Candidate's Spouses - Do They Impact You?

They Stand By Their Men, Loudly

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Published: August 26, 2007

RICHARD NIXON had definite views about how the wife of a presidential candidate should campaign. In 1992, he was watching a lawyer named Hillary Clinton aggressively defend her husband in New Hampshire.

“If the wife comes through as being too strong and too intelligent,” Mr. Nixon observed, “it makes the husband look like a wimp.”

Now, 15 years later, strong and intelligent women are out in force on the campaign trail, and the focus is not just on how they reflect on their husbands but how they reflect on themselves. These women are full partners in their husbands’ campaigns while running mini-campaigns of their own, with hectic travel schedules, strategic agendas and a media horde in tow.

Is it any surprise, then, that they can “make news” just as often as their husbands? Or that the “news” about them can be distorted?

Michelle Obama, the wife of Senator Barack Obama, discovered this last week, if not before, when news reports truncated a comment she made about keeping one’s house in order. Her comment was quickly interpreted as a swipe at Mrs. Clinton. Fox News’ “Fox & Friends,” for example, showed a picture of Mrs. Obama juxtaposed against Mrs. Clinton over the caption: “THE CLAWS COME OUT.”

(For the record, Mrs. Obama said: “One of the most important things that we need to know about the next president of the United States is, is he somebody that shares our values? Is he somebody that respects family? Is he a good and decent person? Our view was that, if you can’t run your own house, you certainly can’t run the White House. So, we’ve adjusted our schedules to make sure that our girls are first. So while he’s traveling around, I do day trips.”)

Emerging from the flap was what “The Early Show” on CBS said was a “school of thought” that only wives could criticize Mrs. Clinton because if a man did, he might be accused of browbeating. Rick Lazio fell into that trap in 2000 when he ran against Mrs. Clinton for the Senate seat from New York. During a debate, he walked over to her lectern and demanded she sign a pledge not to accept the kind of campaign contributions known as soft money. He was widely perceived as an ogre and in that moment created sympathy for Mrs. Clinton.

This year, both John Edwards and Mr. Obama have criticized Mrs. Clinton on various fronts, from her vote to authorize the Iraq war to her acceptance of money from lobbyists. But they have not used a Lazio-like sledgehammer.

“No one says they are not being chivalrous,” said Carl Sferrazza Anthony, who has written extensively about the political influence of First Families.

Yet the dynamic with the wives and a female frontrunner has complicated matters. Elizabeth Edwards has been the trailblazer, criticizing Mrs. Clinton regularly, to the point of saying that Mr. Edwards would be better than Mrs. Clinton on issues that matter to women.

With spouses less programmed than in the past, the line is blurrier between what women like Mrs. Edwards and Mrs. Obama want to say and what the campaigns need them to say.

“These are two women lawyers who have been in the professional world where they’re expected to speak up,” Mr. Anthony said. “But they still serve as windows into their husbands’ character.”

And possibly windows into the campaign’s needs. Witness Mrs. Edwards’s recent lament: “We can’t make John black. We can’t make him a woman. Those things get you a lot of press, worth a certain amount of fundraising dollars.” Clearly she was expressing the campaign’s frustration at the media’s priorities, but she was skewered anyway (sometimes hilariously, with one blogger writing, “Mrs. Edwards wishes husband John was a black woman”).

The Internet has taken up the debate over whether Mrs. Edwards, a beloved figure in the blogosphere, is being effective or has gone too far.

A sampling from DemocraticUnderground.com:

“I adore Elizabeth Edwards, but the campaign is making a huge mistake by having her be the ‘hit squad.’ ”

“Elizabeth Edwards is allowed to say what she wants. People can either choose to agree or disagree.”

“You are right and we can criticize John Edwards for letting her fight his battles.”

“She isn’t ‘fighting his battles,’ she is merely stating her opinion.”

Robert Thompson, a professor of media and popular culture at Syracuse University, said that Elizabeth Edwards’s unusual circumstances — as a smart, appealing woman undergoing treatment for cancer — has further complicated her role. “It used to be that all you had to do was make your candidate look good and make the other guy look bad,” he said. “Now, it’s: ‘Do we use Elizabeth’s gravitas to help make her husband seem deeper? Or do we move away from it because the juxtaposition makes him look like a guy who just cares about his haircut?’”

Modern campaigns almost demand that a wife speak up; they certainly give her plenty of chances. This is true even among Republican wives, who, like Nancy Reagan, often wield their power behind the scenes. Ann Romney, the wife of Mitt Romney, was asked what set her husband apart from the other candidates. “He’s had only one wife,” she replied.

David Redlawsk, who teaches political science at the University of Iowa, said that polls showed that most people do not vote for a candidate based on that person’s spouse, although that might be different this year in the case of Mrs. Clinton. But generally, he said, the spouses might as well say what they want.

“It might get folks up in arms,” he said, “but it also gets media attention.”

Mrs. Clinton, of course, could have excellent advice for the wives about how to navigate this universe.

“Hillary is four laps ahead of them,” Mr. Thompson said. “She knows how complicated this is. She would be a great mentor for them. She was there, she knows their pain.”

Alas, she is probably the last person who wants to make it easier for them.