AP Photo
Former Sen. John Edwards and his wife Elizabeth at late Sen. Edward Kennedy's memorial service at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston last August.

An Excerpt From John Heilemann and Mark Halperin's 'Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime'. John and Elizabeth Edwards don't get billing in that subhed, but the chapter published yesterday in New York Magazine is all about them, and about Rielle Hunter, whose affair with John would end his candidacy when revealed by The National Enquirer.

Reading its 10 parts, you watch a trainwreck in slow motion, seeing now what remained hidden while it was happening.

This isn't the Enquirer any more. John Heilemann of New York magazine and Mark Halperin of Time have been covering campaigns for more than two decades.

The blurb for this excerpt:

Saint Elizabeth and the Ego Monster A candidate whose aides were prepared to block him from becoming president. A wife whose virtuous image was a mirage. A mistress with a video camera. In an excerpt from the new book Game Change--their sweeping account of the 2008 campaign--the authors reveal that, inside the Edwards triangle, nothing was too crazy to be true.

While necessarily incomplete, it's a story in which nearly everyone is disappointing. Read it.

Later: Michiko Kakutani reviews the whole book for the N.Y. Times: In 'Game Change,' Insight on the 2008 Campaign.

They proceed in these pages to serve up a spicy smorgasbord of observations, revelations and allegations -- some that are based on impressive legwork and access, some that simply crystallize rumors and whispers from the campaign trail, and some that it's hard to verify independently as more than spin or speculation on the part of unnamed sources.

Between that early paragraph and the start of the final one below, it's clear that the Clintons and McCains also acquire new flaws in Game Change. (The Obama marriage is the happy one-off here, and if their aides dished to the authors, this critic doesn't mention it.)

Though this book focuses on personal matters, not policy concerns, and though some of what will be its most talked about passages fall into the realm of gossip and reflect the views of chatty and, in some cases, bitter, regretful or spin-conscious aides, the volume does leave the reader with a vivid, visceral sense of the campaign and a keen understanding of the paradoxes and contingencies of history.

As a Washington journalist once told me, "I know a lot of people who want to be President, but not a lot who are willing to run for President." Even a little bit of this book makes me wonder again why anyone would.