Campaign a shared mission for the Edwardses

Dancing at Holiday Inn
For their first date, Mr. Edwards took her dancing at a local Holiday Inn — not, to her, a promising start. But his good-night kiss to her forehead touched her with its tenderness and restraint. She never dated anyone else again.

Thirty years after their wedding, they still have different tastes: she’s more poetry, he’s more Grisham, she’s more C-Span, he’s more ESPN. When a cable movie channel asked politicians to talk about their favorite movies in 2004, it was her idea to say “Dr. Strangelove,” Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy about nuclear holocaust, though Mr. Edwards had not seen it. But they complement one another: she obsesses over details, he sees the broad themes. He rallies a crowd, she learns the name of everyone in it.

And Mrs. Edwards, now 58, is her husband’s fiercest defender. An insomniac, she reads blogs and articles assiduously to see what people are saying about him, posting her rebuttals in the early morning hours. In campaign appearances this fall, she was still taking exception to a largely flattering profile of Mr. Edwards — headlined “The Accidental Populist” — that ran in The New Republic in January.

She plays bad cop to his good if she thinks the people working for him are not serving his best interests. His Senate staff joked that if he hated you but she loved you, you were fine, but if she hated you, no amount of love from the boss would be enough.

Mrs. Edwards plays down her role: “Somebody’s wife,” she calls herself in campaign appearances. But her popularity, and the reluctance of rival campaigns to respond to her comments because of her disease, has allowed her to say things that her husband — or any candidate — could not. Frustrated with the overwhelming news media interest in two Democratic rivals, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, she told one interviewer, “We can’t make John black, we can’t make him a woman.”

She was quoted at a luncheon sponsored by Ladies’ Home Journal saying that her choice to spend time with her children rather than practice law had made her happier than Mrs. Clinton — “I’m more joyful than she is” — then later criticized Mrs. Clinton for not being a vocal enough advocate for women.

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Mr. Edwards says his wife cuts through “the fluff” in politics. “I trust her more than I trust anybody in the world,” he said. “She’s herself, and fearless. I don’t think she’s intimidated by or afraid of anything.”

For her part, Mrs. Edwards says that watching her husband as a candidate takes her back to their earliest days together: “It does sometimes remind me of when I first saw him, first listened to him talk about possibilities, and how completely charmed I was by his story and by his optimism.”

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While she can be mercurial, he is grounding. “John brings a steadiness and a calm and a strength,” said Gwynn Winstead, a friend and neighbor who led the bereavement group the Edwardses attended after their son’s death. “And I don’t mean Elizabeth doesn’t have those things, but he gives them to her.”

He has immersed himself in the details of her medical care, much as he used to master the manuals of medical instruments that were at issue in his malpractice cases. Jennifer M. Palmieri, a former campaign adviser who is close to Mrs. Edwards, recalled accompanying her to a recent doctor’s appointment when her husband could not attend. As Mr. Edwards, on speakerphone, quizzed the doctor and then summed up the conclusions, Mrs. Edwards turned to Ms. Palmieri and said, “Now do you see why I don’t worry?”

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