Steven White helpfully points out:
To make a comparison, Rudy Giuliani is actually wealthier than John Edwards, by a little less than $10 million. Mitt Romney? Despite the obsession with Edwards, Romney's personal wealth is a stunning four times as much. This hardly gets mentioned. But of course, neither of these candidates is talking about poverty and the reality of social class.
To say this explicitly, it's okay to be rich if you act rich. The amount of flak Edwards is getting for being both wealthy and concerned with the working class versus the amount of criticism Giuliani and Romney are getting for being uber-rich and utterly unconcerned with issue of class and wage fairness is telling. The press doesn't care if you're loaded and out-of-touch, or self-interested. But to both make a lot of money and think other people should make relatively more money? Why, that's-that's-that's-that's hypocrisy* is what that is!
To engage in some pop-psychology, my sense is that folks in the press corps are very unsettled by social justice types. No end of folks got into journalism through activism, or as a close alternative to it, and as the mores of the profession took them further and further away from direct work on the issues that once enraged them, they've grown somewhat defensively contemptuous of those who took the other path. The poverty activists I know are ecstatic that John Edwards has brought so much visibility to their issues. The media types are aching to point out his hypocrisy, and expose him as a fraud. For the first group, Edwards' focus on poverty doesn't call their life choices, and occupational compromises, into question. For the second group, it does, and so there's an urge to explain it away. If everyone is a fraud, than having turned into a suit is a relatively minor sin.
*Not actually hypocrisy.