At a recent campaign stop in Iowa, John Edwards spoke about the need for a political solution in Iraq and a withdrawal of American troops. Then he turned the microphone over to his wife, who was sitting in the audience.
“Elizabeth wants to say something,” Mr. Edwards said, at the stop in Washington, Iowa.
In a telling moment for the role she plays in his campaign, Elizabeth Edwards stood and gave an impassioned narrative that went on for two minutes, nearly as long as her husband’s, about her military veteran father, how the United States helped Iraqis with elections, and about the sacrifices made by American soldiers. The country needs a “true leader” who can say, Now is the time to leave, she said.
“Which is what John says,” she said, sitting down again.
[The five wives who gathered at a forum for candidates’ spouses in California on Oct. 23, including Mrs. Edwards, played down their roles in their husbands’ campaigns. “No one pays that much attention to us,” Mrs. Edwards said.]
But on the campaign trail in Iowa and California in mid-October, Mrs. Edwards, 58, played a prominent part, one that belies her statements at the forum about her limited influence in the campaign, and one she carries out in spite of her treatments for advanced breast cancer.
Ever since the couple announced in March that they would push on with what Mr. Edwards calls the “cause of our life,” Mrs. Edwards has advised her husband from behind the scenes, defended him in front of audiences and occasionally stolen his spotlight from the sidelines.
She is described by campaign staff members as the one who makes sure he has “mental space,” serves as a good “gut check” during his decision-making, and speaks to him frequently on the telephone when she is not with him on the road.
At events, she speaks up when she has something to add. On the sidelines, women approach her and describe her as a national voice and an inspiration.
And sometimes she is the main attraction: Speaking at a school in Iowa recently, Mr. Edwards noticed some members of the audience watching his wife, who was standing at the end of a row of chairs, cuddling a restless infant. “Would y’all stop looking at her?” he said with a smile.
When she is not with him, Mr. Edwards regularly provides his audiences with updates on her condition. “Oh, I should have said this at the beginning — my wife, Elizabeth, is doing great. She is doing very well,” Mr. Edwards said in Keene, N.H., after apologizing for being late and commenting on the weather.
During a two-day tour of seven New Hampshire towns starting Oct. 26, Mrs. Edwards will meet union members, a constituency Mr. Edwards is courting, and discuss Iraq and universal health care. Already this year she has spent 29 days in New Hampshire and 30 days in Iowa, and she has attended political and fund-raising events in other places.
These forays into the heavy-lifting of the campaign have taken her into terrain rarely visited by the other candidates’ spouses, who, like Bill Clinton, either want to avoid overstepping their role, or who, like Judith Giuliani, have lowered their profile.
[Her role is unusual, said Paul Kumar, a state Service Employees International Union leader who was at a rally in Los Angeles on Oct. 19, where Mrs. Edwards was praised for writing a letter that helped end a strike. “She has a leadership role in her own right on these issues and has expressed herself forcefully in the course of the campaign,” he said.]
Susan J. Carroll, a political science professor at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, said Mrs. Edwards’s background as a lawyer, her sex, her handling of her illness, and the political seasoning from the 2004 race had given her heft in more ways on the trail than other spouses had.
“The campaign is able to use her very effectively, particularly when the front-runner is a woman, to try to make the case that John Edwards is better for women than Hillary Clinton is,” Dr. Carroll said. “It is to their advantage to get her out there, and they are doing it.”
And because of her fight with cancer, “She gets away with more,” Dr. Carroll said, noting Mrs. Edwards’s scolding of the commentator Ann Coulter for attacking Mr. Edwards.
Other campaigns see Mrs. Edwards as a powerful weapon in the race because of people’s reluctance to take her on. “It does give her a moral platform,” Dr. Carroll said, “but not one she has asked for.”
Mrs. Edwards has grown as a national figure since she campaigned with her husband in 2004 and chronicled her struggles with cancer in her best-selling book, “Saving Graces.”
Mr. Edwards’s deputy campaign manager, Jonathan Prince, who calls Mrs. Edwards her husband’s “most trusted adviser,” said, “Any campaign that did not use those attributes would be committing political malpractice of the highest order.”
She has treatments at a doctor’s office monthly and takes daily oral chemotherapy. At events, women wear pink T-shirts. Cancer support fliers are put with policy papers.
“You speak very well,” a woman told her in Washington, Iowa. “Sometimes I think you should be running.”
Phyllis Groth, a resident of Keene, N.H., who saw Mr. Edwards speak there, said he was the only candidate she wanted to see. Asked why, she said: “His wife being sick, and he is still going through with the campaign. Just curiosity, I guess.”
Jeffrey Ernst, a dentist in Cresco, Iowa, who caucused for Mr. Edwards in 2004, said the couple was “tempered like a piece of steel” by her illness. “His wife is a huge asset,” Dr. Ernst said. “I think people identify with her.”
Some voters factor her illness into their views on his candidacy. In Iowa, a reporter told Mr. Edwards that he had spoken to a woman who decided to support Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton because she was worried about Mrs. Edwards’s cancer.
“I have been out on the campaign trail, Elizabeth has been out on the campaign trail,” Mr. Edwards said. “I think that we have been, both of us, completely focused on the job we are doing and what we want to do for the country. And what I think America and caucusgoers can see from that is when challenges and crises come, I will function and do my job and do it well.”
Mrs. Edwards said she had heard those voters’ concerns. “It is not his style to dwell on his own miseries but to take that energy and put it someplace else,” she said. “And if something were to happen to me, that is not only what I would insist on, it would be what he would naturally do.”
Their appearances together are often infused with an easy familiarity that comes from 30 years of marriage.
Asked whether he would concede an election if there were voting irregularities, Mr. Edwards turned to his wife, who was seated with the audience and looked as if she was restraining herself.
“Elizabeth wants to say something,” Mr. Edwards said. But he answered first, and then he handed her the microphone.
Mrs. Edwards spoke at length about her husband as an honest, electable choice. “This is the guy you need,” she said.
Mr. Edwards smiled at the audience. “There is a reason why I bring her along,” he said.