-
sponsorship
Hanna, I have to take issue with your statement that Elizabeth Edwards has an "infallible bullshit detector." Sure, she would have spotted what an on-the-make idiot Rielle Hunter was. But her detector's been on the blink for the past 30 years as far as John Edwards was concerned. As soon as he appeared on the scene it wasn't hard to see he was an oily, vain phony who would take on whatever pose seemed useful for his own advancement. You're right, Elizabeth is not simply "standing by her man" and pasting a fake smile on her face. But as Susannah points out, she's trying to portray John as a naif taken in by a New Age seductress, which just prompts an "Oh, please." But John Edward's political career is over, and Elizabeth Edwards is mortally ill—it's understandable that given the circumstances she doesn't want to end her marriage. Still, why is she making so public this private pain?
-
sponsorship
Eleanor Squillari, Bernie Madoff's former executive assistant cooperated with Vanity Fair reporter Mark Seal for a juicy secretary's point of view on her crooked ex-boss that will appear in the VF June issue. Squillari spent two months helping the FBI and SEC unravel Madoff's financial accounts after Madoff confessed to operating a $50-billion Ponzi scheme in December 2008. Squillari says in the article that following Madoff's arrest, his wife Ruth called the office frequently asking the 25-year employee to provide her with information without notifying the bankruptcy trustees. Squillari said no dice. "Instead, I told the FBI what had just happened. I was working for them now, not for Ruth and Bernie Madoff."
I've always been curious about how much the financier's wife of nearly 50 years knew about his decades-long fraud. In a video interview with Seal, Squillari tells the veteran reporter she "would have no way of knowing if Ruth knew," but she shares a telling anecdote about when a colleague of Madoff's employee embezzled from him. In discussing the matter, Madoff told his own subordinate, "He should have been keeping an eye on his personal finances. That's why I've always had Ruth watching the books. Nothing gets by Ruth."
-
sponsorship
Meghan, it kills me to read that Newsweek piece about Rielle Hunter and her "New Age jargon," as Jonathan Darman calls it, and offers this example:
Human beings were dragged down by "blockages" to their actual potential; history was the story of souls entering and escaping our field of consciousness...Her purpose on this Earth, she said, was to help raise awareness about all this, to help the unenlightened become better reflections of their true, repressed selves.
One undeniable thing about Elizabeth Edwards is her infallible bullshit detector. When I interviewed friends and staff that's the first thing they all mentioned about her. If one of her assistants had tried this "blockages" line on her—or God forbid mentioned it as a cause of her cancer, as New Age types are wont to do—she would have dunked the assistant's head in the sink. It must be doubly dismaying to her that her own husband was seduced by it.
Also, as you mentioned, she is a curious combination of vulnerable and strong. This New Republic story I wrote about her opens with all the times she told other women she met on the campaign trail how pretty they were. Then, in a roundtable with all the wives of candidates, she said:
"My gosh, you are all so beautiful. Which one doesn't belong? I feel a little bit like that—one of these things just doesn't belong." The remark was typical of Elizabeth Edwards—spontaneous, unfiltered, generous, and a little domineering: It takes a unique combination of vulnerability and supreme confidence to say something like that on a stage. The main effect of her compliment was to set her apart. They were a group of fresh faces one could marvel at, and she was the old hand, a woman to be dealt with on her own terms.
-
sponsorship
Hanna,
I hear what you say about moxie. What interests me about Edwards is that she
doesn't fit any clear mold. She seems at once very strong and very vulnerable.
One almost feels that in the very fact that she has lived with advanced cancer
for such an extraordinary length of time. On the other hand, Susannah's
close reading of the passage about Rielle Hunter is spot-on, to my ear. In
this description of how the affair began, Edwards uses language that implicitly
depicts Rielle as a fierce, amoral hunter (her last name, after all), and John as
little more than biological silly putty; if Elizabeth doesn't quite make John out
to be an innocent pup, she does suggests he is merely too pliable. The agency is all the Huntress's.
I suppose that's natural; most of would be angry at the other woman,
especially if she's as touchy-feely as Rielle sounds. Do any of you remember this Newsweek piece by
Jonathan Darman about his encounters with her? If I were Elizabeth, I'd
be both threatened by Rielle's brand of sinuous femininity and put off by it. If
you buy the portrait painted in the Darman piece, Rielle seems to possess a
brand of sexual wile that I can’t help feeling is somehow more deeply
associated with womanhood, to this day, than almost any other quality. When I read
about these women, with their New Age sensitivity, their way of leaning in
close at the bar and asking “What sign are you?” I often find myself thinking
they're the true "XX" and I'm, say, X and a 1/2.
What's interesting to me about the passage Susannah posts is how you can see
that Edwards sort of feels that too, otherwise she would never use words like “target.”
The Rielle that Edwards writes about is just a new version of Crystal Edwards from
The Women. She sees something she wants and doesn't hesitate to wreck a
marriage to get it. These days, though, Crystal Allen doesn’t sell perfume at the
perfume counter; she is into astrology and cleanses and freelance video
work. In this reading, Elizabeth, of course, is the wholesome wife (Mrs.
Stephen Haines) played by Norma Shearer; only the movie doesn't end with her
reconciliation with her husband. It ends with her on a talk show, sharpening
her nails a bit. And who could blame her?
-
sponsorship
Politico reports that Tim Gunn made an appearance on Capitol Hill this morning. He and Leanne Marshall, winner of Project Runway's fifth season, met with Republican Congressman Lamar Smith about what Politico is calling "designer rights." Gunn dished out some free advice to before getting down to business:
Smith lined up his staff and had Gunn provide notes of wisdom, wardrobe-wise.
The staff fared pretty well. "Small tweaks" were made—a shorter skirt was one—and the congressman replied, "two inches?!" in shock. Gunn replied, "no just one." Another lucky female staffer was complimented on her grey skirt and sweater paired with a light brown belt. Gunn said, "this outfit is all about the belt and it works."
Given that the average congressional staffer's wardrobe ranges all the way from Ann Taylor to Ann Taylor Loft, this is quite the coup. But much as I respect Gunn's taste in textiles, I'm not sure the idea he has come to promote will do a thing to help the fashion industry. Senators like Chuck Schumer have long wanted to extend copyright protection to fashion designers, but they've never made a strong case for the idea that the American fashion industry suffers for a lack of innovation. (Shows like Project Runway do not help.) As UCLA law professor Kal Raustiala has argued, it's possible that cheap knock-offs—the very thing copyright protection would criminalize—actually help fashion designers by accelerating the fashion cycle and spurring demand for newer, high-end designs. Add to all this the sure-to-be-ugly costs of enforcing fashion-related IP, and the whole plan starts to look like the legislative equivalent of that strappy neon ruched thing Blayne came up with last season.
-
sponsorship
I just got a note from GLAD saying that Maine's Governor Balducci has signed into law a bill that gender-neutralizes marriage, initiated and passed by Maine's legislature without any court case or judicial involvement whatsoever. That makes Maine the first equal-marriage state to do so entirely on its elected officials' own initiative.
I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay, indeed. A friend from Maine says the Gov. is very close to his out lesbian sister; she expected the signing to come quickly. It's just hard to tell someone you've known and loved and fought with from birth that you don't think she should have the same rights and responsibilities that you do. Maine has a very active referendum process, so it will go up for a statewide vote soon. Go Mainiacs! Marry early, marry often, and hang on to those licenses!
Goodness, fairness is breaking out all over. I thought June was the marriage month! Perhaps judges and legislators in Iowa, Vermont, and Maine thought it might be nice to give same-sex couples and their families a chance to plan before they set those bells ringing?
Next in queue: New Hampshire, New Jersey, and New York. And I'm told we should expect a California rematch next year. Now that no state has to worry about being vilified for going first (Massachusetts), second (Connecticut), third (Iowa) or even fourth (Vermont), maybe equality seems like a no-brainer?
I don't know when it takes effect.
-
sponsorship
Meghan, Susannah, Hanna, I think Maureen Dowd is right when she asks: Why is Elizabeth Edwards dragging this scandal back before the public? It just makes her look naive and foolish, and reminds us what a slimy cad her husband is. Dowd mentions, as have so many others, that Elizabeth herself could have been a successful politician. Her situation now speaks to the dangers of subverting one's entire life to the ambitions of someone else. Anne, I also agree that Margaret Thatcher doesn't get the credit she deserves for being a path-breaker and a role model. But also a model was her husband, Denis. He had been a successful businessman and while he was supportive of her career, he mostly stayed out of the way. Angela Merkel's husband, a scientist, barely ever shows up for her official events. These husbands of successful, ambitious women are perhaps better role models of what we should expect of a political spouse than Elizabeth Edwards' head cheerleader.
And while we're on the subject of ambition and marriage, Dahlia and Hanna have a fascinating look at why so many of the women on the short list for the Supreme Court are single. They raise the point that the pressures of getting to the top of the legal profession may discriminate against women with children. So it's comforting to remember that two women who got to the Supreme Court first, when women in the law were a distinct minority, were both happily married with children.
-
sponsorship
Meghan, Susannah, I think we have to give Elizabeth Edwards some credit for what she does do. That moment where she portrays her husband as the victim of the vixen Rielle is really the only blind spot in an otherwise brutally honest—cringingly honest—account. Whether or not this counts as a public flogging, as Maureen Dowd suggests, is really beside the point. The typical thing for a political wife is to cover for her husband, stand by him on the stage the way Eliot Spitzer's wife, Silda did. And for that we liberated feminist types gave her a public flogging. I suppose Elizabeth did that to some degree, by standing by him during the campaign. But then she undid it, by writing this book which is a tick-tock of the entire affair, including his lies, the cheesy come-on line she has to know will make it to late night TV ("You are so hot") and more lies. And then she goes on Oprah and says she doesn't even know if she loves him anymore. Mixed in with whatever we fault her for is some serious moxie. What other political wife has ever done that?
-
sponsorship
Meghan, I think Maureen Dowd's column on the Edwards debacle now chronicled in Elizabeth's new book, Resilience, is spot-on to call the media spectacle the book has spawned a wife's public flogging of her errant husband. What I find off about Elizabeth's take on the matter is her seemingly recurrent positioning of her husband as a victim of a wanton woman. After John revealed his affair to her, she called for him to “protect our family from this woman."
"It didn’t occur to me that at a fancy hotel in New York, where he sat with a potential donor to his antipoverty work,” Elizabeth writes in her book, “he would be targeted by a woman who would confirm that the man at the table was John Edwards and then would wait for him outside the hotel hours later when he returned from a dinner, wait with the come-on line ‘You are so hot’ and an idea that she should travel with him and make videos. And if you had asked me to wager that house we were building on whether my husband of then 28 years would have responded to a come-on line like that, I would have said no.”
Targeted? Rielle lying in wait? Give me a break. When it comes to adultery, women too often posit the other woman as the enemy, their husband as the victim, the affair the two had some kind of sordid transgression that never would have happened were he not coerced by this Jezebel. Too bad that in her attempt to share the truth, Elizabeth got mired in the quagmire of not vilifying her husband for his misdeeds enough.
-
sponsorship
So Maureen Dowd has a slightly caustic column about Elizabeth Edwards' new book, which details her reactions to her husband's affair, online today here. She says that Elizabeth is dragging John out for a public "flogging" and then notes, of Elizabeth's bewilderment about the affair: "She may be smart, but she doesn’t seem to know much about men." It's hard to imagine a man writing this acerbically about another man's savvy about the other gender. But I'm curious: Who agrees with MoDo, and who thinks that she's wrong to describe this book as a public "flogging"? Does John Edwards merit a flogging, in any case?
-
sponsorship
While we are on the subject of elderly female pathbreakers, Emily—and before the 30th anniversary of her ascent to the British prime ministership passes—maybe it’s worth reflecting for a minute or two on the career of Margaret Thatcher. Long before Hillary, decades before Sarah, there was, after all, Maggie: The idea that female politicians can run important countries, make tough decisions, get elected and re-elected to office is not actually all that new.
What is extraordinary about Thatcher, in retrospect, is how unimpressed she was by her own groundbreaking role, and yet how feminine she remained while holding what had been, up until then, an exclusively masculine job. She was not a member of the all-male clubs where the Tory party allegedly made its secret decisions, but she didn’t seem to care. She was often the only woman in the room, but didn’t appear to be in the least intimidated. At the same time, nobody ever mistook her for a man. On the contrary, she had, in the words of then-French president Francois Mitterand, “the eyes of Caligula and the lips of Marilyn Monroe.” Gorbachev called her the “Iron Lady.” She was immaculately dressed and coiffed, and never wore trousers. She terrified many of the men who worked for her. Once, she famously snapped across the cabinet table at Nigel Lawson, Chancellor of the Exchequer: “Nigel, get a haircut.”
Though sometimes criticized for not helping other women make it in politics, this is not entirely fair: In fact, Thatcher set the stage for the rise of a whole generation of prominent female politicians. Since her prime ministership, women have run the British foreign office, the Home office, the Northern Ireland office, and many other important parts of the government. In the past decade or so, women broadcasters, political columnists and newspaper editors have become commonplace in the U.K.—more so than in the U.S. I can’t help but think Thatcher’s example had a role in that, too. Because she was a conservative, feminists have never wanted to claim her as a role model, and have never celebrated her achievements. But as time goes on, her premiership looks more revolutionary, not less.