Stepford (First) Wives

On a Yale political e-mail list today, a Republican subscriber named JP posted this measured praise of Howard Dean:

Dean should be accorded quite a bit of respect for his answer to the whole wife question, essentially that her job was far more important than helping his campaign. Why cannot other politicians emulate this?

The answer, I think, is that the media demand that political wives participate in a Platonic form of which Laura Bush is the closest earthly exemplar. It's an example of how culturally liberal media (I won't deny that particular bias) unquestioningly presume family structures in the "heartland" (they call it "flyover" off-camera) are ordered in particular ways, from which any deviation earns the scorn of pundits even less culturally traditionalist than the politicians in question.

Personally, I would have more respect for a male politician who marries a thoughtful, intelligent, independent woman than one who marries a doughy-eyed semi-professional agree-er. I'm probably in the minority on that (I don't claim to have a privileged understanding the culture of red America), though I suspect that the pre-fabricated media narratives about who is and who isn't an acceptable political wife create a positive feedback loop. I quite agree with the gentleman that Judy Dean is to be commended. In fact, given the relevant choices this year, Dr. Mrs. Dean is probably the person I'd regret voting for the least.

I suspect that a lot of the animus against Mrs. Clinton derives from her struggle to represent herself as a traditional housewife in 1992. Her utter contempt for housewives was so thinly veiled that (a majority of) people who cite things like the cattle futures deal as a reason for disliking her (c'mon, she's obviously guilty but financial malfeasance is thoroughly bipartisan) probably have that subconsciously in mind.

I'm most certainly in a minority in actually liking THK. (Hey, I like European women and I like heiresses, and the way she orders Kerry around reminds of my mother and the mothers of all my Jewish friends in New Jersey). Sure she says crazy things from time to time (okay, frequently) [less frequently than Donald Rumsfeld--ed.], but she's had an unquestionably interesting life (actually a bit like my mom's except for the inheriting $500 million portion of it), and she's just about the only first lady candidate since, I dunno, Ladybird Johnson, that I could see myself having a conversation with. (I know a lot of people in both parties love Nancy Reagan. I rather admire her advocacy of stem-cell research, and it's nice to have some Reagans on my side occasionally, but the "Just Say No" stuff left indelible mental scars, as I imagine was the case for quite a lot of young kids in the 80s; though it was ironically, educational in the end, in that it was my first encounter with the phenomenon of moralistic hypocrisy. To this day nothing sets off my bullshit alarm faster than an anti-drug message.)