Elizabeth Edwards’ enabling of her husband is one for the books

She was stumping for the John Kerry-John Edwards ticket in Las Vegas and spoke to 100 people crammed into a sweltering pizza parlor.

She ignored the miserable heat and spoke for an hour on what the Democratic ticket would do for Nevada’s military families.

Afterward, during our interview, she shed her warm, motherly image and pounced on a comment former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani made in his recent speech to the Republican National Convention. Immediately after the attack on the World Trade Center, Giuliani said, he grabbed the arm of then-Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik and said, “Thank God George Bush is our president.”

It was a version that he hadn’t told publicly before, and Elizabeth Edwards spoke bluntly: “Is there anybody in America who believes that?” She said it was unreasonable and over the top “if someone at that moment was thinking in a political way.”

That day, she impressed me with her intelligence, her logic, her common sense and her ability to handle herself.

Today I have no respect for Elizabeth Edwards.

She’s hawking a book and, to make money, she’s exploiting her husband’s infidelity, going on television today on Oprah Winfrey’s show to talk about the book, “Resilience.”

She’s made the decision to stay with her husband despite his admitted affair with filmmaker Rielle Hunter in 2006, when he was running for the presidency and Elizabeth Edwards was fighting cancer. Her decision to stay with him, well, that’s her business.

But once you make that choice, what’s the point of going on TV and talking about it … except to drive up book sales.

There’s an interesting timeline here.

In October 2004, not long after her Las Vegas stop, she finds a lump in her breast, and it is diagnosed as breast cancer.

The Kerry-Edwards ticket fails the next month.

In December 2006, John Edwards announces he’s a contender in the 2008 presidential campaign. A few days later, he tells his wife about the affair.

In March 2007, the couple announces her cancer has returned; though treatable, it’s not curable. She says then she wants him to continue his race.

Her book “Saving Graces,” about her cancer fight, is re-published in August 2007 with a new final chapter. This is after she was told of the affair but before he admits it publicly in August 2008. He only acknowledged the affair after dropping out of the race when it was clear he couldn’t win.

“Saving Graces” focuses on her cancer and the death of their son, Wade. It says not a word about the 2006 affair but stresses the love between her and her husband. But now some of the language seems more telling than it did before. On page 353 she wrote: “No marriage is perfect because no person is perfect. … Rarely, but from time to time, we have been disappointed in one another, because that is the true nature of real intimacy and mutual dependence.”

Now in 2009, she’s writing that he shouldn’t have run for president and how, when she learned of the affair, she threw up.

Well, she could have stopped that run for president instead of bolstering it. Instead, she enabled him to keep the affair from the public.

Will the talk show circuit help her children deal with a dying mother and an unfaithful father? Don’t think so.

And timing is everything. Last Sunday, her husband acknowledged he’s under investigation by the FBI for possibly spending campaign funds on his mistress, who was paid $114,000 for video work in 2006 and 2007.

And, yes, Elizabeth is joining with him to deny there was any financial wrongdoing, although how she might possibly know is a mystery.

I won’t be buying her new book. I won’t be watching her on Oprah. I’ve already heard more than I want to hear.

The woman who came across as “real, warm and bright” helped snooker voters in the last election. Working together, John and Elizabeth Edwards cheated every Joe and Josephine who wrote $100 checks for his campaign and made calls on his behalf because they believed in him and admired the woman he married.

Thank God John Edwards isn’t president.

Jane Ann Morrison’s column appears Monday, Thursday and Saturday. E-mail her at Jane@reviewjournal.com or call (702) 383-0275. She also blogs at lvrj.com/blogs/morrison/.