A few days before Edwards admitted that Rielle's baby was his, the NY Times put out this hit piece on Elizabeth Edwards.
This is what they call Cultural Studies.
--------
Elizabeth Edwards Teeters on Her Pedestal
By JUDITH WARNER
Published: January 15, 2010
YET another illusion has been shattered.
In a new book about the 2008 presidential campaign, “Game Change,” Elizabeth Edwards is portrayed as “an abusive, intrusive, paranoid, condescending crazywoman,” and nothing like her image as “St. Elizabeth.”
According to the book’s authors, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, well before John Edwards’s affair with the New Age videographer Rielle Hunter, Mrs. Edwards was known to demean her husband (“She called her spouse a ‘hick’ in front of other people and derided his parents as rednecks”) and to bully his staff. “The nearly universal assessment among them,” the authors write of the long-suffering Edwards aides, “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.”
The revelations are sometimes unsourced and often omniscient. The authors’ suggestions that Mrs. Edwards’s sharp tongue drove her husband out on the road, and in “steering clear of his wife,” he ended up in the arms of Ms. Hunter, have been denounced as sexist and insensitive to Mrs. Edwards’s real suffering.
And so the Edwards saga continues, a private story turned very public preoccupation. Clearly, there is much more at stake in preserving or attacking her image than establishing who-said-what-to-whom-and-when in the Edwards entourage.
Mrs. Edwards’s story has long been appropriated by many women as a symbol, a stand-in on a much larger scale for their own suffering and stoicism.
Before the news of the Rielle Hunter affair, the Edwards story made many women happy.
It wasn’t just that Elizabeth Edwards — who looked considerably older than her eternally baby-faced husband — was a woman they admired and believed in.
Her story made them believe something good about themselves. It was a kind of Everywoman’s fable: behind the imperfect physical shell, a gem of inner beauty resides. And is loved and recognized.
This story was a dream come true for many women. “I like that he’s got a fat wife,” a woman in a focus group told an Edwards pollster in his 1998 Senate race, as recounted in “Game Change.” “I thought he’d be married to a Barbie or a cheerleader.”
If it was thus for Elizabeth Edwards, there was hope for us all.
Of course, now reality has hit, and with it, perhaps, an unwelcome message: in unhappy marriages, there are rarely pure victims — even if one spouse’s behavior is grossly more offensive than the other’s.
In truth, Mrs. Edwards had already begun falling from her pedestal last year, when she published her book, “Resilience,” about facing life’s adversities, and embarked upon a media tour that seemed intended to draw the entire country into her marital woes. She talked of preparing her children for her death, and justified spending so much of her limited time with them out on the road by telling Matt Lauer, “I hope I have important things to say.”
She toured her multimillion-dollar home with Oprah, and in her book dismissed Ms. Hunter as one of those “people” who are attracted to “those with any fame or notoriety or power,” adding, “They look at our lives, which from the outside in particular are pictures of joy and plenty, and they want it for themselves.”
Her tone seemed off, and many critics called her on it.
“Edwards kept painting Hunter as a fame seeker, eager to glom onto her husband’s spotlight,” Tina Brown wrote on her Web site, The Daily Beast. “Whereas it’s Edwards who has written the book and dragged Hunter into the media glare.”
Other women rushed to her defense. Mrs. Edwards had after all been through so much, they said. The death of a child, cancer, her husband’s betrayal. Whose personality wouldn’t fray under such pressure?
As she braces herself against the current media storm (and prepares for another tell-all next month from a former aide), Mrs. Edwards might do well to remember her past. She was perhaps never more admired than in her most notable moment of absence: when she chose not to appear by her husband’s side as he went on “Nightline” in 2008 to make his mea culpas about the Hunter affair to the American public.
She was contrasted favorably then with another wronged wife of that year, Silda Wall Spitzer, who stood quietly and wretchedly at her husband’s side as he admitted to the sexual misdeeds that led him to resign as New York’s governor.
But now the silent, stalwart Mrs. Spitzer — private, dignified, ultimately controlling her story by the very act of not telling it — doesn’t look like such a sap.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/fashi ... abeth.html
