Running Mates
It's a Tricky Role, but Somebody Has to Be the Candidate's Spouse

By Lois Romano
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 23, 2007

This is one strange year for political spouses.

During the 1992 presidential campaign, Hillary Rodham Clinton stepped out as the unabashed career-driven wife -- and paid a high price for it. Portrayed as power hungry, she spent the next decade trying to win back the homemakers and other voters she alienated.

But she also thrived, surviving two presidential terms as the commanding "wife of." Then, in one of life's more astonishing journeys, the first lady became a senator and, from there, a front-running presidential candidate.

This all leaves the current crop of feisty spouses teetering between dutiful mate and accomplished professional as they try to adapt an archaic stereotype to fit contemporary times.

Elizabeth Edwards will say in one breath that her job is made easier by the fact there are now "so many more female role models in careers like entertainment, the media and politics." But she will also say she's not about to make the same mistakes Clinton did.

"Hillary Clinton in 1992 is a lesson in what not to do," offers Edwards, also a lawyer by training, whose husband is one of Clinton's opponents in the presidential race. "She was dismissive of the range of options women had chosen, declaring, 'I don't bake cookies. . . . I don't stand by my man.' That turned off some people."

However Clinton handled the 1992 campaign, it is hard to deny that her choices have changed traditional expectations, freeing her successors to step out from the shadows. Working mothers in campaigns are no longer anomalies, and Elizabeth Kucinich has not been compelled to conceal being the first wife of a major party presidential candidate with a pierced tongue. The wives seem more empowered than ever to speak out, sometimes against Clinton.

The intensity and speed of the 2008 presidential cycle has thrust onto center stage prematurely these women who seem to make as much news as the candidates. The first lady contenders include lawyers, a business owner, a public affairs executive, a Red Cross official, a nurse, a political operative, a college professor and homemakers. The spotlight will be on five of them today in California, when they join Maria Shriver to talk about the choices and compromises all have made as political spouses. Also looming large in any discussion of mates this year, of course, is a former president masquerading as just another supportive spouse.

Janet Fowler, a Dartmouth College government professor who has closely followed electoral politics, says there are "certainly a lot more activist wives these days.

"And there is a greater acceptance of assertive women that is consistent with other societal trends," she adds. "But there is still a divide in the country in what people want and expect. Look at how much people like Laura Bush."

While a likable spouse is still far down the list of what most voters seek in a candidate, recent polls show that the partner nonetheless cannot be ignored. In a recent Newsweek survey, 57 percent of respondents said that a candidate's relationship with his or her spouse is revealing about what kind of president that person would be, and nearly a quarter of voters in a May Fox News poll said their opinions of candidate spouses would be extremely or very important to their vote.

As the most prominent and important surrogates in a campaign, they no longer have the luxury of sitting it out, or of traveling exclusively at their husband's (or wife's) side. Most keep independent schedules often as rigorous as the candidate's, have support staffs and strategically use their voices to promote the candidate and sometimes criticize the opposition, while trying to hold on to their own identities.

Edwards has pointedly swiped at Clinton, and Michelle Obama made it pretty clear she was reluctant to give up her career as a vice president at the University of Chicago Medical Center. (She has compromised by curtailing her workload to about a fifth of what it was before.) Ann Romney, a proud homemaker, took a potshot at her husband's opponents who have been married more than once.

Bess Truman, they are not. The American public is no longer inclined to tolerate a disengaged spouse.

Laura Bush is the most popular member of the Bush administration and has approval ratings that are twice her husband's, but not necessarily because she's a traditional spouse. "There is a great deal of independence perceived in her case," says Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center. "She's not associated with the policies of her husband's administration like Nancy Reagan and Hillary Clinton were."

Today's spouse is expected to know the issues and to advocate, while also presenting the traditional imagery of family. "I don't know that what any of us of are doing is anything different than most American women, trying to prioritize," says Jeri Thompson, a former political operative and the wife of Republican candidate Fred Thompson.

But these women are leading their lives and prioritizing in full public view as they audition for first lady. "We do look at these women and try to get an idea of how they'll fit our image of the first lady as icon," says Carl Sferrazza Anthony, who has written numerous books on first ladies and political families.

Obama got off to a rocky start in her early speeches when she talked about her husband's dirty socks and how he was "stinky" in the morning, an image people perhaps might have found a little too human. Those references have since been dropped from her stump speech, and she's not giving many interviews these days.

Jackie Clegg Dodd, who runs her own international business-consulting firm and is the wife of Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd, said that it's critical not to create an "us versus them situation, homemakers versus career women," which she said Clinton did.

* * *

Most know that their most important job is to keep the focus away from themselves and on the most positive aspects of the candidate. "There is no two-for-one," says Edwards, who gave up practicing law in 1996, in a reference to one of Bill Clinton's controversial lines in the 1992 race. "No one elected me to anything."

Apparently no one told Teresa Heinz Kerry that the candidate came first. In 2004, her introductions of her husband, Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, were largely long-winded stories about herself. She also tended to talk about her late husband, John Heinz, a tad more in interviews than her current one. Eventually, her profile was lowered.

Judith Steinberg Dean became an issue in husband Howard Dean's 2004 presidential bid for what she didn't do: campaign. Steinberg, a physician in Vermont, did not show up in public until right before the Iowa caucuses, at the urging of Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, who told the candidate that voters needed to see her. Darned if they do; darned if they don't. Campaigns and spouses negotiate this daily.

Thompson's entry into the race was briefly overshadowed by controversies over his wife's involvement in the campaign, and he was forced to spend time defending her. "It's understandable that American people want to see the spouse of who they are looking at as candidates," says Jeri Thompson, who notes that she was not at all surprised at the intensity and negativity of the news coverage about her. "It's part of the deal, part of the process." Nevertheless, she has tried to stay in the background since. She made her comments, in response to questions, via voice mail.

Rudy Giuliani's wife, Judith, has also tried to stay under the radar following two unflattering magazine stories.

The political wife of decades past had a well-defined role as a behind-the-scenes helpmate. Pat Nixon barely spoke. Abigail McCarthy considered herself "excess baggage." Bess Truman dodged the public altogether, saying: "I am not the one elected. I have nothing to say to the public." Jackie Kennedy rarely campaigned. Mamie Eisenhower said, "Ike runs the country, and I turn the pork chops."

A 21st-century campaign doesn't allow much room for a candidate's wife to disengage. The lightning media turnaround coupled with a celebrity culture shines the same white-hot lights on the spouse that were once reserved for just the candidate. Elizabeth Edwards has been startlingly outspoken during this campaign, calling in to a live news-talk program to take on right-wing pundit Ann Coulter on national television and saying there was too much "hatred" of Hillary Clinton for her to win the general election. She maintains she's not behaving much differently from 2004, when her husband was the Democratic vice presidential nominee. "There's just a lot more coverage," says Edwards, who has received additional attention since revealing she is battling incurable cancer.

"What we're seeing is the collision and collusion of the news media and the need for celebrity," says Paul Costello, who worked for former first lady Rosalynn Carter and Kitty Dukakis, wife of the 1988 Democratic nominee. "There was never this much attention paid to wives during the primaries before."

Anthony, the author, says Republican candidates aiming to attract the conservative base have to be more careful about the image they present to a constituency looking for a more traditional marriage. Their wives are far less open about their influence within the campaign.

Cindy McCain, who is chairman of her family's business, an Anheuser-Busch distributor, and active in humanitarian causes, says she feels her platform is best used to soften her husband's image and to talk about family. "The public really does want to see you as a couple," she says.

But there is such a thing as too much coupling. Rudy Giuliani has been criticized for taking phone calls from his wife -- 40, the Wall Street Journal estimated -- in the middle of public appearances. Last month, he awkwardly answered a cellphone call from her during a televised speech to the NRA, leaving the audience uneasy. (Fox News actually polled on the subject, and found that only 9 percent of Americans thought it appropriate for a candidate to interrupt a speech to pick up a call from his spouse.)

Jeri Thompson, who initially was believed to be micromanaging her husband's campaign, says her primary role is to "unapologetically" take care of her two toddlers and her husband.

Janet Huckabee, whose husband, Mike, is trying to lay claim to the Christian right, is an executive with Red Cross and ran for secretary of state in Arkansas. Yet in an interview, she is careful to play down her influence and role. "I primarily support my husband," says Huckabee, who said she has kept her job for income, and travels on weekends with the campaign. "On a very simplistic level, I try to be a helpmate.

"My husband is the candidate. He doesn't need me to be as well."

Ann Romney said in an interview that her role as a mother, wife and grandmother is her most important one. Still, these days she doesn't spend all that much time at home.

Limited by a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis a decade ago, Romney says she nonetheless independently travels about three days a week for her husband's campaign.

"What I feel I can do is talk about his personal side," she said. "I can talk about the issues if I'm asked. But I like to let people know we're a family and he's a husband and a father."

Of course, that hasn't stopped her from getting in a periodic jab. Asked earlier this year at a campaign event what distinguished her husband from the rest of the field, this wife of nearly four decades replied sweetly, "He's had only one wife."

Research director Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.