The latest issue of National Review features a Byron York article that examined the media’s disinterest in the Edwards story (before today’s admission).
It includes the following passage, which explains why the revelation could hurt Edwards more than some other politicians caught in the same boat:
His partnership with wife Elizabeth, now suffering from inoperable cancer, has been a defining aspect of his career in public life. “Part of his political mythos ? a pretty good chunk of it ? was Elizabeth Edwards, the relationship between the two people,” says John Hood, president of the John Locke Foundation, a North Carolina think tank. “The way they came onto the public stage in North Carolina was after their son’s death [Wade, their 16-year-old, was killed in a 1996 auto accident], and their having new children later in life. When he came to the public fore, it was as a member of a family. It wasn’t ‘great successful trial lawyer,’ it was ‘grieving dad and husband.’ So the family identification for Edwards was critical to his political rise.”
