ELIZABETH EDWARDS: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obit of Elizabeth Edwards is in today's Indy, you can link to it here. It was an interesting one to write, because of those ambiguities I cite at the top: there is a lot that can be said about public v private morality, about the place of spouses in political races, especially when those like Edwards, Hillary, or Michele Obama are successful in their own right, and often characterised as Lady Macbeths, about how our culture suspects the successful but glorifies the victims of tragedy, and about just how manufactured a candidate John Edwards was. But an obit was not the place for extended discussion of those topics. One other point to be made in passing was the role of Lauch Faircloth in the appointment of Kenneth Starr as the Whitewater Special Persecutor. Oddly, Wade Edwards had met Jesse Helms when he got his presentation at the White House, and Helms read his speech into the Congressional Record--then Edwards defeated Faircloth for the Senate. It was Helms and Faircloth who got David Sentelle his position, and cashed in by getting Starr appointed...the rest, as they say, was nauseating history