http://thinkprogress.org/2007/03/26/edwards-interview/Exclusive: Edwardses Rebuff Critics, Underscore Importance Of Talking About Cancer
ThinkProgress spoke with the 2008 candidates who attended Saturday’s New Leadership on Health Care presidential forum. We’ll bring you some highlights from those interviews this week.
The New York Times speculated this weekend that there are “cons” attached to discussing Elizabeth Edwards’s health condition. In her 60 Minutes interview, Katie Couric told John Edwards as a matter of fact that, “You’re putting your work first, and your family second.” In our conversation with John and Elizabeth Edwards, they soundly rebutted critics who have questioned their motives, and underscored the importance of talking about Elizabeth’s health condition.
Elizabeth said the “baseline” reason they moved quickly to inform the public about her diagnosis was because “one of the important things is to tell the truth to people about what’s going on.”
She added that not allowing cancer to disrupt her routine has helped move the discussion “past what is happening with me to the fact that there are so many people in this country not dying with cancer but living with cancer. So we’re allowed to have a national dialogue about that, which helps people. I hope will help people tomorrow get this diagnosis and the next day get the diagnosis to see that in fact you can — you have a choice a choice about how you live the rest of your life and one of them is to live your life with cancer as fully, and live your life as fully as you possibly can.”
Watch it at link:
A recent USA Today poll finds that Americans support the decision of Edwards to stay in the race by a 2-1 margin.
Transcript:
ELIZABETH: Of course, in our case, people knew what was going on. John cancelled events and we had to — one of the important things
to tell the truth to people about what’s going on, and that’s sort of the baseline. Aside from that, what we’ve seen is the extraordinary dialogue that’s taken place. It’s moved — thankfully, it’s moved past just what’s happening with me to the fact that there are so many people across this country not dying with cancer but living with cancer. So we’re allowed to have a national dialogue about that, which helps people — I hope will help people tomorrow get this diagnosis and the next day get the diagnosis to see that in fact you can. You have a choice a choice about how you live the rest of your life and one of them is to live your life with cancer as fully, and live your life as fully as you possibly can, and all the medical people speaking about the possibility of doing that, I think has been, I hope has been inspirational to everyone facing it around the country.
NICO: So you and Tony Snow had a –
ELIZABETH: Actually, you know, that’s another thing that it does, is it — I think we disagree on so many things across this country, and instead of starting with the things we disagree on, maybe it’s a useful dialogue to start with the things that we do agree on, and health care, for example, and the forum that’s taking place today is one of those things. We all agree that we all should have good health care and we want good health for everybody regardless of their political persuasion.
FAIZ: Senator Edwards, you’ve had an Iraq redeployment plan for a quite a while now. It seems that one of the last strawmen the right has is what happens when we leave. chaos will erupt, that’s why we can’t do it. What’s your response to that specific argument about what happens when we leave?
JOHN EDWARDS: Well, first of all, anything could happen no matter what we do, and we need to start by being honest about that. Second, I think we have to prepare. As we’re orderly — in an orderly way redeploying out of Iraq, we need to engage the Iranians and the Syrians into this effort to help secure Iraq. We need to maintain a presence in the region, already have troops in Kuwait, we need to have a presence in the Persian Gulf, naval presence in the Persian Gulf. We’ll probably need to put some troops into Afghanistan, although most troops will be able to come home. And then I think over the long term we have to prepare for the worst, which we haven’t been doing until now, which is we have to have a plan for containment in the event that things go in the wrong direction. We have to do this in a smart, responsible way. But at the end of the day, the Iraqis have to decide whether they’re going to reach a political reconciliation between Sunni and Shia. Without that, there cannot be peace in Iraq.
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