If you watched TV over the weekend you no doubt heard about Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s intemperate remarks about President Obama’s light colored skin and his lack of a “Negro” dialect. The statements attributed to Reid are part of a new book Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. Although the media immediately fixated on Reid’s alleged racist comments about Obama, there were far juicer revelations included in the book. In a review in today’s NY Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/books/11book.html?hpw

Michiko Kakutani writes “during debate preps, some staff members assigned to Sarah Palin by the McCain campaign discussed the “threatening possibility: that Palin was mentally unstable.” They add that several of Senator John McCain’s lieutenants agreed that if it looked like their candidate might actually win in November, they would have to discuss how to relegate Ms. Palin “to the largely ceremonial role that pre-modern vice presidents inhabited”: “it was inconceivable” that “if McCain fell ill or died, the country be left in the hands of a President Palin.”

Somehow the McCain aides fall back plan to keep Palin’s ‘crazy’ hands off the red button don’t make me feel much better about the decision to select flash in the pan Palin. This account reconfirms what most of us suspected; the Palin pick was a selfish, ill considered and reckless choice by an increasingly desperate McCain.

The portrait painted of some of the candidate’s marriages is eye opening to say the least. While the Obama’s marriage is described as a model one “Obama adored his wife” there was no love lost between the McCain’s. Rumors about Cindy McCain having a “long-term boyfriend” in Arizona were thought to be rooted in truth. The McCain’s were said to have “fought in front of others, during small meetings and before large events, to the amazement and discomfort of the staff.” The authors say that Mrs. McCain accused the senator of ruining her life, and when it came time to film campaign videos of the couple, the crew had to roll for hours to capture “a few minutes of warmth.”

The picture of John and Elizabeth Edwards partnership is even more disturbing. Edwards aides, reportedly thought, “their boss had become increasingly megalomaniacal and narcissistic over the years, and that while the aides had sympathy for Mrs. Edwards’s struggle with cancer, they regarded her as a badgering, often irrational presence on the campaign. The nearly universal assessment among them, the authors write of the Edwards aides, “was that there was no one on the national stage for whom the disparity between public image and private reality was vaster or more disturbing. What the world saw in Elizabeth: a valiant, determined, heroic everywoman. What the Edwards insiders saw: an abusive, intrusive, paranoid, condescending crazy woman.” John Edwards reportedly nursed delusional hopes of being named attorney general in an Obama administration even after the National Enquirer published the story of his affair and subsequent love-child.

These stories help me (as a former Edwards supporter) understand what would drive a man to keep running for president despite a recurrence of his wife’s cancer and the public revelation of an extra-marital affair. Maybe we saw what we wanted to see in them, maybe no human being can live up to our outsized expectations for political candidates. Maybe John and Elizabeth Edwards publically lived a lie so long that they couldn’t inhabit or even find their personal truth anymore.