Elizabeth Edwards responds to Slate's John Dickerson's charge that they are exploiting her cancer.

[jefferson_dem]

How Tough Is John Edwards?
A new ad exploits the suffering of the Edwards' family. But that's OK.
By John Dickerson
Posted Thursday, July 19, 2007, at 7:40 AM ET

I think John Edwards just made an ad about his wife's cancer, but I'm not sure. In his latest New Hampshire spot, the gutsy and appealing Elizabeth Edwards talks about her husband's toughness. It's a sign of how the gender stereotypes are being challenged in this election that Hillary Clinton's campaign is using her husband to soften her image, and John Edwards is using his wife to toughen his. (That's the charitable view. For rival Democratic campaigns, the ad is an occasion to claim Edwards has been emasculated and make haircut jokes.)

Elizabeth Edwards starts by talking about her husband's intelligence and how he works harder than anyone she has ever known, fighting for the voiceless. That he just finished a three-day tour talking about poverty grooves nicely with that message. The ad ends with this line: "It's unbelievably important that in our president we have someone who can stare the worst in the face and not blink."

What is Elizabeth Edwards talking about? She's clearly referring to something in her husband's past, but what? It is a measure of the toughness of John Edwards' life that more than once, he has had to "stare the worst in the face." Elizabeth Edwards could be talking about their teenage son's death in a car crash in 1996 or her cancer.

<SNIP>

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Elizabeth Edwards responds to this article in Slate's Fray.

Remarks from the Fray:

John Dickerson needs to read my husband's book, Four Trials. In it, he will read the stories of four families uprooted by tragedy or accident who leaned, in their worst moments, on John Edwards. He was but a young man when he represented a former salesman, E.G. Sawyer, who, because a doctor prescribed an excessive amount of a pharmaceutical, was confined to a sliver of life in squalor. Without John's strength, intelligence and voice, he would have died that same way. Dickerson would not have to have read Four Trials to know the story of Valerie, whom John represented after a pump connected to a kiddie pool drain with a faulty cover sucked most of her intestines from her little body. And there are hundreds of E.G.s and Valeries over a twenty year career, hundreds of stories too hard to hear and certainly too hard to tell. But John heard them, and told them, and lived beside these families until their lives were righted. He is doing a broader version of the same work today. His Road to One America tour was high-lighting what he has seen as he has worked on poverty issues: people in need: in need of housing and health care and jobs, surely, and in need of dignity and respect, and in need of a voice. He, again, is their voice. Yes, he has faced death and disease in our family, but the measure of his strength is the fights he has -- for his entire adult life -- voluntarily taken on, not just those that fate would not permit him to avoid.

--Elizabeth Edwards

To reply, click here.)

(7/19)

SEE ---> http://www.slate.com/id/2170697#Fray

[northzax]

1. yeah, but she didn't actually respond

she told some sad stories about other people. Still, every single one of these should have been minor compared to your son dying and your wife's cancer coming back, right? the worst tragedies are personal. She doesn't really refute the piece to me, she almost confirms it.