Carry On

As always, Frank Rich distills the essence of the issue at hand in his column. This week was the news (and reaction thereto) of the return of Elizabeth Edwards' cancer, Elizabeth Edwards for President, and its impact on the Presidential campaign of her husband. As Rich says:

ELIZABETH EDWARDS’S choice to stay in the political arena despite a Stage 4 cancer diagnosis didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know about Elizabeth Edwards. People admired her before she was ill for the same reasons they admire her now. She comes across as honest, smart and unpretentious — as well as both devoted to and independent of her husband. But we have learned a great deal about the political arena from the hubbub that greeted her decision. For all the lip service Washington pays to valuing political players who are authentic and truthful, it turns out that real, honest-to-God straight talk about matters of life, death and, yes, political ambition, drives “some people” (to use Katie Couric’s locution) nuts.

And as Rich implies, and some people have said (me included), Couric was vicious in her interview of the Edwards. See, 60 Minutes. Of course, I could also comment on the apparent hypocrisy in the fact that Couric lived though her husband's illness and death from cancer while she continued to work at the Today Show. But I'm not Republican, so I would never suggest that she should have devoted herself full-time to her husband during his last days.

Rich addresses the "accusations" with the perfect response:

Whatever Mr. Edwards’s flaws as a candidate turn out to be, he is not guilty of the most persistent charge leveled since his wife’s diagnosis. As Ms. Couric phrased it, “Even those who may be very empathetic to what you all are facing might question your ability to run the country at the same time you’re dealing with a major health crisis in your family.”

Would it be better if he instead ran the country at the same time he was clearing brush on a ranch? Polio informed rather than crippled the leadership of F.D.R.; Lincoln endured the sickness and death of a beloved 11-year-old son during the Civil War. In the wake of our congenitally insulated incumbent, who has given our troops neither proper armor nor medical care and tried to hide their coffins off camera, surely it can only be a blessing to have a president, whether Mr. Edwards or someone else, who knows intimately what it means to cope daily with the threat of mortality. It’s hard to imagine such a president smiting stem-cell research or skipping the funerals of the fallen.

Indeed, of all the reasons to applaud Elizabeth Edwards’s decision to stay in politics, the most important may be her insistence, by her very action, that we not compartmentalize the harsh reality of death and the imperatives of public policy, both at home and at war. Let the real conversation begin.

Susan Madrak, who blogs at Suburban Guerrilla, also wrote about the reaction to the decision of Edwards to maintain his campaign for President at the Huffington Post, The Cancer Scolds Explain It All For You. She also has a thoughtful, insightful take on the issue:

We have such a strange, conflicted attitude toward death in this country. And when someone is stricken with something like cancer, we (the societal we) rush to the barricades and insist on an all-out fight - well, to the death, which seems to me is only a form of denial. How dare we have rooms in our lives for anything else?

We are a generation of control freaks, convinced we can master anything with enough effort. We can fix it, or we can wish it away. And when you get cancer, people seem to expect that it should become a full-time job.

We forget this is not a binary choice. We are not living or dying; we are living and dying. (As someone once wrote, "Life is a ship we get on, knowing it will sink." The only difference with a terminal illness is, we now have the advantage of seeing land on the horizon.)

So why is it so unthinkable that Elizabeth Edwards has decided to live while she is dying?

Why indeed? And why should we judge their decision, one way or another?

(Rich article also available at Welcome to Pottersville)

Tags: Commentary, Politics, John Edwards, Frank Rich