Elizabeth Edwards is dying and knows it. No one who has not battled a dread disease, only to see it recur with a vengeance, can know her emotional state or should presume to judge how she chooses to live the unknowable - but limited - number of days she has left.

The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) describes how she’s been spending her “nights and days”:

Mrs. Edwards’s world these days is jam-packed with incongruous experiences. In public, she says she’s continuing to campaign for her husband’s presidential bid because she doesn’t want to let cancer win before it kills her. She tells voters on the stump that her husband’s campaign is a “calling” worthy of “my precious time.”

Privately, she is juggling the campaign with the fallout of her disease, her decision and her day-to-day life. Mrs. Edwards says she doesn’t see herself as a cancer victim and that she isn’t letting it take over her life.

Between campaign stops and monitoring political blogs, she is working on a “dying letter” to her three children — a “guide to life” she started before her diagnosis but which takes on more poignancy now. Her advice runs from balancing work and family to telling her children they should always wear solids instead of stripes or plaid - otherwise, she warns, you’ll look back at old photos and cringe at what you’re wearing. She is sorting out her and her children’s possessions - clothes, papers, photographs - and boxing them to save after her death.

Elizabeth is, in both a metaphorical and medical sense, on her deathbed. Some people leave this earth unburdening their souls with a confession to a crime or transgression; others unburden their souls with voicing their gripes or criticisms. Based on her recent attacks on Ann Coulter and Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth is decidedly in the second camp.

According to Washington Post media analyst Howard Kurtz, Elizabeth has become her husband’s “attack dog“:

John Edwards remains a distant third on the Democratic side and … seems to be getting little traction. It’s his wife, Elizabeth, who is drawing most of the media attention in an attempt to help her husband.

That was sadly true a few months ago, when the couple revealed that Elizabeth’s cancer had returned in advanced form. There was an outpouring of public sympathy for this brave woman who refused to quit the campaign trail over a mere life-threatening disease.

But now Elizabeth seems to be her husband’s attack dog, saying things that the former senator can’t say or feels it would be too risky to say. It was Elizabeth who called “Hardball” and ripped Ann Coulter for ridiculing John in personal terms. It was Elizabeth who came out for gay marriage. And now it’s Elizabeth taking a jab at Hillary.

It’s almost as if she’s the vice-presidential running mate, playing a counterpunching role while John Edwards stays on the high road. But, well, isn’t there something strange in a spouse - even an accomplished lawyer - assuming this tougher posture?

Because her husband is vying for the White House Elizabeth’s deathbed is not confined to a room in her home or a hospice. Her death scene has a nationwide audience, and since she has nothing left to lose she’s going to go out having her say - no holds barred.

Having said that, Elizabeth runs the risk that her toughness will only accentuate her husband’s “soft” side. As Slate’s John Dickerson puts it: 

In his latest New Hampshire spot, the gutsy and appealing Elizabeth Edwards talks about her husband’s toughness. It’s a sign of how the gender stereotypes are being challenged in this election that Hillary Clinton’s campaign is using her husband to soften her image, and John Edwards is using his wife to toughen his. (That’s the charitable view. For rival Democratic campaigns, the ad is an occasion to claim Edwards has been emasculated and make haircut jokes.)

And New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd argues (subscription required) that Elizabeth may, unwittingly, be helping Hillary’s campaign more than her husband’s:

Things are getting confusing out there in Genderville. …

Elizabeth Edwards on a tear of being more assertive than her husband. She argued that John Edwards is a better advocate for women than Hillary, explaining that her own experience as a lawyer taught her that “sometimes you feel you have to behave as a man and not talk about women’s issues.” …

[M]ost people are not worried about Hillary’s ability to be strong. Anyone who can cast herself as a feminist icon while leading the attack on her husband’s mistresses, anyone who thinks eight years of presidential pillow talk qualifies her for the presidential pillow, is plenty tough enough to smack around dictators, and other Democrats.

John Edwards and Barack Obama often seem more delicate and concerned with looking pretty than Hillary does. …

Voters believe - and the latest National Intelligence Estimate assessment warns – the U.S. is in a protracted struggle against Islamofascism, and that it’s only a matter of time before we have to fight jihadis over here as well as over there. The character trait that matters to voters in 2008 is toughness, which explains why two Yankees – New Yorkers, no less – have taken the lead in the latest CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll in South Carolina.

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