Edwardses Can't Get Out of Their Own Way

Elizabeth Edwards knew her husband’s run for president could implode the moment his affair with Rielle Hunter came out, but she played the loving wife role anyway. “It was hard to walk away,” writes Maureen Dowd of the New York Times. “Just as it’s hard to walk away from her desire to prosecute her husband now in public, while still taking the marriage ‘month by month.’”

John Edwards is finished politically. “Nobody—except Rielle—has any interest in hearing from him again,” Dowd contends. “But now Saint Elizabeth has dragged him back into the public square for a flogging.” She bills her book as an inspirational story, “but it’s just a gratuitous peek into their lives,” that exposes her kids and demonizes “the ex-girlfriend who’s now trying to raise the baby girl.” (More Elizabeth Edwards stories.)