I feel for Elizabeth Edwards. Anyone who has buried a child has suffered enough for one lifetime. To give her the benefit of the doubt, I am sure her book can teach people a lot about resilience, which is an important life-skill.

I did experience a dissonance when watching the interview though. I can understand her anger towards Rielle Hunter, she is right to ask women to respect another person's marriage and home. I did feel though, that there was much more displacement of her anger towards Hunter than towards her husband, and by refusing to speak her name, and referring to possibly her own children's step-sister as "it" was a low point and made her seem petty - it also isn't instructive in terms of women respecting each other.

Obviously she doesn't have to like Hunter, but she could still speak about her in a decent way. It's the high road and Elizabeth is on stronger ground asking for women to treat each other well if she practices it herself. John Edwards has lied so much to Elizabeth about the affair, that for her to swallow wholesale his story about how the affair began is disingenuous to say the least. No doubt Hunter's book will fill in those gaps.

Elizabeth is also a bit gothic when claiming that Hunter (by name and by nature!) is some kind of Fatal Attraction type who was trying to take Elizabeth's home and family away from her. It's probably much closer to the truth that Hunter is a woman who considers herself to be as sexually liberated as any man and doesn't aspire to Elizabeth's grandiose domestic bliss. (Did you see the full-size indoor basketball court? Really? Even Oprah looked surprised. There are schools that don't have buildings that opulent.)

Elizabeth's Doris Day act about not being able to say something like "you're so hot" is probably the most instructive moment in the interview. Men like assertive, confident women who come on to them. They are very turned on by that, they may not act on it, but they all like it. Elizabeth tries to make Hunter's actions sound predatory, when in fact, that kind of talk is pretty normal for women of her age, and she may well have said it without seriously expecting to engage in an affair with him.

What Elizabeth doesn't address though is that her husband hired his mistress to work on his campaign and that once she knew about the affair, you would have thought that she might have noticed that her husband's alleged one-night stand was now working for him. For the people who worked for John Edwards, the fact that he was unfaithful to his wife, is something which disappointed them greatly and the betrayal affected everyone who campaigned for him and raised money for him. They put time and effort and trust into a campaign which was headed nowhere and it seems to me to be quite insane that either Elizabeth or John could have believed his campaign could have survived that revelation.

For people who worked on his campaign the fact that Edwards hired Hunter is what puts the misconduct into the beyond the pale zone.

Whilst I feel for Elizabeth and wouldn't wish her sorrows on anyone, she allowed her husband to hire a woman he had had an affair with, and covered for him so that he could run for public office, knowing that if the affair was made public, that it would make a mockery of his campaign, betray the trust of the people who had worked for him and possibly had he won the nomination, destroyed the Democratic party.

Is Elizabeth such a coy 1950s hausfrau that all she can think about is, as she says in the interview, is whether or not something affects her life? Her actions affected the lives of a lot of other people, and in protecting that McMansion of hers and all that goes with it, she seems to have lost the ability to see beyond her own picket fence. That doesn't make her, in spite of everything she has prevailed over, much of a role model. The final irony of this interview for me, was that I realized that not only would John Edwards have made a terrible President, but Elizabeth wouldn't have made much of a First Lady.

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