One of the media's favorite attacks against Palin revolves around her failure to tell Katie Couric what magazines and newspapers she regularly reads. The clumsy answer was an early flash point that led many to scoff that the Alaskan governor didn't read anything at all.
But guess who doesn't read very much either? That would be John Edwards, if you believe John Heilemann and Mark Halperin's new book "Game Change." According to their reporting, when a friend inquired if John Edwards read a particular tome, his wife, Elizabeth, apparently found the idea of her husband reading laugh-out-loud funny, saying, "Oh, he doesn't read books."
Yet this impression of her husband as an anti-intellectual "hick," as Elizabeth reportedly referred to him, never became a common undercurrent during his his 2004 campaign for vice president or his later run for President.
So why did Palin get painted so quickly as a bombastic dunce and Edwards escape without such a negative characterization?
It probably has to do with the fact that most members of the media bought Edwards persona. They liked his world-view.
They believed in his claim that there were "two Americas." So they didn't dig deeper to see if there was any substance beneath his shiny surface.
Palin was never given the benefit of the doubt, in large part because the world-view to which she subscribes is anathema to the one held by so many pundits and reporters."
H/T The Politics of the Cross
