John Edwards and Eliot Spitzer...

...are back in the news. Edwards's wife Elizabeth is on a tour promoting her new book, Resilience. And Spitzer, hoping to rehabilitate his image and possibly run for office again, is on a tour of his own. I really don't want to get into what each of them did that got them banished to the political wilderness. Marriage is harder than it looks, and I'd rather not judge them. I actually think the Europeans have a much more realistic attitude toward this; or as a friend of mine once said, "What's the big deal? It's just skin on skin." But like Watergate, the cover-up is often worse than the crime. And their re-emergence does raise a few questions in my mind.

Elizabeth Edwards has appeared on a number of talk shows and won't even allow her interviewers to mention Rielle Hunter's name. I saw her on Charlie Rose and didn't feel much sympathy for her--and this is a woman that lost a child and has battled breast cancer! I just found her to be both naive and narcissistic. And all I could think was, why is she airing her family's dirty laundry like this? On another show she said that she wasn't sure if "that woman's" baby was her husband's or not, because the affair only lasted one night. Apparently, this Ms. Hunter approached him, not the other way around. And anyway, it was his only indiscretion. Uh-huh. The question I'd like to ask Mrs. Edwards is, are you trying to convince us, or yourself?

As far as Spitzer is concerned, he reportedly spent a total of about $80,000 over the space of about ten years on his "habit." In a recent interview, he said that a decade was "not long in the grand context of my life." Huh? Spitzer is almost 50 years old. He's been married since 1987. Assuming that he didn't see any prostitutes for the first 20 years of his life, then this behavior went on for about a third of his adult life and almost half of his married life. As for the money, it's his to spend as far as I'm concerned. But even though he's from a fabulously wealthy family, that's still a lot of dough. I think my wife would notice if I spent 80 Grand. So what I'd like to know is, are we to believe that his wife, a Harvard-trained lawyer, had no idea what he was up to all those years? Does she care? And can Spitzer quit cold-turkey? Does he want to? Is it reasonable to expect him? I dug out my Magic 8-Ball from the closet and its answers were, in order, "Don't count on it," "My reply is no," "Very doubtful," "Ask again later," and "Outlook not so good."

Then there's the question of their political futures. Personally, I never bought into Edwards's phony populism. I always thought it was just a market segment that he thought he could fill. It's hard to identify with the poor when you live in a 28,000 square-foot home. I don't know where he goes from here.

As for Spitzer, I can't make up my mind if he was a good public servant or not. He sure had enemies, though. I've seen Frank Langone and Hank Greenberg on CNBC recently and it's clear that they both despise him. I wouldn't be surprised if someone hadn't been out to get him. But there's no doubt that he's a good politician and polls show that New Yorkers would prefer him to his successor, David Paterson. I always thought that he'd be the first Jewish president; that's hard to picture now. But I'll say that unlike Edwards, we haven't seen the last of Spitzer.