More on Elizabeth Edwards

"Some say..." has become a cliche for journalists like Katie Couric who don't want to put questions directly in their own words. 60 Minutes is what it is and I wasn't particularly bothered by the screwy hardball questions. Certainly John and Elizabeth were not surprised by them. But I wish there had been more followup on their answers which were quite good and straightforward. The Huffington Post has a post by Melinda Henneberger on Elizabeth Edwards:

After you have cancer, people both do and do not want to know how you are. It isn't that they don't care, exactly. But often, it is hard for them to hear anything other than one word: Great! If you said the truer thing -- I hope I'm OK, but none of us really knows, do we? -- it would clear the room. That's how we are about death.

Which is why the single most important thing Elizabeth Edwards said on 60 Minutes the other night was "We're all going to die." And it's this unflinching acknowledgment of mortality that, paradoxically, makes her so fully available for swing-for-the-fences living.

(snip)

... There is no daylight between the personal and the political for Elizabeth Edwards, which is what people mean when they rave, rightly, about how "real" she is. ...

It's what we respond to in her...

(snip)

We'd amen anything she'd decided, of course, anything at all. But if that were me, we all agreed, we'd hope to be right where she is, saying, "Baby, don't you DARE drop out and put that on me."

She believes in her husband, with everything she's got. ...

This sounds about right. Elizabeth says onward! and onward it is.