(Cross-posted, with slight edits, from The Crolian Progressive.)
When we talk, for a brief moment, with celebrities, we have no way of knowing whether our snap impressions of them reflect the whole person. I once had a conversation with then-Senator Paul Sarbanes about homeschooling; the Senator was respectful and kind and seemed interested in what I had to say. On another occasion, I sat next to the French Consul-General in New York at a $75-a-head banquet (long story); the Consul-General spoke to his friends in French and ignored me. I'm left with a good impression of Sarbanes and a poor impression of the Consul-General, but who's to say that my experiences with them reflect who they really are?
Perhaps Sarbanes is a mean-spirited miser and the Consul-General a kind father. There's no way to know a person except by knowing them; but still, with celebrities, we try. And as my former co-blogger Andrew McMichael reminds us in his eulogy of John Hope Franklin, sometimes a brief encounter can elucidate some important facet of a famous person's character.
I'm reminded of all this by the death on Tuesday of Elizabeth Edwards, who left two young children behind. John Heilemann and Mark Halperin talked to several aides on the John Edwards campaign in 2008 and came away with the distinct sense that Elizabeth Edwards was a nasty, mean-spirited person. "Their own relationships with her were so unpleasant that they felt like battered spouses," Heilemann and Halperin wrote of the aides. "During the 2004 race, Elizabeth badgered and berated John’s advisers around the clock. She called Nick Baldick, his campaign manager, an idiot." Their sources would be in a position to know; they worked with Elizabeth Edwards day in and day out and were privy to her moods and modes of expression. Their experience of Edwards, however, was not mine.
In February 2007, I posted a diary on MyDD about John Edwards' campaign rhetoric. The diary grew out of a discussion with the magnificent Elle in which she suggested that Edwards came across as an urban populist of the Fiorello LaGuardia type. I agreed with Elle and argued that, given the demographics of his support, Edwards might be better served switching to an explicitly agrarian radical style of rhetoric (cue Ignatius Donnelly).
This was at a point in MyDD's history when it was still the go-to location for inside-the-Beltway types to take the pulse of the blogosphere. One of those Beltway readers, apparently, was Elizabeth Edwards. I awoke the next morning to discover a multi-paragraph response from her in the comment section. Here's an excerpt:
The problem with analyzing rhetoric -- and remember, when I was in English graduate school, that is what I expected to spend a lifetime doing -- is that it is rhetoric.
Instead of analyzing the language of emails or snippets from selected speeches, it might be useful to think about the man himself, his career, his 2004 primary policies, his activities since 2004, and his 2008 policies. ...
And as for distinctions made above, I think I (as opposed to John, whose opinion on this I do not know) disagree with the way you have framed it, which may be a reflection of the time in which the rhetorical examples are drawn -- the 1890's and 1930's. The rhetoric (if backed by action) that rural America wants in 2007 is complex - a combination of what you suggest, an intervening government, and what you don't suggest, a less invasive government. And the urban example you gave is less "urban" than it is personal. You could say those words or words like them -- and I suspect John has -- anywhere in this country. ...
Will you find academicians who suggest that there should not be a personal responsibility piece in the answer to poverty? Yes, of course you will, but you will not be able to say that that means they are more concerned with urban poverty versus rural poverty.
You can find many progressive bloggers who will tell you of similarly thought-out comments from Edwards. Heilemann and Halperin wrote that "She would stay up late scouring the Web, pulling down negative stories and blog items about her husband, forwarding them with vicious messages to the communications team." Maybe so. I didn't feel attacked by her comment, though. Instead, I felt respected. Plenty of liveblogging politicians will nod and smile and give you sound bites and talking points when you ask them a question. Edwards wasn't doing that; she was engaging with me intellectual to intellectual. She disagreed with my ideas, and she said so, and offered a supple logical argument to back up her position. Indeed, I think this showed a shocking level of respect for a then-anonymous blogger. Edwards paid me the ultimate intellectual compliment: she took my ideas seriously enough to argue with them.
We now know something that we didn't then: two months earlier, Elizabeth Edwards had learned of her husband's infidelity. When she heard the news, she wrote in 2009, "After I cried and screamed, I went to the bathroom and threw up." Since then, commentators have ascribed a variety of traits to Edwards, many of them unfavorable. Heilemann and Halperin, for instance, blame her manic and overbearing ways for her husband's straying.
My own feeling is that, whatever her faults, Elizabeth Edwards was a rarity in politics: a political figure possessed of a great mind. She was reminiscent in that way of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and William F. Buckley; I disagreed with them on many things, sometimes violently so, but I'd have given my right arm to have discussed political philosophy with them over dinner. Ditto for Elizabeth Edwards, a onetime scholar of English who decided to devote her talents to her family and her husband's political career rather than to academia. Lost in the tangle of frustrated promise and betrayed affections was a thoughtful intellectual struggling to break free. At times she did, even if only in the darker recesses of the blogosphere for the benefit of a few Web-addicted souls, and the results were stimulating and worthwhile. When I think of Elizabeth Edwards, that's what I'll remember.