First Ladies (69 page)

It had not been easy. As she wrote in her autobiography, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, unhappy with the fact that a woman and an African American had been assigned to his committee without his approval, announced that since women and blacks were “worth only half of one ‘regular' member,” Schroeder would have to share a chair with Ron Dellums, an African American from California. Hard as it is to believe this could happen in 1973, she wrote that “nobody else objected and nobody offered to scrounge up another chair.”
¹⁴

Even that bizarre experience did not prepare her for the sexism encountered in her presidential bid. No matter how broadly she shaped her campaign talks, the media heard only women's issues. And all they saw was what she wore. She complained she could be talking about the most serious issues, such as environmental controls or defense policy, and a reporter would ask why she was wearing red. A hectic schedule required traveling light, but when she wore the same dress twice in one week, she heard someone joking that she might have to miss an event because “her plaid dress was at the cleaners.”
¹⁵

When Schroeder announced she was dropping out of the race after only a few months, fatigue and disappointment combined to cause her to shed a few tears, and the media jumped on this as conclusive proof of her unfitness for high public office. For her, the most upsetting comment came from those who considered anyone who cried to be unfit to have a “finger on the nuclear button.” For her, those people had it all wrong—she wouldn't want a commander in chief who couldn't cry.
¹⁶

For years Schroeder kept a “sob sister” file with accounts of powerful men known to have shed a few tears. Such accounts included George Washington saying good-bye to his generals and Lyndon Johnson at a civil rights ceremony. But the fact remained, in many voters' minds, that tears disqualified a woman as presidential material because they marked her as unstable, too emotional, not fit to lead.

Elizabeth Dole could not match Schroeder's elective successes but she had served as cabinet member, headed the Red Cross, and worked hard for her husband's unsuccessful presidential run in 1996. In 2000, she decided the time had come for her to run on her own. But before any primaries were held, she dropped out, citing money problems and lack of public support. Her husband had not been much help by speaking publicly about her slim chances and hinting he might contribute to one of her rivals, John McCain. Short though it was, her candidacy nonetheless encouraged other women.
¹⁷

Hillary Clinton's announcement in February 2007 looked more promising. Like Elizabeth Dole, Clinton had achieved major name recognition and publicity through her spouse. But her eight years as First Lady and her service nearly that long as a U.S. senator from New York had combined to give her some advantages. She was not alone in thinking she could do what no woman had done before her—capture a major party's nomination. President George Bush, talking to a reporter about her chances, explained why he thought she, rather than Senator Barack Obama, would get the nomination: “She has staying power, star power, and money power. She brings a big organization that is well funded right off the bat … [O]ne of the lessons I learned is you have to be able to play the long ball.”
¹⁸
Bush doubted Obama had the sticking power.

A few months later, it looked like President Bush had it right, at least about Clinton. She had collected a huge war chest, and her campaign spent lavishly, showing the full confidence of a front runner. But by February 2008, a different story was being told. With just two candidates still in the race, the former First Lady was losing ground. On June 7, 2008, after Senator Obama had collected the necessary number of delegates to secure the nomination, she suspended her campaign. Supporters who crowded around her in the National Building Museum in Washington to hear her concession speech could hardly contain their disappointment, but she reminded them that they had helped her put nearly eighteen million cracks in the toughest glass ceiling of them all.

Clinton and her campaign managers had struggled to put together a winning strategy, but they found the rules for female candidates were
different. The nasty rumors and unsubstantiated charges against her went back to her First Lady days, when she had endured attacks more vicious than those leveled at any of her predecessors. As Garry Wills wrote, “Hillary Hate” became “a large-scale psychic phenomenon” complete with Hillary rag-dolls made for dismembering, talk show hosts commenting on her purported lesbianism and drug use, and song lyrics altered to conclude “that's why the First Lady is a tramp.”
¹⁹

But her problem reached beyond personal characterizations and charges. It resulted from what Karlyn Kohrs Campbell described as a very old conflict between “gender norms for the performance of femininity and rhetorical norms governing public advocacy.”
²⁰
Cultural norms held that a woman should talk in nonconfrontational terms, sound compassionate, and reveal lots of little personal details that humanized her. But cultural norms were quite different for a leader, especially a commander in chief. Here the prize went to the decisive voice, one using strong argument and evidence to make a case. Hillary Clinton had decades of public speaking experience as a governor's wife, First Lady, and practicing attorney. But she still struggled to develop a “feminine rhetorical style.” When she happened to tear up at an emotional moment or share a deeply felt personal conviction, she was accused, like women before her, of playing games or taking undue advantage.

While it is true that some voters may have been so enthusiastic about a woman,
any
woman, in the White House that they would have voted for Hillary Clinton even if they disagreed with her on major issues, the old negative bias against
all
women candidates was more visible. The same comment that would have been deemed abhorrent if aimed at a member of a racial group was simply ignored if it targeted a woman. Consider the Republican strategist on CNN who argued that it was okay to “call some women a white bitch because that's what they are.”
²¹

Television and newspaper reports focused on Hillary Clinton's hair color and makeup and the cut of her suit and the height of her heel while rarely referring to such subjects for male candidates. When she objected to being treated differently, she was deemed testy. When she observed that TV debate hosts often pitched the first question to her, comedians parodied her for complaining. When Chelsea Clinton joined her on the campaign trail, the candidate was accused of “pimping” her daughter. The sexist treatment came from both men and women. When a female supporter of Republican nominee John McCain asked him what he was going to do “about the bitch,” he began his answer with a big laugh.

In listing her qualifications for chief executive, Hillary included her First Lady years. Her most controversial ad began with the sound of a phone ringing and a voice asking if this call came “while your children are safe and asleep” and something was “happening in the world,” who would you want to answer that call? Would it be “someone who already knows the world's leaders, knows the military? Someone tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world?” The ad ended with Hillary Clinton picking up the ringing phone.
²²

Barack Obama pointed out that just living in the executive mansion hardly qualified as expertise. Judgment was what mattered, and Obama argued that Clinton's vote in 2002 to expand President Bush's war powers hardly showed good judgment. Her supporters replied that residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue did not necessarily prepare a person for the presidency but it did count for something. Encountering world leaders and national press on a daily basis, learning to juggle incredible demands, knowing how to choose the best staff and advisers and then rely on their judgment—all figured in the First Lady's job as surely as in the president's.

The Clinton campaign could have pointed to considerable documentation that supported that view. One student of the executive branch wrote that the First Lady is “a senior counselor for the president—perhaps his closest and most trusted.”
²³
Bradley H. Patterson then enumerated the many ways Hillary Clinton had assisted the forty-second president—including five appearances in front of congressional committees and more than nine hundred appearances in three hundred destinations in the United States and abroad, on top of the five hundred public events in the nation's capital.

But, Patterson continued, “it was in the international arena that First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton made what may have been her most illuminating contribution to her husband's presidency.”
²⁴
In the first six and one-half years, she took forty trips overseas, of which twenty-one were on her own without the president, stopping in eighty-three countries. He noted that in 1993 a federal appeals court had ruled that traditionally First Ladies act as advisers and personal representatives of the presidents.
²⁵

Debating the proper role of a First Lady was nothing new. Historians and political scientists had been trying to define the job for decades, even comparing it to the vice presidency. While the two jobs vary, depending on who holds them and how the chief executive chooses to use them, ceremonial appearances and policy making are part of both roles. But the presidential spouse holds some obvious advantages. While the vice president is elected and the First Lady is
not, she almost always has higher name recognition, as was shown by political scientists who compared news coverage of the two jobs in the Carter administration: “Even Walter Mondale, who was heralded as the new prototype of the activist vice president, failed to receive as much attention in the
New York Times
as Rosalynn Carter.”
²⁶
Would anyone question that Hillary Clinton received more press coverage than Al Gore?

Attempts to codify a First Lady's political influence and participation have never been entirely satisfying for the very obvious reason that so much of the evidence remains private and confidential. Even when presidential couples acknowledged a wife's influence, as in the case of Betty Ford's “pillow talk” or Harry Truman's nod to Bess's good judgment, skeptics have held back from quantifying it. Both Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter referred often to their close working relationship, including weekly business lunches. But did Rosalynn's power exceed that wielded by Nancy in the Reagan collaboration?

Nancy repeatedly downplayed her clout, even when caught on camera suggesting lines to the president, but close aides insisted she controlled major White House policy decisions.
²⁷
Two journalists who covered the capital for nearly three decades concluded in 2000 that “Nancy Reagan was perhaps the most powerful First Lady in recent times. She controlled her husband's schedule with the help of astrologers, forced the firing of a chief of staff and several national security advisers, and pressed her husband to set aside his ‘Evil Empire' rhetoric to meet with Mikhail Gorbachev.” When the producer of an ABC miniseries on Nancy Reagan finished his project, he concluded that people asking when the United States would have its first female president had missed an important point: “We've already had her.”
²⁸

Further confounding any valid measurement of a First Lady's power is the fact that Americans disparage influential women and punish the ones who step out on their own platforms. The traditional woman who stands quietly behind her man is often much more to their liking. Historian Gil Troy concluded that Betty Ford “may have cost” her husband the 1976 election and “the historical respect his administration is now often denied” by her outspoken support of various causes and her unwise comments—sounding “like the boozy wife who speaks the unspoken at the company picnic.”
²⁹
Troy admitted Betty Ford received a lot of enthusiastic, supportive mail but it did not come from the conservative wings of the Republican Party where her husband needed votes.
³⁰

Hillary Clinton's admission of influence—and her husband's way of highlighting it—contrasted with what most of her predecessors had
done. Eleanor Roosevelt always avoided acknowledging her influence, and she routinely warned those she had helped not to give her credit. Though historians have concluded she “acted as FDR's vice president,” Franklin typically sounded more exasperated than pleased about her activism, even when he benefited from the fans (and votes) she brought in.
³¹
Lady Bird Johnson, another exceptionally influential presidential spouse, concealed her power behind a soft voice and traditional gestures, such as planting trees or visiting schools. Liz Carpenter, her chief of staff, emphasized that Lady Bird was no Eleanor Roosevelt—Lady Bird saw her role as wifely and supporting and did not intend to make history in her own right. It is hardly surprising that both Eleanor and Lady Bird come out near the top of historians' rankings of First Ladies.
³²

After suspending her campaign in early June 2008, Hillary Clinton waited for the Democratic Party convention to make Barack Obama's candidacy official. Some of her supporters held out hope that she would get the second spot on the ticket, but Obama's camp insisted that was never seriously considered. Instead, Obama had apparently decided almost as soon as he realized he had the nomination that she would make an excellent secretary of state.
³³

Within hours of the Democratic convention's choice of Obama and his selection of Joe Biden as his running mate, Republican nominee John McCain announced Sarah Palin would join him on the GOP ticket. The move, calculated to steal Democratic thunder, ended up producing its own lightning. Palin was virtually unknown outside Alaska, but the charismatic mother of five energized Republican voters who hoped to draw off some of the Clinton enthusiasts who had turned lethargic about the Democratic ticket once it had become entirely male.