Teetering on her pedestal

According to the books authors,John Heilemann and Mark Halperin,well before Democratic presidential candidate John Edwardss affair with videographer Rielle Hunter,Mrs. Edwards was known to demean her husband and to bully his staff. The nearly universal assessment, the authors write of 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.

The authors suggestions that Mrs. Edwardss sharp tongue drove her husband out on the road,and in steering clear of his wife,he ended up in the arms of Hunter,have been denounced as sexist and insensitive to Mrs.Edwardss real suffering.

Before the news of the Hunter affair,the Edwards story made many women happy. It wasnt just that Elizabeth Edwards was a woman they admired and believed in. This story was a dream come true for many women.

I like that hes got a fat wife, a woman told an Edwards pollster in his 1998 Senate race,as recounted in Game Change. I thought hed be married to a Barbie or a cheerleader.

Of course,now reality has hit,and with it,perhaps,an unwelcome message: in unhappy marriages,there are rarely pure victims.

Mrs. Edwards had already begun falling from her pedestal last year,when she published her book,Resilience,about facing lifes adversities. On media tours,she talked of preparing her children for her death.

She toured her multi-million-dollar home with Oprah,and in her book dismissed Hunter: (People like her) look at our lives,which from the outside in particular are pictures of joy and plenty,and they want it for themselves.

Edwards kept painting Hunter as a fame seeker,eager to glom onto her husbands spotlight, Tina Brown wrote on her Web site,The Daily Beast. Whereas its Edwards who has written the book and dragged Hunter into the media glare.

Other women rushed to her defence. Mrs. Edwards had been through so much,they said. The death of a child,cancer,her husbands betrayal. Whose personality wouldnt fray under such pressure?

As she braces herself against the media storm,Mrs. Edwards might do well to remember her past. She was perhaps never more admired than in her most notable moment of absence: she chose not to appear by her husbands side as he went on Nightline in 2008 to make his mea culpas about the Hunter affair.

She was contrasted favorably then with another wronged wife of that year,Silda Wall Spitzer ,who stood quietly and wretchedly as her husband admitted to the sexual misdeeds that led him to resign as New Yorks governor.