Climbing The Greasy Pole: Should Political Spouses Be On The Ballot too?

We can’t elect couples, but we can acknowledge that political spouses bought their ticket so they gotta take the ride. Life isn’t fair and the couple has to decide in advance how to conduct themselves. If the spouse is going to make coin from the other’s political fortunes, shine the spotlight on them.

Works the other way, too. Rudy Giuliani deserves to be sunk by Judy. I’d question the character of someone who could stand to be around such a revolting person, let alone dump his previous wife for her. Two peas in a pod, I guess.

Hillary Clinton bothers me because, aside from her triangulating Iraq to the very last, she has nothing to offer women, let alone poor and/or working women, but she’s trying to win the women’s vote simply because she’s female. Hillary’s the Girl Power! candidate.

A girl can do ANYTHING!

So, uh, what do you plan to do? What have you done so far?

Whoo! Girl Power in the Senate! In the White House!

I didn’t quite catch that. Why should women vote for you again?

Because We Girls understand each other!

o_0

Because I’ll probably be running against the un-Groovy Ghoulies. From New York.

Okay, guess that’ll have to do. See ya next November.

[…] As much as I enjoy and admire Private Eye (I’ve been a regular reader for over 20 years), let’s face it, in its attitudes to women and minorities it ican often be paternalistic, colonial and crass, the cuteness and likeability of Ian Hislop on HIGNFY notwithstanding. So if I didn’t absolutely dismiss the rumour (because leaving ethnicity aside she is young and he is old and it’s been known) I suspected the motivation behind it. […]

I love the commentary on this site – I link to Progressive Gold from my own little blog – but this post was chock-full of sexism.

Where to begin?

Mrs. Fred Thompson certainly looks like a trophy wife, but she’s not. She is a seasoned, high-level Republican operative who is responsible for re-packaging her lazy-ass know-nothing husband as a presidential candidate. Who convinced him he could run and win? Who got the Republican establishment on board (which meant pulling a lot of people away from McCain)? The so-called “trophy wife.” I am pretty sure I wouldn’t agree with a thing that woman says or does, but to call her an empty shell just because she’s blonde and surgically-enhanced is wrong. Remember that thing about not judging a book by its cover?

You take a broad swipe at politicians who put their wives on the payroll, or even wives who have the audacity to work in the same field as their politican-spouses. Again, this is very unfair. These women are not blank slates. They most likely had an interest in and experience with politics before they met their husbands. They have their own expertise. Are they supposed to drop everything when their husbands are elected? Is his career so important that she must be reduced to a mere satellite? In a way, this is just another version of the inequity in so many marriages – yes, both partners may see themselves as equal, but whose career is supposed to take a back seat in the interests of the family? Always hers.

It is still much harder for a woman to get elected in the U.S. than a man; the U.S. lags behind many other countries in terms of gender representation in the national government. Unfortunately, to run in the U.S. you have to be able to convince early backers that you are a viable candidate, and historically it has been much, much harder for women to do that than men. And many of the women you have in mind would have had to begin running decades ago, when things were worse than they are now.

In other words, what you are seeing is a generation of women who didn’t have the opportunities their spouses had, and settled for less. Years down the line it means her job is lower status than his, and she is seen as a “hanger on” who benefits from his achievements.

Your description of the ideal First Lady is pretty much on target. I would say Laura Bush fits the bill – mute, pretty but not sexy, demure, professional experience limited to activities a short step from motherhood (primary school teacher, librarian, and so on). Always younger (and shorter) than her spouse, and never a drinker, a smoker, or overweight. Sort of the Virgin Mary meets Betty Crocker – another cartoon composite far from the reality of most women’s lives. Laura’s a woman who is certainly not trying to “profit” from her husband’s position by having any personal goals… well, I don’t find that kind of automaton preferable in the least.

To sum up – you say this sexist media conversation about political spouses benefits political women least of all – and I agree. In that spirit, maybe take a closer look at a few of the things you said in this post.

And finally, this recurrent sexism about Hillary Clinton from people who haven’t taken the time to actually look at her background drives me nuts! First off, she has almost the same education as Bill. But while he ran for office in Arkansas, she kept working as a lawyer. Now, if she had moved back to Illinois she might have run for a state-level office, and worked her way up. But she was in love and she got married. Its what a lot of women in the 1970s did.

So Bill ran and she kept working in the law. She worked diligently on children’s rights throughout the 1980s, with the Childrens Defense Fund and elsewhere. She was already a recognized leader in that field before the presidential campaign. And believe me, children’s rights is a very difficult field – the very idea of children having rights independent of their parents, and what legal representation they are owed in cases of abuse, neglect etc., is very controversial. I consider this a woman’s issue because it disproportionately concerns girls who are the victims of sexual abuse.

She made sure feminist voices were heard in the White House, and her presence and speech at the Beijing 4th World Conference on Women was very important. The Clinton White House never waivered on women’s issues – there was never any question that Bill would cave on, say, partial birth abortion legislation – and that is in large part because of Hillary’s influence. If I wanted to spend more time on this, I could find more examples from those years, but I don’t.

The notion that she hasn’t done anything for women is ridiculous, especially compared to the other Democratic candidates who really haven’t done anything for women except make the right noises (and even John Edwards won’t support the right of gays and lesbians to marry, not to mention letting Bill Donohue bully two of his staff out of a job).

In closing – I do love this site, particularly for its mix of U.S., UK and NL stories. Keep up the excellent work. Now excuse me while my head explodes.

Jeri Thompson doid not become involved in politics until after her husband, when after a life of mooching around, as many in their tenties do, she was suddenly elevated to lobbying and campaign positions.

As for Clinton, I have acknowledged her achievements inclusding in the foedl of child law and they are many – but they are in the past. What is she doing now? Name one concrete tjhing she has done for women and i don’t mean going on tv and eating crow over Monica.

Take the credit card industry for example. When not a senator Clinton lobbied her husband, then president, to relax rapacious credit laws that were disproportionately affecting lone female parents – yet as soon as she became a Senator, her campaign funded with credit card money, she voted for the bankruptcy protections she once chanpioned to be removed, to the favour of the credit card industry. She is a creature of the same moneyed interests and elite power structures that have always run the Democratic party and the fact remains that without her husband she never would have had the name recognition that enabled her to become senator; that is an uncontravertible fact and there’s nothing sexist about stating it.

The sexism is in the system that means that’s one of the few ways a woman of talent can succeed in US politics – and it’s clear it’s success that’s what’s important to Clinton, not what she can do for the unrepresented.

How far is she prepared to go to win? This weekend she has said she would not take using nuclear weapons against a declared ally, Pakistan, off the table. There are a lot of poor women and children who would not find this policy to their taste. I do agree ith you however that in her lack of concern for the disposessed she is no different to the other Democratic candidates.

I am no fan of John Edwards, i think he’s a nartcissits and a hypocrite in many ways and yes he did cave to Donohue but I questioned his political judgement on who he hired ( and why they accepted) at the time. However, at least his stance on poverty has a great deal more relevance to the lives of many women and children than any amount of pro-choice t-rhetoric and Yearly Kos attendance. There can be no other equality until there is economic equality.

It’s all very well to have the right to abortion and family planning but what if you can’t afford the busfare to the clinic or the pill prescription?

Apologies for the typos. My eyesight is not great.

Ciccina:

Re Jeri Thompson, you may find this article interesting. ”

On Aug. 5, 1997, Kehn sent Thompson’s Senate office a 12-page proposal to “design, develop, host and maintain a world-class multimedia Web site” at a cost of $45,000 per year. As her qualification for the contract, Kehn cited her job at a small Nashville firm that provided daily news summaries to health-care companies.

“She is a seasoned, high-level Republican operative”, my ass.

Two weeks later, Thompson’s staff sharply rejected the proposal, according to memos located by the Memphis Commercial Appeal in the Thompson Senate archives, stored at the University of Tennessee. “I consider this project technically vague and stunningly overpriced,” a staff member wrote.

Nope, Jeri is an ambitioous amateur (who learns fast, asmittedly) and who lucked out on a particlarly malleable and biddable stooge.

Palau: thank you for the response and for the link to the clip on Mrs. Thompson.

I’ll take the easy point first: anti-poverty programs are meaningless without guaranteed access to birth control. The ability to limit family size is an essential, decisive factor in determining a woman’s ability to work, to secure sufficient resources for herself and her family’s basic needs (nutrition, shelter, education and so on); and I’ll just stop there because I know you know what I’m getting at. My point – don’t fall into the trap of pitting “pro-choice rhetoric” vs. “real” poverty initiatives. In the U.S., the pro-choice movement has always been about access to birth control (though the media rarely reports on this issue – until very recently they wrote all the concern off as hysteria/ propaganda).

There can be no economic equality without women’s equality, and women’s equality entails her ability to regulate her own fertility on her own terms. Further, economic development – the kind that helps poor people, rather than just improving a nation’s bottom line – is predicated on securing the full spectrum of women’s rights (and this of course includes not just reproductive rights but laws and practices regarding lending, inheritance, divorce, property ownership, workplace discrimination, safety from male violence, forced marriages and so on). I hope I don’t sound too much like I’m lecturing because I actually think you probably agree.

As for Clinton, I think you have such a visceral dislike of her that its getting in the way of seeing her as she as. I won’t go through her voting record because, while she has a perfect record on the core women’s issues, so do other Senators (Boxer, Stabenow, etc.) But she is known as a real advocate on Capitol Hill behind the scenes as well. At minimum, her website mentions the Prevention First Act, which wasn’t going anywhere until Hillary got behind it, and her work on international family planning funding as first lady and as Senator (there are clips going back to 1994 that document her raising this issue in the U.S. and abroad).

But in short, not only is she committed to women’s issues, but she has been for a long, long time.

At a minimum, even if you want to say that she hasn’t done *that much* for women, you must agree that she has done more than any of the other candidates.

What has Edwards done that stands out? He supports “seperate but equal” on gay marriage, sent his wife to speak for him at the Planned Parenthood candidates forum, and gave Donohue political juice by caving to his demands.

And Obama – what? He voted “present” on a politically tough, totally bogus pro-life state leg bill that other legislators found the courage to openly oppose, and everyone concerned admits it was because it was politically expedient not to take a stand. So what in the track record of either man suggests he won’t sell women out when he’s in the White House? Pretty statements? (Also, I just cannot get past the idea of handing the country over to a man with so little experience on the national stage, just because he says / believes the right things. Freaky).

Then you’ve got Biden, who has a very “mixed” record on choice (on the NARAL vote scorecard he earned a 33 out of 100% in 1995; 43% in 1996; 34% in 1997… he didn’t shape up until 2004 http://www.naral.org/elections/statements/candidate-record-biden.pdf). And who else is running – Kucinich, who is not only nuts but has a severely anti-choice voting record? Even current Senate majority leader Reid sold women out on key votes, and there is also a drumbeat from certain people in Democratic circles urging candidates to “moderate” by voting pro-life on the most politically difficult issues.

My point is that on women’s issues you cannot just go on trust, because we get sold out all out the time. It seems absolutely clear to me that Hillary is the least likely person to back down on this stuff. Not only does she take these issues personally, but she is the only one who has already had to deal with the ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ and knows first hand what they are about. And if you want to deny she has any personal integrity and is just power hungry, consider that she is the candidate least tied to a “southern strategy” and has the least to gain by throwing the Bible Belt a bone.

That said, it is really, really insulting to keep saying that this is just about women voting for a woman because she’s a woman. If that really were a factor, or a viable strategy, you would have seen Elizabeth Dole gain more traction in her presidential run. It seems from the media coverage and some public reaction that being a woman counts against her more than it counts in her favor. Keep in mind that the unfair attention paid to Edwards’ haircut and the whole Breck Girl thing is partly about feminizing him – reinforcing the idea that femininity and credibility are mutually exclusive qualities.

As for saying she would never have become Senator without her husband’s name recognition, yes, it is sexist. It is sexist because you are assuming that she couldn’t have done this on her own if she hadn’t been married to Bill. And yet other women have run for the Senate and won and they are not married to Bill. So what gives? Do you think she is less intelligent, skillful and driven than non-Bill spouses like Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, or Debbie Stabenow? Or do all women who get to the Senate get there because of the man they married?

I am not saying that Bill’s popularity, both among the public and among donors, was not an asset to her campaign. But so was the name recognition that she earned from her years of performance as First Lady. Don’t think so? Imagine Bill had been married to somebody like Cindy McCain, or a human doorstop like Laura Bush. Do you think either of them could win a Senate seat anywhere – and I mean, if they had Bill Clinton for a husband and the exposure of 8 years in the White House? While at the time she began her run Hillary was unpopular among a certain set of voters, people still agreed that she was intelligent and serious. In fact, the conservatives who hate her now still agree on those points.

Until we can fold space and time, we don’t have a shot at knowing what her career path would have been if she hadn’t married Bill. But being first lady to a popular president alone does not hand you a Senate seat, especially not in a very, very tough state like New York.

But to harp on her relationship with her husband is pointless. He was an asset to her campaign just as Edwards’ personal money from trial lawyering is an asset to his, or Romney’s “good looks” (so not my type), or Kucinich’s credibility with the Area 51 crowd. Its a part of picture – but just part. It doesn’t define the whole person (except maybe Kucinich).

I hope I’m not monopolizing your time. I do appreciate the response (and the blog as a whole).

Sorry, forgot again about Mrs. Thompson. Thanks for the link to the WaPo clip. I still see things differently though.

She is high-level. She has access to the top Republican office holders, strategists and donors. If she were a ditz, not only would they not be talking to her about serious issues, but there would be a tremendous below-the-radar questioning of Thompson’s judgment in letting her call the shots. There isn’t. She didn’t start out high-level, but she there now.

Yes, her background is sketchy but her work experience after she arrived in Washington is solid. I mean, the way some reporters snigger you’d think she came to DC to work as a stripper. Undoubtedly the connection to Thompson helped her get the first gig but that is exactly how things work in Washington, unfortunately. The best jobs go to the people with the best connections. Your personal relationships are considered professional assets. That’s why it sucks to live in Washington (which I do). It is the norm around here and doesn’t *necessarily* reflect on a person’s aptitude, though, if you are a moron or a total screw-up it is difficult to get someone to be willing to link his/her reputation with yours.

I do think that the easiest (and probably more common) path for her would have been to keep playing girlfriend until marriage, and then living off of his work whether in Washington or Hollywood. She chose a different path, and in large part she made this thing (and by “thing” I mean the gross insult to democracy that is the Thompson candidacy) happen. This contradicts the identity of “trophy wife” who by definition is purely decorative. I mean, Thompson might have thought he was getting a trophy wife if she was playing the bimbo role before he proposed – no one lauds him for his insightful nature – but its not what he wound up getting.

[…] When I asked a while back whether spouses should be on the ballot too I was writing with tongue partially-in-cheek: but Ensey was exactly the type of poltical spouse I had in mind,.Another Judy Giuliani, a political spouse who will stop at nothing to get her chosen lifemate elected so that she can play first lady – or alternatively so that she can later use her partner’s poll success and name-recognition as a stepping stone to her own Evitaesque ascendancy to office. […]

[…] Oh yes. Here. They know and we know that despite their considerable individual intellects and achievements it’s unlikely they would have become QC or Senator respectively, had they not gained name recognition and influence by being married to who they were married to. In the case of Clinton it’s enabled someone who’s been a Senator for barely five minutes, who’s never run any government body or even a city or state, to potentially step into one of the most difficult jobs in the world; in the case of Cherie Booth/Blair she’s had the opportunity to make massive amounts from speaking fees she would never have got as a simple human rights and employment lawyer; […]