The Politician's WifeBehind every great woman is a dead husband.
Posted Friday, March 22, 2002, at 11:03 AM ET
Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Dole, and Tipper Gore share one thing in common: A dead husband. Not literally, of course. Blood still pumps through Al's and Bob's and Bill's veins. But their husbands' elective careers are dead, though each man may be in a different stage of grief: denial (Al), bargaining (Bill), and acceptance (Bob). Hillary, Liddy, and Tipper aren't just political wives. They're political widows.
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StumbleUponThese New Widows are accomplished, talented women who still waited until their husbands' careers were over to launch electoral lives of their own. After graduating from law school, Hillary Clinton bottled up her elective ambitions to follow her husband to Arkansas. Elizabeth Dole, a successful Washington lawyer who became a Federal Trade Commissioner and twice a Cabinet secretary, suppressed the dream ("I want to be the first woman president," she confessed to an old boyfriend in Salisbury, N.C.) to hit the campaign trail three times in support of her husband's presidential ambition. Tipper Gore never admitted to political aspirations of her own until this past week, when she toyed with running for the Senate in Tennessee, but she quit her job as a newspaper photographer and shelved her plans to use her Master's degree in psychology so she could promote her husband on his way to Washington. Now she's left the door wide open—"it is not right for me, right now"—to her own eventual political run.
Only once their husbands had either succeeded to death (Bill), failed to death (Al), or were simply near death (Bob) could the New Widows hit the trail in support of themselves. Each has her own reasons for that. Hillary Clinton followed her heart by moving to Arkansas, but she also followed her ambition while she was there, transforming herself into a more traditional wife (despite her husband's "buy one get one free" pledge) after Bill lost his first gubernatorial re-election. Elizabeth Dole didn't marry Bob until she was already a Washington fixture, having served in the Johnson and Nixon administrations, and she continued to wield power independent of her husband after their marriage. But she never ran for an elective office until Bob's presidential ambitions were thoroughly and irrevocably quashed. Tipper Gore always professed to be a reluctant political wife, ambivalent about her husband's success. For years, Al made decisions without her counsel. But over time, she became one of his key advisers, and now it looks like she'd like to run the family business for a while.
The New Widows provide a new twist on the old journey from candidate's wife to Candidate Wife. The first women to serve full Senate terms were actual widows who took office after their husbands' deaths. Decades later, classic political widows still make their way to Washington: Rep. Mary Bono, R-Calif.; Rep. Lois Capps, D-Calif.; and Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, R-Mo., all won special elections to succeed their late husbands and have been re-elected since. Sen. Jean Carnahan, D-Mo., was appointed to her position after Missouri voters cast their ballots for her late husband, Mel, knowing that Jean would go in Mel's place. She's running for election in her own right this fall.
The classic widows are as different from each other as the New Widows. Some, like Jean Carnahan, were powerful inside players before their husbands' deaths. Others, like Mary Bono, were political neophytes. What both types of widows share is an understanding that, while their husbands were in office, their political ambitions had to be restrained.
But there is a key difference (other than the obvious fact that one group's husbands are biologically alive): The New Widows don't run for hubby's most recent job. Bill was never a senator from New York. Bob was never president or a senator from North Carolina. Al hasn't been a senator from Tennessee for 10 years.
In this, a New Widow's campaign more closely resembles the dynastic tradition in American politics than it does the widow's mandate. A candidate with name recognition and the ability to raise cash doesn't need to work her way up from state rep to state attorney general before launching a senatorial bid. Women as well as men have long used this to their advantage: Kansas' Nancy Kassebaum, the first woman elected to a full term in the Senate who was not a political widow, was the daughter of a political icon: former Kansas Gov. Alf Landon, who had run for president against Franklin Roosevelt in 1936. If favorite sons (and daughters and brothers and sisters) can capitalize on the benefits of their political brand name, why not wives?
Already one political wife has decided that she doesn't need to wait until she's a New Widow to run for office. Janet Huckabee, wife of Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, has announced that she's running for Arkansas secretary of state. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette calls her the state's "First Tomboy," and she hasn't ruled out running for governor in 2006, when Mike Huckabee will be term-limited out of office. Who knows? Maybe she'll surpass him in popularity, and Mike will be the one who holds teas and eventually hits the campaign trail in support of Representative, Senator, or even President ("The Woman From Hope"?) Huckabee.
But if Arkansas voters decide this fall that they don't like the Guv, they can register their disgust at the polls not once but twice. Call it two for the price of one.
If you liked this Assessment column, check out Backstabbers, Crazed Geniuses, and Animals We Hate, a collection of our all-time funniest, meanest, sweetest, and weirdest profiles.
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Reader Comments From The Fray:
The formula for the first woman president:
1. A First Gentleman who is a known factor. People can accept that a husband can keep his wife's counsel in perspective but assume that women will give more weight to her husband's counsel. In other words, people will vote for a man who has a wife that doesn't necessarily inspire confidence outside of a First Lady's traditional role. They will not vote for a woman whose husband they don't think could handle the job of President.
2. She needs to be a Conservative/Republican. Three factors here: (a) Nothing would energize the conservative base like a liberal women; (b) The President will have to be a tough customer at times and conservatives are generally perceived as such as opposed to a touchy-feely liberal (women); and (c) Conservative women are more likely to vote with their spouses than liberal women. A women candidate's toughest crowd will be conservative men whom if not won over will siphon away their wives' votes.
3. She needs to be the best man for the job (i.e. In addition to satisfying the above, she has to succeed on the field of politics against the men)
--Ender
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The future of feminism? I doubt it. What Mrs. Dole, Mrs. Clinton and Mrs. Gore share most obviously is that none of them would have gotten near success in electoral politics if they hadn't married the men they did. The idea of running for office probably would not have occurred to Mrs. Gore; Mrs. Dole became a fixture as a Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic town that doesn't even send representatives to Congress; Mrs. Clinton is simply too unattractive a personality to have won office without the enormous extra advantage of being married to a two-term President. The women who will have the greatest influence on American politics in the future will not have to depend on their husbands' electoral success to establish their own. Their model is more likely to be Margaret Thatcher, who actually accomplished something after being elected to office, than it is any of the "widows" Suellentrop discusses.
--Joseph Britt
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To Joseph Britt: Precisely. In fact, I think you could carry it even a step further by noting that all three are so closely identified with their husbands and their husbands' policies that they are seen more as stand-ins than as political creatures in their own right. My assumption has always been that New York voted Mrs. Clinton into office as a way of tying both Clintons to New York and its politics; that is, force them to identify with New York, rather than Arkansas or some place else, in order to limit their scope but use their political power for New York's wants and desires.
Mrs. Dole may well be the stand-in with the least attachment to her husband. She gets name recognition from him but his coattails long since shredded away. She will probably have to stand more on her own than either of the other two.
Tipper Gore may have become more political over the years, and would probably closely reflect Al's beliefs, but the Gore magic is long gone from Tennessee and I think she knows that. She may have to work her way into a major campaign by going through the lesser jobs, and I don't believe she has the "fire in the belly" for that.
--Jay Tex
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Post-feminists like Hillary, Tipper, and Libby are more clearly distinguished from traditional political wives than Suellentrop believes…When women like Mary Bono and Laura Bush are good at being ornaments, it helps their husbands chances, but doesn't provide much of a starting point for a post-ornament career. Post-feminist political wives have more potential for their own political careers because their roles are more highly political. Women like Hillary Clinton can have careers, subordinate those careers to their husbands' ambitions, and play important roles in their husband's political operations, all at the same time. They develop a wide range of political skills and achieve the name recognition needed to run for political office. All such women really need to show is that they can hire appropriate campaign managers, pollsters, and ad people and be effectively staged as a prop in their manager's campaign. Hillary Clinton showed herself to be an effective campaigner if not as effective as her husband. Unfortunately for Libby Dole, she turned out to be every bit as ineffective a national campaigner as Bob.
--Riccaric
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