Elizabeth Edwards’ posts have been fantastic. She’s right: Four Trials lays out in moving detail Senator Edwards’ successful fight for people who didn’t have a voice.

What I wrote about in the piece was about what conclusions we were supposed to draw from the ambiguous ad. Perhaps everyone immediately thought of Senator Edwards’s law career when they saw the last line. I didn’t. A lot of other people I showed it too had the identical reaction I did. When I asked the campaign what voters were to conclude I got a laundry list and most of the items didn’t fall anywhere near the category of “the worst.” Proposing a universal healthcare plan and launching a poverty tour don’t fit that description, nor does the Senator admitting he was wrong about Iraq. Tough to do. Sure. Worst? No.

Not distinguishing between those items and his legal career was inartful. Clearly he’s seen trauma, hardship and pain. But compared to what? Compared to most of us he’s seen worse. Compared to himself? I was perhaps blinded by that last line’s reference to “the worst.” Maybe I took it too literally. When I think of “the worst” in Four Trials I think of the part where I read for the first time about Wade, and how the senator said his sorrow afterwards was the undercurrent of his life. I thought about the moving way Elizabeth Edwards talks about the accident on the stump. More recently I watched Senator Edwards speak to the sojourner’s about prayer and how after Wade’s death he was “nonfunctional” and how prayer helped him through that.

Maybe it’s because I have kids, but I can’t imagine anything else that fits into the category of that challenge—in Senator Edwards’ life or anyone else’s. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have my best friend and wife of thirty years fight cancer. Those two seem like the worst to me when making a comparison to his legal career. Why does it matter what I think? Because the ad is ambiguous and political ads ask us to connect to the candidate through images and inference. So I tried to figure out what this ad was asking of us.

I figured it was so clear what was being asked of the audience that a debate would start about whether it was right or wrong to bring up these issues, even obliquely. It was my view, as I wrote, that it’s fine to bring them up and that anyone who has been through those challenges has at least two important qualities we might want in a president: perspective and toughness.