly insane choices that they both have made along the way, my radar was buzzing. This is, after all, still politics.



There is an amount of crazy fairytale here, that is almost childlike in its construction, and there is a part of me (the New York City, glass half empty, Woody Allen part, I'm sure,) that doesn't buy that anyone really believes in those sorts of happy endings. At the same time that Elizabeth Edwards is telling us that life is messy, she holds forth the illusion that she created years ago that somehow her family could beat the odds. The fact that they have so extremely NOT beaten the odds, makes it even further fetched that this particular betrayal came as a huge surprise to her. Somewhere in the fateful family decision to become political after the death of their son, they gave up the ability to falter privately, and Elizabeth's only gift request, that he remain faithful, almost assured their eventual demise. I find that request sort of strange unless she had some reason to think he wouldn't...or unless she was having a realistic moment in the fairy tale. His request in response would have to have been that if he did somehow fail her, that she try to forgive him. But it feels to me like those thoughts are the territory of mere mortals, and this was a fairy tale.

If we just accept that they are both far from victims in this game, and I don't think that cancer, infidelity, or the subsequent lies, changes the facts and the rules of the game, then we can move forward with whatever bits of the underlying story here that can help people struggling with these issues that stretch beyond marital infidelity and into the cold fact that the entire construct of the American Dream and the happy ending is an impossible lie. If we accept that human nature is fragile and fallible, and that we have been lied to about what to realistically expect, maybe we can move to a place where we realize that our personal dream fulfillment is more about what we create internally, and less about what we've been told just happened naturally. The prize at the end is what screws everything up because it becomes more and more idealized until we are easily convinced that it can be bought with a credit card and that its something accessible without hard work, failure and forgiveness along the way.

I kept wondering why now? why this way? why Oprah? It all comes off as so weepy and touchy-feelie....and yet, it sorta worked. Elizabeth, the kids, the house, (alot of those square feet are part of some huge basketball complex, by the way, but how can you explain that away once the bulldogs in the media have their jaws locked on the lawyer with a huge house meme,) John skulking in the background looking thin and wan, and then finally having a quick heartfelt sit down at the end, it all worked; the despair and growth and learning....and then....



It was somewhere towards the end that I began the see the well oiled machine gears turning behind all of this. I began this new lil' Edwards cycle feeling sort of annoyed with Elizabeth for bringing this forward again, and then beating myself down with the internal response that its up to her as a dying woman. After all, Ive been told time and again by the media that Edwards is not eligible for his second act, ever, because THIS is just too bad. You would think that we don't live in the political climate that we live in; you would think that we haven't witnessed every disgusting scandal possible, save bestiality, (but so long as there are a few fundamentalist, holier-than-thou, creeps still out there, stay tuned,) none of which excuses John Edwards for what he's done. Its just that anyone who knows politics knows that what hes done, as it effects society and even the message the Obama carried forth, has more to do with being a champion for the poor than cheating on his dying wife. And the timing; how could the investigation into campaign funds begin just as the book is released? That couldn't have possibly been by design, but it worked out great, huh? Lets chalk that up to luck, OK?



Elizabeth is a formidable woman, and a wonderful human being, (or so we hear from those who have met her; I like her image but I don't know her personally.) She is dying of cancer pretty publicly and she speaks about the messiness of life in a way that is accessible and common. But to assume that she isn't every inch the powerful political wife would be to underestimate her. To think that her need to come out with a book now as opposed to later, (....after all, and again, who are we to judge the wishes and the medical condition of a dying woman?) doesn't also have some cathartic underlying healing of the cheated on woman in all of us, would be tragically naive.

And somewhere towards the end of the sister's sit down, it became clear to me that Elizabeth is giving John and ultimately the country, the greatest gift that she could; she is allowing us to walk with her on her path of forgiveness and her quest for truth in her life. It matters little that the details are far from what any of us will ever experience in our lives. In the end, we are all the disappointed child that Bush abused, and the abused wife that John cheated on. There is some part of the misplaced emotion of the past 8 years, and probably from our own dysfunctional families, that seems to land on the Edwards' shoulders. So to address that is ultimately probably more helpful than not.

If we are over identified with Elizabeth, she is allowing us an end to the story that is believable, because she isn't Barbie, and Ken doesn't just get a pass because he's the most popular boy in school. If we ever were blinded or offended by Edward's good looks, this puts a few lines on his face and takes him down a few notches. So whether this happens in the service of Elizabeth's legacy or the future of the country and breaking down the walls between the Two Americas, isn't really important. I don't feel like we are in a position to split hairs when it comes to what has to be done to bring this country back in the general direction of Americans at least having a chance at some sort of life, and I'm not in the business of ignoring an intellectual voice at a time of crisis, for moral reasons. Americans who are willing to put their entire lives out there for scrutiny, and who have the background and knowledge to speak on the issues, should not be silenced because of a set of bad decisions. If anything, we could hope that they learn from their mistakes and emerge stronger and more focused on what is important.

I'm not saying that this is something that happens immediately, but I can see the groundwork in its infancy here. I don't see the damage to message or the impact of the paternity of the child that others are bringing up. last thing I knew, Edwards had left the race with the agreement with the other players that his message would be carried through. Last thing I saw was that Obama is actually, in the quicksand of the messes hes been left with, trying to address it. It seems to me that if paternity is an issue, we will be informed. Its not like the mother of the child has held back as far as her pursuit of Edwards ("you're so hot!" ??? Could that be the line that brought down a Presidential hopeful?)




Nothing excuses John Edwards lies, (and I am more concerned with the deeply flawed decision by the two of them, to stay in the race after it was clear that this was coming out,)...but are we going to allow our perceptions to be shaped by a media that decides what to focus on, and pundits who dictate the future feasibility of the voices in our midst? I want to point out how incredibly and terribly wrong most of these media folks have been over the past 8 years, and how frantically they have been scratching for a perch from which to expound on our new socialist government. I was offended last Sunday to hear the various panels decide that Edwards is finished forever, no chance ever, ever, ever....how can they project how bad things will get or what will happen in this country? What have they been right about lately that didn't fall in their laps? What is the formula that they use to measure the feelings of the American people?...I want to point out that it matters little when they are wrong; they just move on with more predictions and tell-me-something-I-don't-know. Its when they are right that they take off running a victory lap, and it serves....who?

We've surely got more important issues to deal with than this, but in light of the government investigation and the book, here we are again. What can we take from this? Whatever applies; I don't turn my nose up at anything that could possibly help me process all that's gone on, and really, the Edwards thing is the very least of it.


c/p RIP Coco

Enough, or "Where IS Vicki Iseman, Anyway?"

Enough.

Let it go.

What is this accomplishing?

Today the New York Times continues to hammer the Edwards affair as if it were vital to the future of this nation.

"But what if?", you might say. "What if he had gotten the nomination?"

If he'd been the nominee, we'd be utterly screwed right now. But he isn't, and to the extent that we are screwed at all because of this, it's because of the double standard in the media in handling Democrats' peccadillos as opposed to those of Republicans.

At this point, I have no concern about the feelings of John Edwards. As someone who supported him in his quest for the nomination, and sent money for that effort, I'm angry at the idea that a dime of my money was spent to pay off Rielle Hunter to keep quiet. I'm baffled at how on earth he thought he could get away with it. And I'm appalled and disgusted at him, not just for cheating on a wife who is smart, attractive, loyal, and may very well have put her own life in danger conceiving two children after they lost their son; but also for choosing such an obvious ditz. It's one thing if your husband has the opportunity to nail Angelina Jolie. That would hurt, but at least you could understand it. But to fall for an aging party girl because she tells you that you have an old soul and that you may be the second coming of Gandhi? Sorry, but that's right up there with "You're beautiful, have you ever done any modeling?"

So now that's out of the way.

But I fail to understand how the very same media that has been kind to Elizabeth Edwards up until this point because of her illness has decided that they need to continue to put this story on the front page in perpetuity. John Edwards is not the nominee, he is not going to even attend the convention, his career in public life is over. Do we need to punish his wife further to feed the insatiable maw of right-wing talk radio? And where IS Vicki Iseman, anyway?

I'm having a hard enough time wrapping my mind around the fact that the ferociously intelligent, passionate, brave, kind woman who stood on the landing of the steps in my house in the summer of 2007 and talked about universal health care has been reduced to staying with this man because it's the best way to ensure as much time with her children as possible in the time she has left.

Let it go already. I don't need to know any more. And neither does anyone else.

For Chist's Sake, Who Cares? John Edwards in the Age of Holier-than-thou Morality

Tonight on Hardball, David Schuster, went on about how John Edwards' titillating 2006 affair has damaged his message on poverty so severely that...well, he has lost his message. So powerful is the media's feeling about this moral lapse that it surpasses everything else in his career, and all other news on this Friday dump-day.

The National Enquirer, after months of trying, for no real reason, to uncover this thing, as if no one else in politics ever has cheated, as if it means anything in the face of what his work and message has been....or even in the face of the news of the week or the fact that we are at war and planning another, has finally satisfied a hungry supermarket checkout line, dragging our culture further into the gutter.

Lies? You wanna talk lies? How about the lies that the democratic leadership don't want to waste time bringing to light? How about the sick, the old, the suffering that are hungry tonight because of the lies of the government and the insurance industry? What about those old republican ultra-conservatives who would force patriotic Americans to deny their right to the pursuit of happiness honestly, forcing don't-ask-don't-tell, while they have sordid bathroom sex with strangers, even sneaking them into the White House press briefings?

Yeah, HuffPo's Edward's Big News Page will fill you in on the immorality of that night way back 2006, and its even being suggested that then the family went forth, stoically, with this lie under their belts. But who is to say what happened, how they felt, and if they even knew? Maybe it was his own personal secret...Why do we care?

You know what? As heartbroken as I am, because this may answer the question of why he dropped out when and how he did, and as much as I hate liars, I've got to say that I don't think that it changes what his message has been in this race or how he would be as a President or a Vice President, Attorney General, or diplomat.
To deny his influence on the messages of the primary candidates, of all of them, is to deny the effective parts of Bill Clinton's Presidency, the social and political impact of RFK and JFK, and if you want to go there, evidence suggests that even Martin Luther King Jr strayed.

Anyone who has been on the road in any intense job capacity understands what happens sometimes in those intense hours and days and weeks. Not that it's OK; not that anyone would condone it. But can't we just understand that whatever it was back then, in 2006, they obviously worked it out and decided to go forward as the happy family that they appear to be. Can't we allow ourselves to learn from Edward's message about the Two America's and apply that to what needs to be done? Why does the message have to be tarnished by a slip that is as common as divorce is in this country?
All of Europe laughs at us, the ugly Americans who waste so much time on issues of morality while we slaughter innocents for oil and allow our own weakest citizens to go hungry and without proper care.

I don't like it, and I'm really, really disappointed, but humans are fallible and its not for us to question what happens in someone's personal life unless it is against the law or hurts others in some way that effects society as a whole.

Why are men like this? We are animals and the urge for sex with many different people is deep in the coil. That doesn't mean that we dont have the ability to reason and that we shouldn't strive to overcome those urges, especially when there are children and the construct of the family unit involved.

I cant say that I believe in marriage in general, as a 100% forever thing. I don't understand the mentality of lying to oneself that any particular marriage is the one that will weather years and trials. Rather, if I were to find someone who I felt compelled to marry, I would have to say, realistically, that its a craps shoot and that all we can hope for is to make it to old age together in one piece; that we would promise to try to understand the fallibility of humanity and to not be cruel to each other. Its not OK to make a promise and to be untrue, but its unrealistic to think that its possible for 100% of the people, especially in positions of power that require huge egos, to be perfect 100% of the time.

Why should this make a difference in what he did professionally?
I guess he should have told the truth up front...
I guess they all should have.
I suppose that if we took the same amount of time to hold up the truths of the Clinton's, the McCain's, the Bush's, the Cheney's...I wonder which would be more destructive to society as a whole.

As usual, Americans will follow the bouncing ball, the shiny-shiny, and let the rest be buried. Its the soap opera effect...but this is not a story on TV, these are people who have some very real ideas that just could improve our lot as a country and the world as a whole. So, lets no get carried away with this crap. Move along, theres nothing to see here...except some ideals that were meant to bring us closer to what America was founded for.

c/p RIPCoco

The Silence of John and Elizabeth Edwards...New York Magazine's John Heilemann on Who Councils Hillary and Whatever Else About the Rest of It....

This week's New York Magazine has a piece by John Heilemann , and Ive been turning the thing over and over in my head since I found it in the mailbox, and shortly thereafter got a call from my Mom who, upon receiving hers, was excitedly reporting to me about how this little piece contains some answers about the silence of John and Elizabeth Edwards. Mom was saying that clearly he and Elizabeth had had some sort of falling out with Obama and also that Elizabeth really, really hates Hillary.

Obviously she had just glanced at it, because the gist was really more about who councils Hillary and who is powerful enough in the democratic party to grab control of what seems to be a runaway train. The fact that Elizabeth Edwards finds Obama's health care plan to be not as good as Hillary's and that Obama had been supposedly "brusque" or rude to the Edwards' immediately following his withdrawal from the race, comes off as the gossipy headline but isn't the real story here. This is the sort of thing that you do find from time to time in New York Magazine, in that it can run with the more lurid lead, even in the face of a more substantial story, and people who do what my Mom does, which is to read the first paragraph and then scan the rest, can miss the point. And this is a kind of misleading journalism that is based on what the journalist can glean through his instant message interviews with party bigwigs, and just his gut, is a little misleading. I like Heilemann, but it seems that he is about opinion. Even as it seems like he is on the inside reporting real news, when you look through his columns, they are really opinion pieces, wrapped in whatever connections he has. I'm not saying hes wrong, but I read New York Magazine with a grain of salt, and I hope that everyone else does too.

Well, today Elizabeth Edwards responded to Heilemann's piece on Morning Joe. In her usual dignified way, she attacked just the gossipy parts and left the rest alone...though if Joe had been a better reporter he might have dug a little. The thing is that I don't think that he wants to go there; not really. Elizabeth stated that she didn't find Obama rude and actually found him quite charming. She did confirm that she doesn't like Obama's plan, and prefers Hillary's, and then she left the question of her storied open dislike for Clinton hanging.

Heilemann's in print guess seems to be that Elizabeth may be the reason that Johnny has not made an endorsement. Y'know, I'm pretty interested in knowing what the hell is going on in the Edwards camp, but this reaching and turning some vague snippets into a story that ends with sentences like "Maybe that's why he...." is a little pathetic. The piece implies, or rather states, that Edwards endorsement has been held up by how nice one or the other of the candidates was to him on the day of his withdrawal. Isn't that silly? Does that make any sense? These people are politicians, and yes they have big egos, but they also have thick skin, and there is no way that an entire strategy could come down to how one or the other acted towards him on that one day.

In going over how badly Obama did with the Edward's, Heilemann pushes the envelope further into concern for his diplomatic prowess, in comparison to the story that Hillary was all over them and was almost, maybe able to win Elizabeth over with her kindness and ass kissing. So, then...he goes on to say that if its true that Obama failed to impress Edwards, he doesn't have the diplomatic skills to run the country! And McCain does? Clinton does? Bush does? I dunno...
I suppose that this is one area that Hillary has more experience than the average politician, because she traveled alot as first lady and was around the necessary niceties in diplomatic exchange, but I'd hardly call Obama a slouch, and certainly not because of this! But Heilemann must know that the art of ass-kissing is a very ass-specific endeavor, and best carried out by people who are very adept and the bend over and twist. I find this all a little embarrassing and rather condescending to the Edwards and everyone else involved in this farce of a democratic process...especially the main stream media.


The real point of this story is that Gore and Edwards are the most powerful people in the democratic party right now and...who is going to stop Hillary??? He eventually wends through the merits of Pelosi or Reid talking to her and how much weight or clout Terry McAuliffe or Stephanie Tubbs Jones might have. But ultimately, it appears, that even here, in the lap of gossip, Hillary listens to no one but herself....and that, my friends, is the real reason for everything that is happening.


We're fighting for our lives here, people, lets try to focus on McCain and his lies, lies, lies!
Its apparent that this thing is gonna go all they way because the M$M needs to sell soap, and the daytime drama market is just not cutting it.

c/p RIPCoco

In fairness to Hillary Clinton....

Now I'll bet you never thought those words would come from me, right?

But let's look at the dilemma that Hillary Clinton is in. As we watch her "inevitability" meme vanish in the wind, and her voice is raised ever more often, the mask of "likeability" that she's tried so mightily to cultivate has begun to drop; or perhaps the protective shell she's used so much over the years against the constant verbal feces that have been so relentlessly thrown at her from the right.

But perhaps it's a no-win situation for her this year. She can't possibly match the transformational quality that suffuses Barack Obama's candidacy, because let's face it: for all that we are a long way from an end to misogyny in this country, white women have done far better over the last thirty years than have black men. And if she were to run the kind of campaign John Edwards is running, she'd be branded as "too soft" -- something Edwards has faced as well, except he doesn't seem to care.

After making my customary weekend list of things I wanted to get done yesterday and finishing my yoga practice, I made the mistake of putting on the TV yesterday just in time to watch Punkinhead, Andrea Mitchell, and David Gregory discussing whether Elizabeth Edwards' omnipresence, and habit of making points that her husband either neglected or chose not to make, is a problem for him. And there you have the new John Edwards meme from the Heathers in the media: he's pussy-whipped. Remember, this is coming from a panel that features a woman who's been a journalist for more decades than most of Obama's voters have been alive, one whose endless face-lifts and botox don't make her black leather jacket look any more ridiculous. If Hillary is the new Bob Dole for these morons, then they're trying to fashion Elizabeth Edwards, with her unabashedly dowdy clothes and suburban soccer mom hair, into the new Hillary. Be afraid, men....be very afraid.

Disgusted with this, I switched over to C-SPAN just in time for John Edwards' appearance at the Franco-American Centre in Manchester, New Hampshire. Barack Obama may HAVE Oprah, but John and Elizabeth Edwards ARE Oprah.

After Edwards' second-place finish in Iowa, the family of Nataline Sarkisyan got in touch with the campaign and offered to help. Yesterday they spoke on his behalf in Manchester:

The Lakey family, much derided by the likes of Tucker Carlson who is so invested in the status quo that he's willing to attack a child whose intestines were sucked out by a pool drain and will need care for the rest of her life, have been on the campaign trail with Edwards for a while. Now the Sarkisyans have come on board. Nataline Sarkisyan gives a name and a face to the very real consequences of insurance company practices, illustrating better than any speech ever could why you cannot play nice with these people. The Sarkisyans are not experienced public speakers, but it would be hard to find a speechwriter more effective than what you see in the above video.

There's no way Hillary Clinton could run a town meeting like this without negatively impacting her "I have balls too" need to out-guy the guys. Perhaps if she wasn't hamstrung by the thankless task of trying to be both genders at the same time, she wouldn't have felt it necessary for her surrogates to strike this kind of low blow against both Edwards and the Sarkisyan family:

John Edwards angrily took on Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton at two news conferences in a row on Sunday, saying that her campaign “doesn’t seem to have a conscience.”
Mr. Edwards was responding to a comment from Jay Carson, Mrs. Clinton’s spokesman, who suggested that “the references in Senator Clinton’s speeches are about people she has actually helped and changes she has actually made, not stories she’s pulled from the newspaper and included in her stump,” Mr. Carson wrote in an E-mail message.

Mr. Carson’s comment was in reference to an emotional town hall event Mr. Edwards held in Manchester early Sunday afternoon, featuring an appearance by the parents of Nataline Sarkisyan, a 17-year-old leukemia patient who died in December after her insurance company denied her a liver transplant. Mr. Edwards had recently incorporated the story into his stump speech as a criticism of insurance companies.
Speaking at a news conference after the Manchester event, Mr. Edwards responded to Mr. Carson’s comment when a reporter read it to him.

“The Sarkisyans contacted me because they believe I’m the kind of president who will actually fight for their daughter,” Mr. Edwards said. “People who have been through these difficult times against entrenched, powerful moneyed interests – they get it. They get it in a serious way. They’re not looking for somebody who’ll make deals.”
Then after spending an hour on his campaign bus, en route to his next event in Keene, Mr. Edwards called another news conference – before his next event had even started.

“This campaign doesn’t seem to have a conscience,” he said, adding that he had been thinking about the comment from the Clinton campaign. “The more I thought about it, the idea that somehow everything is about them, I mean, it’s an indication that they have no conscience about what’s at stake here. These families are who this is about. It’s not about them, nor is it about me. It’s about whether we’re going to actually stand up and fight for these people and how much we care about them.”

It's difficult enough for John Edwards to operate like this, given that his looks seem to give supposedly heterosexual men in the media the vapors. You have to give him credit for being comfortable enough in his own skin to continue to run these "human interest" town meetings, which always include long question-and-answer sessions and which always have a sizable role for his wife. He's not emerging from these unscathed, but then he doesn't have to prove he's as tough as the bellicose bullies in the Republican Party either.

Family Values