Not a Big Truck

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In today’s Washington Post, Ruth Marcus rightly skewers John Edwards for his ridiculous statement that, with regard to his affair with Rielle Hunter, “Being 99% honest is no longer enough.”  Marcus doesn’t think that Edwards is being even close to 99% honest even now, and for her, it is his hypocrisy that is particularly galling: “[H]e was the one who told us that character counted.”

Right on.  John Edwards deserves this kind of criticism.  But Ruth Marcus reserves some strong shots for Elizabeth Edwards, too:

… [W]hat was she thinking when she supported his running? She knew about his affair, she knew that everything about a presidential candidate’s life is at risk of exposure, and she encouraged him? If she cared about shielding her family from this terrible intrusion, what did she think was going to happen if he won the nomination — or the presidency?

Marcus goes after Elizabeth for saying things like this to Katie Couric in a March 2007 interview:

“It’s important that the American people have the opportunity to have a president like him,” Elizabeth Edwards explained. “I didn’t want it [her cancer] to take this away, not just from me but from those people who depend on our having the kind of president he would be.”

To Marcus, this is “excruciating” and “creepy.”  Marcus is making Elizabeth Edwards into almost as bad a character as her husband.

Sure, Marcus has a point.  Elizabeth Edwards should not have made herself complicit in her husband’s deception of the public, and should not have helped him wage such a sanctimonious and moralistic campaign, a major component of which was John Edwards’s supposedly upstanding family values and rock-solid marriage.  For the benefit of American voters, she should not have supported her husband so vigorously and should not have spoken so favorably about him in public forums when she knew the opposite of what she was saying was true.

Easy to say she should not have done those things.  But what would you have done if you were in Elizabeth Edwards’s position?  Through no fault of your own, you find yourself with cancer, two small children, and a husband, to whom you have been married for almost thirty years, who has been cheating on you.  I think it is really difficult in a situation like that even to acknowledge the reality of what has happened (to say nothing of walking away, separating, etc.).  Betrayal is tough to deal with and the easiest option is often to pretend that once the other person has apologized, everything is okay.  All you want in a situation like that is for things to go back to being the way they were.  Many times that isn’t ultimately the best option for the relationship, but it is a natural response to the situation, I think.  It is really asking a lot to expect Elizabeth Edwards, with cancer, children, and a 30-year marriage, not only to not take the easy road and pretend privately like everything is okay in their relationship, but also to go public and broadcast your marital problems to the world.  (Which is what she would’ve done even had she simply kept quiet on the points for which Marcus criticized her — it would have been interpreted as a rebuke of her husband.)

Perhaps the right thing to do would have been not to pretend to the world that everything was fine.  So, Elizabeth Edwards is no saint.  But let’s try to be a bit more sympathetic and cut the woman a bit of slack.