I hesitate to get into the Ann Coulter/Elizabeth Edwards thing, but there are some interesting issues involved. First, I don’t have a problem with what went on during Hardball yesterday. Ann says some outrageous things; she can’t be too aggrieved when someone pulls something on her.

Second, it had been my impression during the 2004 campaign that John Edwards did not go around talking about the death of his son, Wade. I thought that was a commendable thing, especially since Al Gore’s convention-speech account of his sister’s death had been one of the most appalling performances in recent political history. So good for Edwards.

Then I read Bob Shrum’s book, No Excuses, in which he writes this:

Kerry talked with several potential [vice presidential] picks, including Gephardt and Edwards. He was comfortable with Gephardt, but even queasier about Edwards after they met. Edwards had told Kerry he was going to share a story with him that he’d never told anyone else — that after his son Wade had been killed, he climbed onto the slab at the funeral home, laid there and hugged his body, and promised that he’d do all he could to make life better for people, to live up to Wade’s ideals of service. Kerry was stunned, not moved, because, as he told me later, Edwards had recounted the same exact story to him, almost in the exact same words, a year or two before — and with the same preface, that he’d never shared the memory with anyone else. Kerry said he found it chilling, and he decided he couldn’t pick Edwards unless he met with him again.

I think the Edwards campaign has denied Shrum’s account, and to my knowledge we haven’t heard from Kerry about it. I find it hard to believe that Shrum would have made it up out of whole cloth, but on the other hand, it’s not possible to say exactly what the story is. Still, if you use a personal tragedy for political purposes, as a number of politicians have done, it can lead to some of your critics saying some pretty rough things about you. And then nobody looks very good.

Finally, Elizabeth Edwards’ call to Harball seems to be part of the campaign’s strategy of appealing to fringes of the Democratic party by mixing it up with the netroots’ favorite right-wing villiains. Edwards was quite showy about his decision to pull out of a Democratic debate co-sponsored by Fox News, and this seems to be consistent with that.