Well, consider that Elizabeth Edwards actually posted an apology for her husband's affair -- as well as her own complicity in hiding it from people that were working for and supporting his presidential campaign -- at the extreme-left website Daily Kos.
Imagine that.
Here are some highlights (emphasis added, h/t Lee Stranahan, photo courtesy Washington Post):
John made a terrible mistake in 2006. The fact that it is a mistake that many others have made before him did not make it any easier for me to hear when he told me what he had done. But he did tell me. And we began a long and painful process in 2006, a process oddly made somewhat easier with my diagnosis in March of 2007. This was our private matter, and I frankly wanted it to be private because as painful as it was I did not want to have to play it out on a public stage as well. Because of a recent string of hurtful and absurd lies in a tabloid publication, because of a picture falsely suggesting that John was spending time with a child it wrongly alleged he had fathered outside our marriage, our private matter could no longer be wholly private...The toll on our family of news helicopters over our house and reporters in our driveway is yet unknown. But now the truth is out, and the repair work that began in 2006 will continue. I ask that the public, who expressed concern about the harm John’s conduct has done to us, think also about the real harm that the present voyeurism does and give me and my family the privacy we need at this time.
Isn't that great? It's all the press's fault for showing interest in a former presidential candidate/vice presidential nominee/Senator who cheated on his wife while she was suffering from cancer.
As you might imagine, the Netroots are quite angered by this, and feel totally betrayed. One former Kossack, Lee Stranahan, who got banned last weekend for having the nerve to post on this subject, spoke out at the Huffington Post Friday:
I believe that the Edwards are both sincere in their stated positions about poverty, health care and other issues. I can even believe that the reason they wanted Edwards to become president was to promote that agenda. To the extent that's true, I totally agree with their ends but their means were so shortsighted, reckless, and potentially damaging to their own agenda that they can't be ignored.
Just taking the Edwards current statements at their words, I am left with a very uncomfortable truth -- both John and Elizabeth Edwards cynically used their marriage as a means to help John Edwards win an election. Right now, they are hoping that the emotional goodwill that they built up from their supporters will carry them through.
I'm sure I'll get some angry comments here but if you're an Edwards supporter, let me put this bluntly; if you gave John and Elizabeth Edwards time, money, support, or goodwill, they played you.
They made a conscious decision to make their relationship a focus throughout the campaign. That emotional goodwill you feel for them? They not only let you feel, they took actions and made statements specifically so you would feel it.
Are such sentiments going to be typical of folks on the left and particularly in the media? Is the real betrayal here that Edwards did this while his wife was battling cancer, or while he was campaigning for president?
In the long run, will media that have treated this couple like darlings for quite some time be as outraged as the folks in the Netroots, or will this issue be buried quickly under the rug so as not to overshadow the upcoming Democratic National Convention as well as the November elections?
