Concord, N.H. – Six months after being diagnosed with incurable cancer, Elizabeth Edwards is pushing hard for her husband’s presidential bid, serving as campaign surrogate and political pit bull.
In fact, the wife of Democrat John Edwards spends more time campaigning than she did before March, when she learned the breast cancer she fought in 2004 had spread to her bones.
“We have a lot of time to make the difference. The truth is we don’t have all the time in the world,” she said Wednesday in a campaign donation appeal that could just as well apply to her future.
In the past week, Edwards has walked a picket line with striking United Auto Workers in Michigan, attended fundraisers in New York and courted voters in the early primary states of South Carolina and New Hampshire. She’s on the road five or six days a week.
Hargrave McElroy, who traveled with Edwards during the 2004 campaign, said she expected a less hectic pace when she began to accompany her longtime friend again last month. That hasn’t been the case.
“This is the ‘I’ve been sick’ schedule?” an incredulous McElroy asked Edwards after two days back on the trail. “Who are you kidding?”
In a recent interview with The Associated Press, Edwards said her health has remained stable and she feels no significant side effects from the pill she takes daily or the intravenous infusion of drugs she gets every few weeks.
“I honestly have just as much energy as I had in the beginning, and my schedule is even worse,” she said, quickly correcting that characterization to “more full.”
Her role in the campaign includes more than simply putting in appearances. She has been the point person in criticizing her husband’s rivals, suggesting that Hillary Rodham Clinton copied her husband’s health plan and that Barack Obama swiped material from John Edwards’ 2004 campaign.
Edwards makes no apologies for her outspokenness and relishes a leading role. She says she doesn’t dwell on the prospect of her death, though with two young children – Jack, 7, and Emma Claire, 9, it surely must be on her mind. Moreover, she’s no stranger to the subject: a teenage son, Wade, died in 1996.
“Realism doesn’t buy you anything. Giving up hope gets you nowhere,” she said in the AP interview. “Advances are made every day, and the second I give up hope is when I start dying. And I am not doing that. If cancer takes me, cancer takes me, but I’m not going to give it a minute more than I absolutely have to.”
