NEW YORK -- Jeanine Pirro is running for the Senate from New York state. She is the Westchester County district attorney whose husband went to prison for tax evasion. If she gets the Republican nomination, Pirro will run against Hillary Clinton. She is the incumbent whose husband was impeached as president of the United States. A third candidate in the race is Edward Cox. He is a New York lawyer whose father-in-law, Richard Nixon, resigned the presidency in disgrace. I pick up the morning paper with trepidation. What will Victoria Gotti do next?
I have, of course, mooshed my apples and oranges in a breathtakingly casual way. In the first place, as longtime fans of this column know, I am mostly an admirer of Bill Clinton and still think, as I hope he still does too, that he was indeed set up by a vast, right-wing conspiracy. This is not the case with Albert Pirro, whose "crime" was emphatically a crime and who leaves Bill Clinton in the dust on this and other scores. Pirro also fathered a child in an extramarital affair. You can, as they say, look it up.
But what's striking about the Clinton-Pirro race, if it comes to pass, is that both women have marriages that seem, on the surface at least, to be at odds with the conventional ideal. It's not just that both husbands are proven philanderers, it's that they were publicly so. This can be even more of a problem, since what we are all willing to suffer in private might become insufferable if it becomes public. Then the unknowable questions that haunt all marriages become unbearable burdens. There are still, despite all you might have read, people for whom pride or humiliation are enormous factors.
If anything, the Pirros make the Clintons seem as if they have a marriage out of an antique quilt. Jeanine Pirro has been quoted as saying that she's sticking in her marriage because her husband is "the father of my children," and then suggesting that the couple leads mostly separate lives anyway. "I don't follow him around," she once said. "I work 18 hours a day. I don't want to hear about what he does. He doesn't care what I do." FTD would go broke on this couple.
What we have here are examples of marriages with the bylaws of a Washington lobbying firm -- Republican and Democratic partners who share the proceeds while they conduct political warfare. The important thing, I take it, is the take itself, a divvying up of the proceeds in which money matters more than mere politics. A similar principle applies in these marriages. What matters most is the perpetuation of the ongoing concern. Every marriage decides what that is. For some it's money or raising kids or sharing property or running the Democratic Party -- or simply stability, no matter how unstable. Who are we to judge?
The third factor in the New York Senate race is even more intriguing to me. Here we must summon Eddie Cox and, of course, his wife, the former Tricia Nixon. My indelible memory of her is of the young woman accompanying her parents, Richard and Pat, as they walked to the helicopter that took them into exile. You would think that someone who went through that painful experience, a daughter who saw her father's suffering, would never again go near public life. But, no, her husband's in the Senate race and she, as custom dictates, will give him that wifely day-long smile of adoration and sit, as custom also dictates, for interviews both pleasant and painful.
The same holds for the other women associated with this race -- even more so if Hillary Clinton eventually runs for president. In effect, she will once again invite us to dissect her marriage and why she stays in it. She is clearly up to it -- but why she is up to it is something many of us will never understand. The life of a politician, ever strange, is getting stranger and stranger.
In the meantime, it is abundantly clear that New York state has retaken the lead from California in pioneering social change. Marriage here just ain't what it used to be -- or what it was once supposed to be. The Empire State's women, at least some of those associated with politics, are showing themselves to be strong, steadfast, impervious to leering curiosity and willing to go their own way in marriage. No matter who wins, the cliche about a weaker sex is surely going to lose.
cohenr@washpost.com
