Excerpts from the interviews linked above:

WINFREY: Is it a day by day thing? 
EDWARDS: Neither one of us is out the door so I guess it’s day by day, but
maybe it’s month by month. 
WINFREY: So you are still living together? 
EDWARDS: Still living together. 
WINFREY: Are you still in love with him? 
EDWARDS: You know, that’s a complicated question. 

REPORTER: But you are saying it may go beyond the state court process.
PAWLENTY: It’s one of many scenarios. So if the question is will you sign the certificate exactly the day the Minnesota Supreme Court decides, well if the court process at the state level is continuing than I am prohibited to sign it. So it is more involved than just that one day that one moment. There are other factors here.

Both answers are made more complicated or involved by presidential politics. The high-office aspirations of John Edwards are now relegated to history by his admitted marital infidelity. Pawlenty’s, however, may get a boost or a dent depending on how he handles his responsibility of issuing an election certificate to either Al Franken or Norm Coleman.

Why? Health care is a top election issue, political ads aim to impact emotions, and — as Brian Rank, a Twin Cities oncologist, puts it – ”cancer is an emotional microcosm of health care in the United States.”

The ads range from hard-hitting to soft focus, some citing specific, individual cases while others take a broad-brush approach. U.S. Sen. John McCain’s cancer-surgery scars? MSNBC won’t go there. Elizabeth Edwards’ cancer? Ads for her husband John’s presidential campaign didn’t need to say “cancer” to go there.

“The ad that I shuddered at is the one that said ‘I’m going to be fighting cancer and the insurance companies,’” says Rank. Ads that set a divisive tone, in his opinion, won’t help the country come together to grapple with weighty health care issues, like how to cover 40 million to 50 million uninsured people.

Rank was surprised to hear who belongs to the independent organization behind the ad, which is targeting its attack on McCain and several Republican congressional candidates across the country, including Republican state Rep. Erik Paulsen, who is running for the 3rd District U.S. House seat, and U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg, who last week demanded the ad be pulled. The coalition, called Health Care for America Now, includes medical professional organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Nurses Association, alongside labor unions and other progressive groups.

Regarding the recent ad that showed McCain’s melanoma scar, Rank said he as has conflicting feelings. “Where is health care privacy?” he wonders, while at the same time recalling the case of the late U.S. Sen. Paul Tsongas, whose campaign for the Democaratic nomination for president in 1992 included medical claims of a full recovery from non-Hodgkins lymphoma, when in fact cancer had returned after a bone marrow transplant. “His Dana Farber [Cancer Institute] docs weren’t quite honest as he was running,” Rank recalls.

(McCain’s very limited release of medical records continues to inspire concern about the state of his health and calls for greater openness among all four candidates on the major party tickets.)

Rank says he doesn’t think cancer should be off limits in political advertising, even though the advertisers’ primary motivation for bringing up the topic in ads often isn’t to advance the needed national debate over health care.  ”Things that elevate that dialogue are welcome,” Rank says. “In an ideal situation you’d want people to be transparent and open and honest in the ads — which is not what political ads are for.”

And even when the ads strike emotional gold — as with the two spots featuring the Edwardses that hint or more at Elizabeth Edwards’ cancer — events can undercut the message. “It’s hard to have an emotional response now, knowing that he had an affair during the time,” Rank observes.

Rank recommends searching out real medical information about cancer from the National Cancer Institute and the National Comprehensive Cancer Network. Candidates’ Web sites contain much better information about their positions on health care, he observes, along with sites such as RealClearPolitics.

Here are six cancer-themed political TV ads from this election cycle, followed by a clip from Bill Moyers on Lee Atwater, a victim of cancer and a victimizer through campaign ads.

BraveNew PAC ad: “McCain is 72. He’s had cancer 4 times.”
Key quote: “Another bout of cancer for John McCain while he’s president of the United States would profoundly impact his capacity to lead.”
Note: MSNBC banned this ad.

Health Care for America Now: “Erik Paulsen: Not On Your Side for Health Care”
Key quote: “He wants me to fight cancer AND the insurance companies? Fine. I’ll take you both on.”
Note: This ad in slightly altered form has appeared in seven other states in versions attacking other Republican candidates, one of whom has filed a formal complaint.

Coleman for Senate: “Wyatt”

Key quote: “Wyatt survived a rare form of cancer. He’s the reason I introduced the Conquer Childhood Cancer Act. See, you have to work on the big issues, but you can’t forget the little ones.”
Note: The boy in the ad, Wyatt Rech, was a poster child (in the metaphorical sense, anyway) for the Conquer Childhood Cancer Act this year.

Obama for America: “Mother”
Key quote: “My mother died of cancer at 53.”
Note: An early ad from September 2007, used into primary season.

John Edwards for President: “Heroes”
Key quote: “Elizabeth and I decided in the quiet of a hospital room, after 12 hours of tests and after getting very bad news, what we were going to spend our lives doing. For all those that have no voice. We are not going to quietly go away. Instead we are going to go out and fight for what it is we believe in.”
Note: This November 2007 ad came seven months after Elizabeth Edwards’ breast-cancer diagnosis and combines hospital scenes with shots of Iowans, whose Jan. 3 caucus day was then nearing.

John Edwards for President: “John Edwards — 30 years”
Key quote: “It’s unbelievably important that in our president we have someone who can stare the worst in the face and not blink.”
Note: Cancer is not mentioned directly but implied in the narration by Elizabeth Edwards, whose announcement of her diagnosis in March 2007 was still fresh four months later when this ad was released, and in the ad’s opening shot of John and Elizabeth Edwards, which is taken from that announcement.

At the crossroads of TV political advertising and cancer is Lee Atwater, who managed George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign. In this three-minute video essay, Bill Moyers charts the epiphany that arrived late in the short life of Lee Atwater, architect of the modern political attack ad, who shortly before dying of brain cancer in 1991 wrote:

My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. … It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don’t know who will lead us through the ’90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.

Bill Moyers: “Lee Atwater’s Epiphany”

That does not make you unique.  The same will happen to me, of course, and everyone else who is living today, just as it has happened to everyone who preceded us.  Humans are mortal.  Even if one believes in the afterlife, we know that it is just that–the afterlife.  When we die, our time on this earth is at an end.

As might be expected, this is not an easy thing for any of us to face.  It’s hard enough being human without thinking every day that in but a scant few years, decades at most, everything you’re doing will be done.  Each of us is born dying, and if you spend too much time thinking about that you’re liable to just want to go sit in a corner for a few dozen years.  And so we do our best to ignore the unpleasantness as best we can, and resent those who remind us that none of us is getting out of this life alive.

People like Elizabeth Edwards.Elizabeth Edwards is dying.  She has stage four breast cancer that has spread to her bones, and possibly her lungs.  She may die slowly — good and proper treatment may give her several years.  But she doesn’t have forever.  All too soon, despite her doctors’ best efforts, the cancer will spread.  All too soon, it will kill her.  It is, as she herself noted, treatable, but not curable.

That dos not make Elizabeth Edwards unique; there are thousands, if not millions, of Americans dying of something incurable.  It may be cancer,  AIDS, diabetes, hypertension or simply too many worn-out systems from a long, healthy life.  They may be acutely aware of it each of the seven times a day they take their medication, or they may be blissfully unaware of the mortal threat until it is too late.  But they are, all of them, dying just the same.

What makes Elizabeth Edwards unique is that her husband is seeking the presidency. 

There was much speculation when news first surfaced of Edwards’ recurring cancer that her husband, John, would suspend his campaign, and go home to be with his wife.  To grieve with her and simply spend the rest of her life waiting for the inevitable.  It had to be tempting. 

But Elizabeth Edwards decided to go on.  And I say that deliberately; I do not believe this was her husband’s decision, but hers.  And I believe that like most of us, she believed in someone she loved and believed in doing the best we can in the time we have.  This is going to be John Edwards’ last chance at the presidency; he’s not going to be a player in 2012 unless he wins.  Elizabeth knows that.  And she knows that whether John is president of the United States or a guy who quit running to stay with his wife, she’s still got the same chance of being alive in 2010. 

And so she chose to live, to view cancer as what it is: the thing that will kill her some day. 

We all have something that will kill us some day.  Elizabeth Edwards just happens to know what her something is.

The American writer Frank Herbert once wrote, “To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror, to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror.”  That is how Elizabeth and John Edwards are living their lives: free of terror.  Elizabeth will die someday, perhaps someday soon.  So will you.  So will I.

On “60 Minutes,” Elizabeth Edwards said, “You know, you really have two choices here. I mean, either you push forward with the things that you were doing yesterday, or you start dying.”  That’s the choice all of us face: to surrender to fear of our own mortality, or to accept that we will die some day, and that while we live, we must live.