FEMA Trailers to be Seized By a Rutterless Agency; Elizabeth and John Edwards Again

First, I want to reiterate what Jill said here about the repossession of FEMA trailers in Louisiana by the end of May, and before most of the projects to restore housing are fully in place. This is another example of the bold insanity of our government at work. Contact the FEMA Leadership here, and Vitter, to urge him to stop blocking Obama's nominee for the post of FEMA head, here. This is storm season and, as Jill says, no one is in charge of disasters and emergencies. This sort of thing just makes you wonder where the media is considering the story below and this.
There are people in office who are seriously kinky and caught in ignored scandal, and the media is obsessed with the most irrelevant moral implications of what amounts to straight sex in the primary season, in their quest for ratings. Meanwhile the long suffering people of Louisiana and areas effected by Katrina are still not back in reasonable housing...and now will be on the street if the rudderless FEMA has its way. Is anyone paying attention? Again, go here and tell them what you think!




Yesterday I found myself absorbed in the (DVRed) Elizabeth Edwards edition of Oprah that aired this past Thursday. Elizabeth Edwards has alot of important things to say to us as human beings and as a country in her new book Resilience, but the whole thing ultimately made me just a little uncomfortable. As much as I like the Edwards' regardless of the disingenuous air that surrounds them these days, and the seemingly insane choices that they both have made along the way, my radar was buzzing. This is, after all, still politics.



There is an amount of crazy fairytale here, that is almost childlike in its construction, and there is a part of me (the New York City, glass half empty, Woody Allen part, I'm sure,) that doesn't buy that anyone really believes in those sorts of happy endings. At the same time that Elizabeth Edwards is telling us that life is messy, she holds forth the illusion that she created years ago that somehow her family could beat the odds. The fact that they have so extremely NOT beaten the odds, makes it even further fetched that this particular betrayal came as a huge surprise to her. Somewhere in the fateful family decision to become political after the death of their son, they gave up the ability to falter privately, and Elizabeth's only gift request, that he remain faithful, almost assured their eventual demise. I find that request sort of strange unless she had some reason to think he wouldn't...or unless she was having a realistic moment in the fairy tale. His request in response would have to have been that if he did somehow fail her, that she try to forgive him. But it feels to me like those thoughts are the territory of mere mortals, and this was a fairy tale.

If we just accept that they are both far from victims in this game, and I don't think that cancer, infidelity, or the subsequent lies, changes the facts and the rules of the game, then we can move forward with whatever bits of the underlying story here that can help people struggling with these issues that stretch beyond marital infidelity and into the cold fact that the entire construct of the American Dream and the happy ending is an impossible lie. If we accept that human nature is fragile and fallible, and that we have been lied to about what to realistically expect, maybe we can move to a place where we realize that our personal dream fulfillment is more about what we create internally, and less about what we've been told just happened naturally. The prize at the end is what screws everything up because it becomes more and more idealized until we are easily convinced that it can be bought with a credit card and that its something accessible without hard work, failure and forgiveness along the way.

I kept wondering why now? why this way? why Oprah? It all comes off as so weepy and touchy-feelie....and yet, it sorta worked. Elizabeth, the kids, the house, (alot of those square feet are part of some huge basketball complex, by the way, but how can you explain that away once the bulldogs in the media have their jaws locked on the lawyer with a huge house meme,) John skulking in the background looking thin and wan, and then finally having a quick heartfelt sit down at the end, it all worked; the despair and growth and learning....and then....



It was somewhere towards the end that I began the see the well oiled machine gears turning behind all of this. I began this new lil' Edwards cycle feeling sort of annoyed with Elizabeth for bringing this forward again, and then beating myself down with the internal response that its up to her as a dying woman. After all, Ive been told time and again by the media that Edwards is not eligible for his second act, ever, because THIS is just too bad. You would think that we don't live in the political climate that we live in; you would think that we haven't witnessed every disgusting scandal possible, save bestiality, (but so long as there are a few fundamentalist, holier-than-thou, creeps still out there, stay tuned,) none of which excuses John Edwards for what he's done. Its just that anyone who knows politics knows that what hes done, as it effects society and even the message the Obama carried forth, has more to do with being a champion for the poor than cheating on his dying wife. And the timing; how could the investigation into campaign funds begin just as the book is released? That couldn't have possibly been by design, but it worked out great, huh? Lets chalk that up to luck, OK?



Elizabeth is a formidable woman, and a wonderful human being, (or so we hear from those who have met her; I like her image but I don't know her personally.) She is dying of cancer pretty publicly and she speaks about the messiness of life in a way that is accessible and common. But to assume that she isn't every inch the powerful political wife would be to underestimate her. To think that her need to come out with a book now as opposed to later, (....after all, and again, who are we to judge the wishes and the medical condition of a dying woman?) doesn't also have some cathartic underlying healing of the cheated on woman in all of us, would be tragically naive.

And somewhere towards the end of the sister's sit down, it became clear to me that Elizabeth is giving John and ultimately the country, the greatest gift that she could; she is allowing us to walk with her on her path of forgiveness and her quest for truth in her life. It matters little that the details are far from what any of us will ever experience in our lives. In the end, we are all the disappointed child that Bush abused, and the abused wife that John cheated on. There is some part of the misplaced emotion of the past 8 years, and probably from our own dysfunctional families, that seems to land on the Edwards' shoulders. So to address that is ultimately probably more helpful than not.



If we are over identified with Elizabeth, she is allowing us an end to the story that is believable, because she isn't Barbie, and Ken doesn't just get a pass because he's the most popular boy in school. If we ever were blinded or offended by Edward's good looks, this puts a few lines on his face and takes him down a few notches. So whether this happens in the service of Elizabeth's legacy or the future of the country and breaking down the walls between the Two Americas, isn't really important. I don't feel like we are in a position to split hairs when it comes to what has to be done to bring this country back in the general direction of Americans at least having a chance at some sort of life, and I'm not in the business of ignoring an intellectual voice at a time of crisis, for moral reasons. Americans who are willing to put their entire lives out there for scrutiny, and who have the background and knowledge to speak on the issues, should not be silenced because of a set of bad decisions. If anything, we could hope that they learn from their mistakes and emerge stronger and more focused on what is important.

I'm not saying that this is something that happens immediately, but I can see the groundwork in its infancy here. I don't see the damage to message or the impact of the paternity of the child that others are bringing up. last thing I knew, Edwards had left the race with the agreement with the other players that his message would be carried through. Last thing I saw was that Obama is actually, in the quicksand of the messes hes been left with, trying to address it. It seems to me that if paternity is an issue, we will be informed. Its not like the mother of the child has held back as far as her pursuit of Edwards ("you're so hot!" ??? Could that be the line that brought down a Presidential hopeful?)




Nothing excuses John Edwards lies, (and I am more concerned with the deeply flawed decision by the two of them, to stay in the race after it was clear that this was coming out,)...but are we going to allow our perceptions to be shaped by a media that decides what to focus on, and pundits who dictate the future feasibility of the voices in our midst? I want to point out how incredibly and terribly wrong most of these media folks have been over the past 8 years, and how frantically they have been scratching for a perch from which to expound on our new socialist government. I was offended last Sunday to hear the various panels decide that Edwards is finished forever, no chance ever, ever, ever....how can they project how bad things will get or what will happen in this country? What have they been right about lately that didn't fall in their laps? What is the formula that they use to measure the feelings of the American people?...I want to point out that it matters little when they are wrong; they just move on with more predictions and tell-me-something-I-don't-know. Its when they are right that they take off running a victory lap, and it serves....who?

We've surely got more important issues to deal with than this, but in light of the government investigation and the book, here we are again. What can we take from this? Whatever applies; I don't turn my nose up at anything that could possibly help me process all that's gone on, and really, the Edwards thing is the very least of it.


c/p Brilliant at Breakfast

For Chist's Sake, Who Cares? John Edwards in the Age of Holier-than-thou Morality

Tonight on Hardball, David Schuster, went on about how John Edwards' titillating 2006 affair has damaged his message on poverty so severely that...well, he has lost his message. So powerful is the media's feeling about this moral lapse that it surpasses everything else in his career, and all other news on this Friday dump-day.

The National Enquirer, after months of trying, for no real reason, to uncover this thing, as if no one else in politics ever has cheated, as if it means anything in the face of what his work and message has been....or even in the face of the news of the week or the fact that we are at war and planning another, has finally satisfied a hungry supermarket checkout line, dragging our culture further into the gutter.

Lies? You wanna talk lies? How about the lies that the democratic leadership don't want to waste time bringing to light? How about the sick, the old, the suffering that are hungry tonight because of the lies of the government and the insurance industry? What about those old republican ultra-conservatives who would force patriotic Americans to deny their right to the pursuit of happiness honestly, forcing don't-ask-don't-tell, while they have sordid bathroom sex with strangers, even sneaking them into the White House press briefings?

Yeah, HuffPo's Edward's Big News Page will fill you in on the immorality of that night way back 2006, and its even being suggested that then the family went forth, stoically, with this lie under their belts. But who is to say what happened, how they felt, and if they even knew? Maybe it was his own personal secret...Why do we care?

You know what? As heartbroken as I am, because this may answer the question of why he dropped out when and how he did, and as much as I hate liars, I've got to say that I don't think that it changes what his message has been in this race or how he would be as a President or a Vice President, Attorney General, or diplomat.
To deny his influence on the messages of the primary candidates, of all of them, is to deny the effective parts of Bill Clinton's Presidency, the social and political impact of RFK and JFK, and if you want to go there, evidence suggests that even Martin Luther King Jr strayed.

Anyone who has been on the road in any intense job capacity understands what happens sometimes in those intense hours and days and weeks. Not that it's OK; not that anyone would condone it. But can't we just understand that whatever it was back then, in 2006, they obviously worked it out and decided to go forward as the happy family that they appear to be. Can't we allow ourselves to learn from Edward's message about the Two America's and apply that to what needs to be done? Why does the message have to be tarnished by a slip that is as common as divorce is in this country?
All of Europe laughs at us, the ugly Americans who waste so much time on issues of morality while we slaughter innocents for oil and allow our own weakest citizens to go hungry and without proper care.

I don't like it, and I'm really, really disappointed, but humans are fallible and its not for us to question what happens in someone's personal life unless it is against the law or hurts others in some way that effects society as a whole.

Why are men like this? We are animals and the urge for sex with many different people is deep in the coil. That doesn't mean that we dont have the ability to reason and that we shouldn't strive to overcome those urges, especially when there are children and the construct of the family unit involved.

I cant say that I believe in marriage in general, as a 100% forever thing. I don't understand the mentality of lying to oneself that any particular marriage is the one that will weather years and trials. Rather, if I were to find someone who I felt compelled to marry, I would have to say, realistically, that its a craps shoot and that all we can hope for is to make it to old age together in one piece; that we would promise to try to understand the fallibility of humanity and to not be cruel to each other. Its not OK to make a promise and to be untrue, but its unrealistic to think that its possible for 100% of the people, especially in positions of power that require huge egos, to be perfect 100% of the time.

Why should this make a difference in what he did professionally?
I guess he should have told the truth up front...
I guess they all should have.
I suppose that if we took the same amount of time to hold up the truths of the Clinton's, the McCain's, the Bush's, the Cheney's...I wonder which would be more destructive to society as a whole.

As usual Americans will follow the bouncing ball, the shiny-shiny, and let the rest be buried. Its the soap opera effect...but this is not a story on TV, these are people who have some very real ideas that just could improve our lot as a country and the world as a whole. So, lets no get carried away with this crap. Move along, theres nothing to see here...except some ideals that were meant to bring us closer to what America was founded for.

The Silence of John and Elizabeth Edwards...New York Magazine's John Heilemann on Who Councils Hillary and Whatever Else About the Rest of It....

This week's New York Magazine has a piece by John Heilemann , and Ive been turning the thing over and over in my head since I found it in the mailbox, and shortly thereafter got a call from my Mom who, upon receiving hers, was excitedly reporting to me about how this little piece contains some answers about the silence of John and Elizabeth Edwards. Mom was saying that clearly he and Elizabeth had had some sort of falling out with Obama and that Elizabeth really, really hates Hillary.

Obviously she had just glanced at it, because the gist was really more about who councils Hillary and who is powerful enough in the democratic party to grab control of what seems to be a runaway train. The fact that Elizabeth Edwards finds Obama's health care plan to be not as good as Hillary's and that Obama had been supposedly "brusque" or rude to the Edwards' immediately following his withdrawal from the race, comes off as the gossipy headline but isn't the real story here. This is the sort of thing that you do find from time to time in New York Magazine, in that it can run with the more lurid lead, even in the face of a more substantial story, and people who do what my Mom does, which is to read the first paragraph and then scan the rest, can miss the point. And this is a kind of misleading journalism that is based on what the journalist can glean through his instant message interviews with party bigwigs, and just his gut, is a little misleading. I like Heilemann, but it seems that he is about opinion. Even as it seems like he is on the inside reporting real news, when you look through his columns, they are really opinion pieces, wrapped in whatever connections he has. I'm not saying hes wrong, but I read New York Magazine with a grain of salt, and I hope that everyone else does too.

Well, today Elizabeth Edwards responded to Heilemann's piece on Morning Joe. In her usual dignified way, she attacked just the gossipy parts and left the rest alone...though if Joe had been a better reporter he might have dug a little. The thing is that I don't think that he wants to go there; not really. Elizabeth stated that she didn't find Obama rude and actually found him quite charming. She did confirm that she doesn't like Obama's plan, and prefers Hillary's, and then she left the question of her storied open dislike for Clinton hanging.

Heilemann's in print guess seems to be that Elizabeth may be the reason that Johnny has not made an endorsement. Y'know, I'm pretty interested in knowing what the hell is going on in the Edwards camp, but this reaching and turning some vague snippets into a story that ends with sentences like "Maybe that's why he...." is a little pathetic. The piece implies, or rather states, that Edwards endorsement has been held up by how nice one or the other of the candidates was to him on the day of his withdrawal. Isn't that silly? Does that make any sense? These people are politicians, and yes they have big egos, but they also have thick skin, and there is no way that an entire strategy could come down to how one or the other acted towards him on that one day.

In going over how badly Obama did with the Edward's, Heilemann pushes the envelope further into concern for his diplomatic prowess, in comparison to the story that Hillary was all over them and was almost, maybe able to win Elizabeth over with her kindness and ass kissing. So, then...he goes on to say that if its true that Obama failed to impress Edwards, he doesn't have the diplomatic skills to run the country! And McCain does? Clinton does? Bush does? I dunno...
I suppose that this is one area that Hillary has more experience than the average politician, because she traveled alot as first lady and was around the necessary niceties in diplomatic exchange, but I'd hardly call Obama a slouch, and certainly not because of this! But Heilemann must know that the art of ass-kissing is a very ass-specific endeavor, and best carried out by people who are very adept and the bend over and twist. I find this all a little embarrassing and rather condescending to the Edwards and everyone else involved in this farce of a democratic process...especially the main stream media.


The real point of this story is that Gore and Edwards are the most powerful people in the democratic party right now and...who is going to stop Hillary??? He eventually wends through the merits of Pelosi or Reid talking to her and how much weight or clout Terry McAuliffe or Stephanie Tubbs Jones might have. But ultimately, it appears, that even here, in the lap of gossip, Hillary listens to no one but herself....and that, my friends, is the real reason for everything that is happening.


We're fighting for our lives here, people, lets try to focus on McCain and his lies, lies, lies!
Its apparent that this thing is gonna go all they way because the M$M needs to sell soap, and the daytime drama market is just not cutting it.

c/p Brilliant at Breakfast

John Edwards on Health Care...This Guy is the Real Deal!

Jill posted this today, and I think that it should be cross posted to as many blogs and sites as possible.
This IS why we need John Edwards in the White House. There is just no question left in my mind that this man is finished with business as usual, and that he is ready to fight to change things. And not only to change things but to remember who we are and what we stand for. What good is any of it if citizens like this have to struggle like this for what should be (and were, I believe, before this disastrous regime put the plan into overdrive,) our rights. We have the right to health care; full health care. We have the right to jobs and the American dream, if we work hard and are able to get ahead somehow. The decks are stacked against anyone who isn't a millionaire in this country, folks...and thats the real truth.
This is the change we need...this guy is the one:



Pass it on.....

Elizabeth Edwards for President...and The Reptilian Core of the Republican Party Still Has Questions About All This.....

This is where the wheat and the chaff part ways. Its less about how brave one or another of us is, because surely Elizabeth Edwards is in a rare spot, with a loving husband, all the money in the world, and a clear vision of what she wants her life to be until it ends, however it ends. She could never stand in front of us and expect sympathy beyond a familiar fondness for someone who is just brave and real. What she can do is be somewhat of a mirror into the real life choices that are made in America every day. This is not Father Knows Best, and most of us who have dealt with illness ourselves or with sick family members, have continued on, however we can, to take care of the business of living while we're alive.
In the bastardized religiosity that has taken over certain swaths of this country (or maybe I'm just more New England and New York than to spend alot of time judging people's choices unless they severely impact my life,) it seems to be OK to demand a certain set of actions in this particular case, as if to channel some wishful thinking about what is even possible in the world as it is....And I get a smacking of the feeling that maybe certain folks out there don't want to see this death battle at all because they are, A, afraid of it and want deny it, B, don't believe in it and would prefer to focus on the rapture and heaven or, C, worst of all, are worried that someone who clearly illustrates the inequities that are growing every day in America might get people riled up enough to start questioning the house of cards that is serving as the bookie office of the neocons....all that paper goes up in flames pretty easily guys....Watch out, because thats a boulder rolling down the hill behind you.
I guess its the reptilian core of the conservative brain (i.e. Rush Limbaugh, Katie Couric....) channeling what the rest of them are thinking.....like, shouldn't they go and HIDE at home, holding hands and watching each other in trepidation, "enjoying every moment together," until the end?
But then, the Edwards have always done the unseemly thing in public, haven't they?
How dare they turn so publicly to public service after losing a son, when they should have gone and hid their grief...what a public display! How dare he uncover all of these unseemly problems like the embarrassing and vast divide between rich and poor...oh yes, and the silly little problems of corporations that inadvertently (or maybe on purpose?) kill little children while saving 75 cents on a part....
And worst of all...how dare she parade around in public when shes got the big C?
Unseemly, I tell ya...I would call that blind ambition...ha!
Here is the deal as I see it, and as I've seen it since the Edwards came on the scene: These people are the real deal. Political kids are constantly on the road or playing around the press lines. Whatever they decide is THEIR DECISION...They are making the best decision for them, and probably for the country, because when was the last time we saw some actual truth out there and the struggles of life that we can relate to? I don't think that they care what we think. If there is some positioning going on here, it feels to me to be less than we've seen in a long, long time.
And thats the real rub here.
The slow movement of the conservative rule making machine and enquiring minds into our bedrooms has been troubling enough without an ongoing commentary from the likes of Katie Couric, a supposed news anchor, who is asking the questions that no doubt the CBS brass wants to know: isn't it wrong of you to decide how to live your life when we're here watching?
The glaring obviousness of throwing the doubt out there is doing more harm to the right in this game, but really, it looks to me to be just a symptom of our national sickness, that would have us all back in some dark ages where our sick were hidden in the attic and we never got to see a body bag come back from war....oh wait...
When it comes right down to it. I don't care if Elizabeth Edwards dies right in front of our eyes, as long as she is doing what seems best to her and her family. At least its honest and truthful and real....Ive had enough of the plastic yet crazy Bush family, and the red meat eatin' Cheneys, to last me a lifetime.

April 1, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Elizabeth Edwards for President
By FRANK RICH

ELIZABETH EDWARDS’S choice to stay in the political arena despite a Stage 4 cancer diagnosis didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know about Elizabeth Edwards. People admired her before she was ill for the same reasons they admire her now. She comes across as honest, smart and unpretentious — as well as both devoted to and independent of her husband. But we have learned a great deal about the political arena from the hubbub that greeted her decision. For all the lip service Washington pays to valuing political players who are authentic and truthful, it turns out that real, honest-to-God straight talk about matters of life, death and, yes, political ambition, drives “some people” (to use Katie Couric’s locution) nuts.

If you caught Elizabeth and John Edwards in the Couric interview on “60 Minutes” or at their joint news conference in Chapel Hill, you saw a couple speaking as couples chasing the presidency rarely do. When Ms. Couric gratuitously reminded Mrs. Edwards that she was “staring at possible death,” Mrs. Edwards countered: “Aren’t we all, though?” It’s been a steady refrain of her public comments that “we’re all going to die” and that she has the right to make her own choice to fight for her husband’s candidacy even as she fights for her life. There are no euphemisms or equivocations in her language. There’s no apologizing by either Edwards for the raw political calculus of their campaign plans. There’s no sentimental public hand-wringing about the possible effect her choice might have on her children. The unpatronizing Mrs. Edwards sounds like an adult speaking to adults.

Americans understood. A CBS News poll found that by more than two to one, both women and men support the decision to move forward. So do prominent cancer survivors in the media establishment, regardless of where they fall on the ideological spectrum: Tony Snow (before his own rehospitalization), Laura Ingraham, Cokie Roberts and Barbara Ehrenreich all cheered on Mrs. Edwards. But others who muse on politics for a living responded with bafflement and implicit moral condemnation — and I don’t mean just Rush Limbaugh, who ridiculed the Edwardses for dedicating themselves to their campaign instead of, as he would have it, “to God.”

No less ludicrous were those pundits who presumed to bestow their own wisdom upon the Edwards household as it confronted terminal illness. A Washington correspondent for Time (a man) fretted that “Edwards’s supporters, and surely many average Americans” will be wondering when his “duties as a husband and a father” will “trump his duty to his country and the cause of winning the White House.” (Oh those benighted “average” Americans!) A former Los Angeles Times reporter (a woman) who covered the 2004 Edwards campaign suggested to USA Today that “this is a time when they would want to be home together savoring every moment that they’ve got.” A Washington Post columnist, identifying herself as a fellow mother, faulted Mrs. Edwards for not being sufficiently protective of her children.

As Mrs. Edwards moves forward both to manage her cancer and to campaign for her husband, she’ll roil more of the Beltway crowd. In a political culture where nearly every act by every candidate and spouse is packaged to a fare-thee-well for the voters’ consumption, the Edwardses’ story by definition will play out unpredictably in real time, with a spontaneity that is beyond any consultant’s or media guru’s control. Here is one continuing familial crisis that cannot be scored with soothing music to serve as a Hallmark homily in an inspirational infomercial at the next election-year convention. The Edwardses’ unscripted human drama will be a novelty by the standards of our excessively stage-managed political theater and baffling to many in its permanent repertory company.

That’s one reason it will be good for the country if Mr. Edwards can stay in this race for the duration, whether you believe he merits being president or not. (For me, the jury on that question is out.) The more Elizabeth Edwards is in the spotlight, the more everyone else in the arena will have to be judged against her. Next to her stark humanity, the slick playacting that passes for being “human” and “folksy” in a campaign is tinny. Though much has been said about how she is a model to others battling cancer, she is also a model (or should be) of personal transparency to everyone else in the presidential race.

This is especially true in a campaign where the presumptive (or at least once-presumptive) front-runners in both parties have made candor their calling card: John McCain is once again riding his Straight Talk Express and Hillary Clinton is staking her image on the rubric “Let the Conversation Begin!” They want us to believe that they are speaking in a direct, unfiltered manner, but so far their straight talking, even without Elizabeth Edwards as a yardstick, seems no more natural than Cheez Whiz.

Senator McCain’s bus has skidded once more into a ditch since the Edwards news conference. He’s so desperate to find the light at the end of the tunnel in Iraq that last week he told the radio jock Bill Bennett that “there are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk.” Yes, if they’ve signed a suicide pact. Even as the senator spoke, daily attacks were increasing in the safest of Baghdad neighborhoods, the fortified Green Zone, one of them killing two Americans. No one can safely “walk the streets of Baghdad, nor Mosul, nor Kirkuk, nor Basra, nor Tikrit, nor Najaf, nor Ramadi, without heavily armed protection,” according to the retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who delivered an Iraq briefing (pdf) to the White House last week.

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign “conversations” with the public have not stooped to the level of Mr. McCain’s fictions. But they have been laced with the cautious constructions that make her stabs at spontaneity seem as contrived as her rigidly controlled Web “chats.” This explains why a 74-second parody ad placed on YouTube by a Barack Obama supporter had enough resonance to earn (so far) nearly three million views. Reworking a famous Apple Macintosh commercial from 1984, the spot recasts Mrs. Clinton as an Orwellian Big Brother by making her seemingly innocuous campaign catchphrases (“I intend to keep telling you exactly where I stand on all the issues” and “We all need to be part of the discussion”) sound like the hollow pronouncements of the Wizard of Oz rather than the invitations to honest interchange the words imply.

Since the Edwards storm broke, there have been unintended consequences for other campaigns, too. In an accident of timing, Judith Nathan picked the same day as the Edwards news conference to explain that she was only now, after six years in public life, correcting the inaccurate published record of the number of her pre-Giuliani marriages (two, not one). Juxtaposed with the Edwards headlines, the dishonesty unmasked by this confession looked even worse than it might have otherwise. In a less vulgar vein, the first major Democratic campaign event after the Edwards announcement, a forum on health care, prompted more than the usual sniping about Mr. Obama’s substance when his policy prescription lacked the specifics in Mr. Edwards’s plan.

The power of Elizabeth Edwards’s persona is such that the husband at her side will be challenged to measure up to her, too, perhaps even more so than his opponents. No one may be labeling him “the Breck girl” anymore (the subject of another popular Web video parodying his coiffure maintenance), but should his campaign prove blow-dried when he moves beyond health care, he’ll pay his own hefty political price for the inauthenticity.

Whatever Mr. Edwards’s flaws as a candidate turn out to be, he is not guilty of the most persistent charge leveled since his wife’s diagnosis. As Ms. Couric phrased it, “Even those who may be very empathetic to what you all are facing might question your ability to run the country at the same time you’re dealing with a major health crisis in your family.”

Would it be better if he instead ran the country at the same time he was clearing brush on a ranch? Polio informed rather than crippled the leadership of F.D.R.; Lincoln endured the sickness and death of a beloved 11-year-old son during the Civil War. In the wake of our congenitally insulated incumbent, who has given our troops neither proper armor nor medical care and tried to hide their coffins off camera, surely it can only be a blessing to have a president, whether Mr. Edwards or someone else, who knows intimately what it means to cope daily with the threat of mortality. It’s hard to imagine such a president smiting stem-cell research or skipping the funerals of the fallen.

Indeed, of all the reasons to applaud Elizabeth Edwards’s decision to stay in politics, the most important may be her insistence, by her very action, that we not compartmentalize the harsh reality of death and the imperatives of public policy, both at home and at war. Let the real conversation begin.