Elizabeth Edwards rejoins campaign

EMMETSBURG, IOWA -- Elizabeth Edwards had heard enough.

A man had just told her husband, Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, that Michelle Obama said his decision to abide by federal spending limits would handcuff his campaign.

Elizabeth Edwards grabbed her husband's mike.

"I'm surprised and disappointed in Michelle," she bluntly told more than 100 people crowded into a northern Iowa restaurant.

After an absence from the campaign trail, Elizabeth Edwards is once again grabbing the mike and the spotlight in the run-up to Thursday's Iowa caucuses.

Indeed, most of the wives -- and one prominent husband -- are here now and on their best behavior. They're at the candidates' sides or making stops as surrogates in other locations.

Myra Gutin, a Rider University professor and author of "The President's Partner: The First Lady in the Twentieth Century," said a candidate's spouse is not usually paramount in voters' minds as they consider whom to support, but it seeps into their overall impressions.

"It's part of the equation," Gutin said. "We look at spouses as a part of character. It is one of the parts of decision-making, and, who knows, maybe it's one of the things that swings the balance."

Elizabeth Edwards flew in on Thursday, and she's kept a hectic schedule of appearances for and with the former North Carolina senator. She's appeared on early morning TV news shows and shepherded her 9- and 7-year-old children for long days aboard the campaign bus.

At times last year, Edwards was a visible, sometimes controversial presence in the campaign. Last summer, she derided Illinois Sen. Barack Obama for being "holier-than-thou" in his anti-Iraq war rhetoric. She criticized Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York as failing to lead on health care reform and upbraided conservative pundit Ann Coulter on national TV.

But then she was often absent from the campaign trail. She says she was busy taking care of her aging parents and getting ready for 17 guests at Christmas.

She's also been undergoing treatment for an incurable form of breast cancer.

Edwards, 58, shows little sign of slowing. She appears thinner, but the only visible sign of treatment is a quarter-size bruise on her left wrist where she's been injected as part of her treatments. She says she has "a few" side effects from the medication.

She says she's aware of a whispering campaign, fueled in part by anonymous, so-called push polls, that John Edwards "should be home to help his sick and dying wife."

"People actually need to see me [to see] that I'm healthy," she says.

Help with female voters

In her very public battles with cancer, and with a memoir, Elizabeth Edwards garnered wide attention and support. In a race where Bill Clinton and Michele Obama are also stumping the state, the Edwards campaign hopes that admiration helps win over female voters. A Des Moines Register poll published Tuesday showed John Edwards had less support from women than either of his main rivals.

Elizabeth Edwards has already helped her husband win the backing of Deb Damstrom, a bus driver from Madrid, Iowa. She plans to caucus for him.

"She's an inspiring woman," says Damstrom, 58. "I started looking at [John] after I read her book."

At events, Edwards takes the stage to the amplified strains of Tom Petty's "American Girl" and introduces her husband. While he talks about "corporate greed," she argues for his electability. In her quick cadence, she criticizes the 2004 campaign of Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, who tapped John Edwards as his running mate. "They didn't run a single ad in North Carolina," she tells audiences. "We had a candidate on the ticket. They didn't run a single ad."