It's possible to feel a reluctant admiration for the summary way that Missouri Democrats have drafted Jean Carnahan to kind-of-sort-of become their candidate for the U.S. Senate. After her husband, Gov. Mel Carnahan, was killed last week en route to a campaign event in the crash of a small plane piloted by his son, the state party found itself in the awkward position of having no time to replace him in his race against Republican Sen. John Ashcroft. So the new governor, Roger Wilson, has urged voters to cast their ballots for the late governor, promising to appoint his widow to the seat if the deceased wins the election.
If the plan seems--as Missouri Republicans have loudly charged--a little on the tricky side, one can rationalize that it avoids an even less democratic outcome: Had party activists done nothing, then Carnahan's untimely death would have disenfranchised all of the state's Democratic voters.
So why does the whole thing make me queasy? One clue is the casuistry that has ruled the state's debate over the process. While a dead man can't hold office, some legal scholars say, he has every right to run for office. Ah, but he has to meet the usual eligibility requirements, counter others, and a dead man may not be an American citizen. When your state's best legal minds are debating such questions, it might be a sign that something is amiss.
But more than that, the governor's announcement violates my visceral wish that we'd move beyond the age of the Widow Gambit. If we can draw any lesson from Hillary Clinton's explosive passage across the national scene, it is that women who earn and wield power second-hand, by virtue of their roles as wives, only complicate our slow awakening to women's true capacities. It is no criticism of Jean Carnahan to find something dispiriting in the ease with which we can still reach for a female seat-warmer.
Time was, a politician's widow was appointed to fill out his term, or--in the case of a House member--drafted to run in a special election after his death, by whatever political machine had backed the dead man. A widow was thought to be reassuring to the voter (like any good wife, she would think whatever he had thought, right?), but easily controlled by the men behind the scenes, and easily shoved aside once the men had arrived at a worthy (male) successor. In practice, these women weren't always so easy to displace. But the very notion of the "widow's mandate," as it was once known, is an artifact of a time when women mostly couldn't and didn't seek political power directly.
Six of the first 13 female U.S. senators took this route to power, and a seventh, Margaret Chase Smith, started her congressional career filling out the House term of her late husband. By contrast, only one of the nine women now serving in the U.S. Senate began her political career after a bereavement, and that was in the distant past. (Olympia Snowe, of Maine, first ran for her state's legislature to succeed her husband, who died in a car crash in 1973; she has since amassed a long, estimable record as a moderate Republican House member and senator.)
It's entirely possible that Jean Carnahan--who has signaled that she may be willing to take the seat, but has not officially decided--would make a good senator. Raising four children while seamlessly supporting a career politician may be a life of such rigor as to prepare a woman for almost anything. But ask yourself why Gov. Wilson seized on her. Only a wife possesses the desirable quality of empty vessel, into which the voter can pour whatever sentiment he or she held for the deceased. Only a wife holds the anodyne promise that she can capitalize on the voter's fondness for her husband, while remaining a vague enough figure that her appointment cannot offend.
But perhaps the Carnahan story touches on a more primal uneasiness, for what it says about the implacable nature of our politics. What a thing to ask of a woman who has just lost her husband of 46 years, and one of her children, in a violent accident. Put yourself in her shoes: You can pick up your husband's all-consuming work--which you may love as the cause for which he died, or hate as the thing that killed him or, since you are human, both; or you can refuse, walking away from everything he worked for. Take your time: You have a couple of days to think it over.
It is one of the glories of our form of government that its wheels grind on, even in the face of death and disaster. But it may be the shame of our politics that its practitioners are so very nimble at making the best of our losses.
