Elizabeth Edwards=Scum

Edwards -- diagnosed with incurable cancer, betrayed by a cheating husband -- has written a memoir and has proceeded to promote it with interviews during which she refuses to name the other woman and speaks dismissively of the baby that may or may not be her husband's.

The reaction to Edwards's publicity campaign has generated some sympathy for her. But she also has been subject to an inordinate amount of tsk-tsking for failing to articulate the perfunctory speech about the baby's innocence and how everyone needs to do what's in the child's best interest, even as every adult involved knows such words are little more than posturing before the mudslinging begins.

Instead, this woman with the soft Southern accent and the maternal air has essentially said that the baby is not her concern. That is not the expected response from a woman whose figure is devoid of sharp lines and who always seems to be dressed for a parent-teacher conference. Would people respond with the same shock if Edwards had the body of a marathoner and the wardrobe of Carrie Bradshaw? Probably not. Because a woman who looks like that is presumed to be self-involved until proven otherwise.

In a new book about the 2008 presidential campaign, “Game Change,” Elizabeth Edwards is portrayed as “an abusive, intrusive, paranoid, condescending crazywoman,” and nothing like her image as “St. Elizabeth.”

According to the book’s authors, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, well before John Edwards’s affair with the New Age videographer Rielle Hunter, Mrs. Edwards was known to demean her husband (“She called her spouse a ‘hick’ in front of other people and derided his parents as rednecks”) and to bully his staff. “The nearly universal assessment among them,” the authors write of the long-suffering Edwards aides, “was that there was no one on the national stage for whom the disparity between public image and private reality was vaster or more disturbing.”