Blogs’re about interactivity, so the closing keynote by Elizabeth Edwards — 58-year-old attorney, blogger and wife of presidential candidate John Edwards — was not a speech but a chat.

Which meant bloggers got to ask a lot of questions — and got what seemed like very frank answers from Elizabeth.

For ex: One woman — who rambled a bit about how she writes about reclaiming the F word (faith) asked Elizabeth about how her faith impacts her political views.

Elizabeth said that she’s a methodist, but that she doesn’t believe in an intervening god — as in she doesn’t believe in praying to make shit happen (though she didn’t say shit, and she did say she’s appreciative for the people who pray for her). Instead, she believes in a set of general guidelines for living one’s life.

But Elizabeth emphasized that she believes in living according to those guidelines NOT because of the promise of “eternal life” but because “that’s what’s right.”

If Elizabeth’s answer was the answer most religious people gave, I wouldn’t think of religion as such a dogmatic, painful, and generally harmful blight on society.

Elizabeth was careful to separate her own views from her husband’s views — saying that she’d support gay marriage, even while John Edwards only supports civil unions.

And Elizabeth elaborated on her widely-reported comment that John Edwards would do more for women’s issues than Hillary Clinton would. “I just think that we need someone to lead in an aggressive way,” she said, and quickly pointed to “truly universal healthcare.” Saying that Hillary is “not in the right place on this issue,” because “the position she takes is we have cost saving programs” which would reduce cost of insurance and make it more widely available but not actually provide insurance for all. “The national will is here — what we need is leadership,” Elizabeth said, and specifically pointed to the fact that John Edwards has been honest about the fact that there are “sacrifices were going to have to make to get there” — namely raising taxes on those making more than 200K. “I’ve been disappointed that she’s been unwilling to say that,” Elizabeth said about Hillary.

Many of the questions from the general crowd had to do with healthcare and education — from the availability of childcare and elder care to getting young people involved politically. To the former, Elizabeth pointed to importance to making these occupations more attractive via financial incentives; to the latter, she spoke to the importance to making young people feel they aren’t in a vacuum, that they can hear an echo from the work they do.

On media consolidation, Elizabeth said she doesn’t want the Rupert Murdoch “to be the gatekeeper of the information that comes to the American people.” She elaborated later to say that she wasn’t speaking about Murdoch specifically — though she finds him “problematic” — but to the fact that any one person’s voice should be heard so loudly. “I agree with me all the time,” she said jokingly, “and I still don’t think I should be the sieve through which all the information should come to you.”

Then she came and partied with us at the Chicago Children’s Museum, and I got to ask her about her and John’s eco-activism –

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