First Ladies in a Fix

The Washington Post today ruminates about the role of Presidential spouses and concludes that they, well, differ from those of the past.

They sure do. In half a century as an editor, I knew First Ladies from Eleanor Roosevelt to Nancy Reagan, both of whom wrote for me. They differed from one another back then, too, but what they had in common was, after Mrs. Roosevelt, they had little to say about policy issues--in public.

But now, according to a professor of government quoted by the Post, “there is a greater acceptance of assertive women that is consistent with other societal trends. But there is still a divide in the country in what people want and expect. Look at how much people like Laura Bush."

First Ladies were in a bind back then, and they still are today. How much resentment of Hillary Clinton comes from the fact that in 1992 she said she was not the little woman who bakes cookies and stands by her man? She wasn’t, isn’t and is now running for President on her own, but some voters will never forgive her for not being Barbara Bush or Nancy Reagan.

For other spouses, it’s still like walking a tightrope. Shouldn’t Michelle Obama have kept her high-powered job instead of helping her husband? Is Jeri Thompson too involved in Fred’s campaign? Is Elizabeth Edwards too outspoken? Does Judith Giuliani ring Rudy’s cell phone at the wrong time? What gives with Elizabeth Kucinich’s pierced tongue?

Today some of them will be talking about all this on TV with Maria Shriver, who as the wife of Governor Arnold and the niece of Jack Kennedy, knows a little something about the subject.

In 1960, when I sent a reporter to interview her aunt, Jacqueline Kennedy, she sounded like a Stepford wife: "The most important thing for successful marriage is for a husband to do what he likes best and does well. The wife's satisfactions will follow...If the wife is happy, full credit should be given to the husband because the marriage is her entire life."

She never deviated from this submissive line, but even then, it wasn’t simple. When the reporter was about to leave, Mrs. Kennedy looked him in the eye and said, "But I'm smarter than Jack, and don't you forget it."

Fred Thompson, Lonely Guy

Jeri Thompson makes it all sound like something out of Steve Martin’s 1980s movie, “The Lonely Guy.”

There is Fred, on the Fourth of July, when everybody else is at the beach or backyard barbecues getting sloshed with friends, standing on a supermarket checkout line with a pathetic pre-made half a tunafish sandwich and a can of high-cholesterol beanie-weenies.

"I looked at him and just said, 'I'm so sorry,'" she tells People, lets him carry her groceries to the car and invites the lonely guy to a friend’s party that night.

In the Steve Martin movie, a friend takes him to a gathering where most of the guests are life-sized cardboard cutouts of celebrities. But life does not imitate art. Fred Thompson is luckier and, before you can say fireworks, loses his lonely guy status and is living in Washington with a beautiful young wife and kids.

As Jeri tells it, far from being a “trophy wife,” she is a kind-hearted young woman who saved Fred Thompson from the fate of the Steve Martin character who has to get lessons in how to talk to the ferns in his bachelor apartment.

Now the party celebrities are real, but watching Thompson’s listless interactions with them on the campaign circuit, the inner Lonely Guy may be longing to be home with the cutouts and the ferns.

Will Fred Thompson Close the Gaffe Gap?

When he announces tomorrow, the former Senator/actor will start with a clean slate in the hoof-in-mouth department. His Republican opponents have had six months to say stupid things, and they have made the most of them.

Rudy Giuliani had to back off telling Barbara Walters that his wife would attend cabinet meetings and, more recently, his claim to have spent more time at 9/11 Ground Zero than the firefighters.

Mitt Romney has been so busy that Ana Marie Cox on her Time blog had to expand his Top Ten Gaffes to eleven, including the easily disproved claim to have been a hunter all his life, attributing a Castro slogan to Free-Cuba fighters in front of audience of them, misstating French marriage laws, and making an admiring statement about Hitler’s energy policy, among so many others.

If Newt Gingrich decides to run, the floodgates of flubs would overflow.

But Thompson has the potential to catch up. He will no doubt ace his Jay Leno interview this week, but when he has to start defending his positions and his resume, Thompson’s tendency to be casual about such subjects as invading Iran is sure to emerge.

There will be ample opportunities to botch answers about his lobbying for a pro-abortion group, deposed Haitian autocrat Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a company trying to limit payments to asbestos victims as well as corporations producing a taxpayer-financed $1.7 billion “hole in the ground” for an abandoned nuclear reactor in Tennessee.

His private life could be fertile ground as well. Thompson has made light of his avid “chasing” as a bachelor but some of the ladies may surface to provoke uncomfortable questions.

His campaign has intimated his young wife is a lawyer and experienced political operative, but a closer look at the facts suggests a simpler story line: They met at a Tennessee barbecue, and she followed him to Washington where he got her a job. She did work in a law office but not as a lawyer.

Fred Thompson’s long teaser non-campaign has raised high expectations, but starting next week, he will only be the tallest of the Republican pygmies trying to play Ronald Reagan and make voters forget George Bush.

Fred Thompson's Iffy Entrance

He is finally ready for his close-up. After the longest throat-clearing in election history, Fred Thompson has announced he will announce his candidacy next Thursday--by webcast, thereby postponing a little longer the tawdry business of personal appearances and pressing the flesh.

Up to now, Thompson’s “Wag the Dog” campaign has been working well enough to push him into second place in the polls behind Rudy Giuliani without saying much of anything. The few times he has proferred platitudes at rubber-chicken dinners, the applause was not deafening.

Now he is going to have to answer tiresome questions about his past lobbying, his relaxed work ethic and his young wife’s campaign-managing. He will have stand next to the Republican pygmies in debates and trade zingers with the likes of Ron Paul. If he flubs his lines in stump speeches, there won’t be any retakes.

There is a long tradition of movie actors blowing it in live theater. Thompson may regret stepping out from emoting for the cameras and taking his chances with live audiences who may hiss and boo or, worst of all, yawn.

Fred Thompson Signs for Fox Reality Show

The suspense is over. Fred Thompson will not be running for the Republican nomination. Instead he will star in a new reality show this fall for the Fox Network, “Presidential Survivor,” in which the former Senator/actor will play a candidate and simulate all the drama and color of a real campaign--making stump speeches, issuing position papers and debating real candidates in guest appearances.

“After studying all the options,” Thompson announced today, “I have decided I can best serve my country, not by seeking the Highest Office but by giving the American public a true picture of what they should be looking for in a President and how.”

By signing for the series, Thompson will avoid the rigors of campaign travel, fund-raising and having Mrs. Thompson keep firing staff members. In addition, he will be able to collect residuals from re-runs of “Law and Order.”

If the ratings are high enough, Fox executives said, the series will run until next spring, at which point Thompson can decide whether to declare for the nomination in real life or sign up for another TV season.

Cinderella in the White House

So Mrs. Fred Thompson is not a lawyer, a surprise comparable to the news a while back that Mrs. Rudy Giuliani has two former husbands rather than one.

These unexpected twists only add to the fascination of a First Lady who would embody the American dream of rising out of poverty by sheer will and determination, a Horatio Alger story featuring a Cinderella with erotic power.

As their sagas unfold, the outlines are remarkably similar, two young women from small towns, after struggling through unhappy relationships and money problems, drawn to the lights of big cities where they meet their true loves--Judi in a Manhattan cigar bar, Jeri at a Fourth of July barbecue.

The Giuliani and Thompson campaign staffs are busily airbrushing their stories so as not to offend voters of the Religious Right, but they may be underestimating the appeal of love conquering the barriers of age, social standing and, in Rudy’s case, marital status.

Unlike their handlers, the couples themselves are not being shy. Jeri Thompson is seen with a plunging neck line, and Judi is holding her husband’s face for serious smooching in Harper’s Bazaar. "Rudy's a very, very romantic guy," Mrs. Giuliani told the magazine. "We love watching 'Sleepless in Seattle.' Can you imagine my big testosterone factor husband doing that?"

Well, yes. and if enough voters agree, they could end up snuggling in the White House where the sexual activity would, for a change, be in the master bedroom. In the Thompson case, the fertility rites could go even further with the first baby born there since President Cleveland’s wife, Frances, gave birth in 1893.

In contrast, all the Democrats have to offer in Clinton, Obama and Edwards are long-term first marriages. But if Hillary wins, the Secret Service will have to add spousal extramarital sex to their laundry list of threats against the President.

The Judi and Jeri Shows

Now this is new: two leading Presidential candidates trying to sell their second and third wives as First Lady to Republican voters, whose family values embrace “secondary virginity.”

In the New York Times, the Giulianis re-introduce Judith, nee Judi, to offset a Vanity Fair profile that portrays her as a pushy adventuress who insists on an extra airline seat for her Louis Vuitton handbag and who, as the Mayor’s girlfriend, swept into the first 9/11 anniversary memorial ceremony at Ground Zero with a police detail that shoved Hillary Clinton aside.

“I try to remain me,” she told the Times, but to avoid “making myself in any way a distraction from what my husband is trying to do for America.”

The Judi makeover will have to overcome the image of the next First Lady as a twice-married mother meeting her then-married husband at a cigar bar and embarking on a public affair that led to a contentious divorce and alienation from his two grown children. That, along with Mrs. Giuliani’s penchant for high living and tendency to terrorize his staff, might just turn out to be a “distraction.”

But in the interfering-wife department, she is being overshadowed by Mrs. Fred Thompson, whose dominance in the actor-senator’s still unannounced campaign now has a name, the Jeri Factor, to describe her involvement in every detail. The new issue of Newsweek describes her as his "top political adviser and de facto campaign manager."

With disappointing fund-raising figures, Thompson is still running a close second to Giuliani in the polls but among other distractions, his politically savvy but photogenically sexy “trophy wife” is becoming an issue with Republicans who want to see him as the true-conservative alternative to Giuliani.

Mrs. Thompson might benefit from the advice of a former girl friend of her husband’s, country singer Lorrie Morgan, who wrote in her memoir:

“Fred let me know that it was important how I dressed. Sedate was in...with men who had big wallets and insecure wives, wives who were a little older than I was. So get that basic black dress out of the closet. And no cleavage, baby.”

Stay tuned. With the three Democratic front runners still in their first marriages, the Judy and Jeri Shows may draw ratings in the fall TV season to rival “Desperate Housewives.”

Fred Thompson's Conjugal Campaign

Does an unborn candidacy have a right to privacy? If so, Fred Thompson might complain about some of the recent unwelcome attention to his prepping for a run at the Presidency.

Even before announcing, there is news of high-level staff changes, some of which are attributed to the influence of his wife, Jeri.

In the Washington Post, Chris Cillizza reports the de-facto campaign manager has been “pushed aside due to clashes with Thompson's wife.”

Previously, another Post columnist, Mary Ann Akers, had written: “Her hands-on approach to her husband's political operation is rubbing some the wrong way.

"’She's running the campaign,’ grouses one veteran GOP political operative involved in the Draft Fred movement. ‘It's the No. 1 rule of politics: The wife can't be the campaign manager.’

“Playing a role is fine, says the unnamed operative, ‘but not calling all the day-to-day shots.’”

All this comes after gabble about Mrs. Thompson as a “trophy wife,” 24 years younger than the former Senator-actor. But, as a lawyer who worked in the Senate and at the Republican National Committee, Mrs. Thompson obviously intends to be more than ornamental.

When the Senator makes his long-awaited official entrance, Mrs. Thompson can pitch in and help him deal with mounting questions about his role as a lawyer during the Watergate hearings, his lobbying for an organization advocating abortion and all the other little housekeeping details that have accumulated during his non-candidacy.

Somewhere along the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton would undoubtedly be happy to advise the Thompsons about the pitfalls of a two-for-one presidency.