Two weeks after a devastating revelation sent her husband into political exile, Elizabeth Edwards isn’t getting the steady sympathy usually afforded to a woman scorned.
Instead, she’s faced criticism from dedicated Democrats who think she was too willing to keep the affair a secret to help John Edwards’ political ambitions, as well as her own.
At a time when she was expected to hold a prominent role in pushing an agenda of improved health care for Americans, she stands silent. While fellow Democrats converge in Denver to nominate Senator Barack Obama for president, Edwards remains in seclusion in North Carolina.
It seems an odd way to treat a woman with incurable cancer wronged by a cheating husband, the latest in a series of deep hardships in life that includes the death of a teenage son.
But some former followers have questioned the recklessness of keeping the affair under wraps even though her husband — a former US senator, two-time presidential candidate and the 2004 vice presidential nominee — said he confessed the affair in 2006, before the campaign began in earnest the next year.
“I think she’s complicit,” said Brad Crone, a Raleigh-based Democratic consultant. “Obviously, she knew. While she’s the victim, she clearly didn’t stand in the way of the cover-up.”
It wasn’t until earlier this month that John Edwards acknowledged publicly he’d had an affair with Rielle Hunter, a rookie filmmaker hired by his political action committee.
On a liberal blog that Elizabeth Edwards frequents, she explained why she stayed silent after her husband told her of the affair:
“This was our private matter, and I frankly wanted it to be private because as painful as it was I did not want to have to play it out on a public stage as well,” she said.
Many people have come to know Elizabeth Edwards, 59, as a more forthright, revealing woman.
She wrote a memoir last year that brought readers into the most wrenching moments of her life — the death of the couple’s 16-year-old son and her 2004 breast cancer diagnosis. An attorney who worked in private practice and also taught at the University of North Carolina’s law school, she first found out about the cancer the day after her husband and Senator John Kerry lost their bid for the White House four years ago.
She has always had a passion for politics. Known for routinely writing about health care policy on the Internet and she has served as a visiting fellow at Harvard.
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Obama said in June he would be “partnering” with her on health care policy, and she was expected to serve as a campaign voice to challenge Republican candidate Senator John McCain on the issue.
Yet during a visit to North Carolina two weeks after Edwards admitted to cheating on his wife, Obama didn’t mention Elizabeth Edwards — or her husband.
“It’s a setback for both of them,” said Chris Lehane, a Democratic consultant who helped former president Bill Clinton through his cheating scandal. “The question for her — as well as for him — is what is their foundation? What gives them a platform to engage in public issues?”
In a post on the liberal blog Daily Kos, where Elizabeth Edwards has her own diary, she pleaded for privacy and later seemed to explain why she stuck by her spouse and his presidential ambitions.
“An imperfect man with a truly progressive vision who spoke to and for those whom others ignored? Yes, that is who I supported,” she wrote. “An imperfect man who had come to face his own imperfections and was seeking to redeem himself to those closest to him? Yes, that is who I supported.”
In a People magazine interview with her brother and a close friend, they said she decided not to leave her husband, in part, because she is a mother of two young children fighting a cancer that has spread to her bone and cannot be cured.
“There was anguish — excruciating anguish — for her in dealing with this,” Hargrave McElroy, a friend, told the magazine. “She was angry and furious and everything, but at one point she had to make a choice: Do I kick him out, or do we have a 30-year marriage that can be rebuilt.”
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