Student Council Elections '08

Advance buzz on the book Game Change, which is shaping up to be 2008's version of Primary Colors (only for both political parties), shows just how truly f'cked up the Race To Replace Dubya was.

Hillary, Rudy, Johnny Volcano and Moose Lady, Barry O and even Harry Reid get smacked around in the book (for which Reid has already apologized for his remarks about Candidate Obama), but the major losers have got to be John and Elizabeth Edwards.

I don't want to give away the whole book... but 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 "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.)

Ouch.  Just a reminder that every national politician is at least somewhat flawed...and even more somewhat bugnuts crazy.

An excerpt of the book is up at New York Mag's site.