A Philanderer ... and A Crazy Wife

Via Andrew, Hillary's greatest weakness was who we all figured it would be. And John Edwards had a surprising problem:

From the Heileprin 2008 campaign gossip motherlode:

The [Clinton] war room within a war room dismissed or discredited much of the gossip floating around, but not all of it. The stories about one woman were more concrete, and after some discreet fact-finding, the group concluded that they were true: that BIll was indeed having an affair -- and not a frivolous one-night stand but a sustained romantic relationship. ... For months, thereafter, the war room within a war room braced for the explosion, which her aides knew could come at any moment.

The real revelation of the book is its portrayal of Elizabeth Edwards. If the book is accurate, then the discrepancy between her public and saintly image with the private, quite awful reality, is one of the starkest in American public life:

I would be remiss if I did not point to the chapters about the unbelievably dysfunctional husband and wife team of John and Elizabeth Edwards. Not only, it turns out, did many senior Edwards staffer suspect that John was having an affair, several confronted John Edwards about it, and came away believing the rumors. At least three campaign aides resigned because of their knowledge of the affair well before the national media picked up on those early National Enquirer stories.

And John and Elizabeth (who the book says was known to Edwards insiders as an "abusive, intrusive, paranoid, condescending, crazywoman") fought, in front of staffers, about the affair. The authors describe a moment where Elizabeth, in a such a state of fury, deliberately tears her blouse in the parking lot of a Raleigh airport terminal, "exposing herself. 'Look at me," she wailed at John and then staggered, nearly falling to the ground." (That's page 142.) (This was in October, by the way, well before the media took the reports of the Hunter affair seriously.)

Ambers has more juicy dope here.