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.
Although both Senator Clinton and Governor Palin claimed religion as a cornerstone of their lives, they came down on different sides on many issues, most importantly, a woman’s right to abortion. Clinton supported the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade and its definition of a woman’s right to privacy, while Palin, a member of the anti-abortion Feminists for Life, wanted to outlaw abortion except in cases where the mother’s life was at stake.
At forty-four, Palin had sixteen years of experience in public service, mostly in the small town of Wasilla, Alaska (population 7,000), where she served on the town council from 1992 to 1996, then as mayor for six years. After a brief interim as Chair of Alaska’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, she ran on the Republican ticket for governor and took office in December 2006. While Republican headquarters focused on her maverick qualities—bucking Republican superiors in her home state to gain the governorship—bloggers zeroed in on other parts of her résumé, including her support for additional oil drilling and her inquiry about procedures for banning books from libraries.
Palin’s personal history intervened in ways that would have been less likely had she been male. The fact that her infant son had Down syndrome led some to question how she could manage both public office and family responsibilities. Revelations that Republican leaders had paid more than $150,000 for clothes and makeup for her and her family raised questions about authenticity and whether or not the same efforts would have been extended to a male candidate. A belated report that her teenage daughter was five months’ pregnant raised doubts about how carefully the McCain camp had vetted his veep choice.
Palin’s husband, Todd, also came under scrutiny. A college dropout, he presented a stark contrast to his Democratic counterpart, Jill Biden, a college professor with a Ph.D. The “First Dude,” as his wife dubbed him, was a member of the United Steelworkers union and had also worked as a commercial fisherman. He was occasionally a judge for beauty contests but also admitted to advising his wife on policy matters.
Just how the VP nominee’s gender figured in media coverage is difficult to quantify. Certainly her inexperience in the national spotlight proved a disadvantage, as it would have been for any candidate, regardless of gender. While her Democratic counterpart, Joe Biden, rarely met a question he had not faced before, she frequently stumbled or looked unsure of herself. When ABC’s Charlie Gibson interviewed her on September 11, 2008, she appeared not to know the meaning of the Bush Doctrine, and her answer to his query about going to war with Russia over Georgia and Ukraine struck some viewers as poorly formed. A few weeks later, when Katie Couric interviewed her for CBS, Palin startled some viewers by insisting that serving as governor of a state that bordered another country gave her “foreign policy experience.”
Within the McCain campaign, conflicts arose about how to present Palin. According to reports published later, some of the sta
ffers’ objections to her centered on her gender—they saw in her a case of “post partum depression,” thought she “went off on her own,” and “wouldn’t take directions.” Other prominent Republicans, including William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, thought she did just fine, and he argued “let Palin be Palin.”34 But when the votes were counted on November 4, the conclusion was that she had not helped the McCain candidacy.
Cindy McCain had played a minor part in the campaign. She had married the military hero in 1980, before he ventured into politics, and she had never quite warmed to his career change. The pattern of their lives for many years had been that while he worked in the capital, she stayed in Phoenix, looking after the business and their four children, including an adopted daughter from Bangladesh. In fact, when John McCain entered presidential primaries in 2000, his wife, who accompanied him to some rallies, noted that she had never “spent this much time with my husband…. For most of the twenty years we’ve been married he’s been in Washington all week while I’m in Arizona with the kids.”35
Little else about the 2000 campaign pleased Cindy McCain. After her husband won in New Hampshire, false rumors that he was actually the father of their adopted daughter helped him lose the South Carolina primary. The baseness of such a charge caused Cindy McCain to break down and cry in front of reporters, and John McCain eventually suspended his first presidential campaign. The media scrutiny of his family had already uncovered old reports about Cindy McCain’s early ’90s addiction to painkillers and how she had reached into her own charity’s supply to meet that need. The stress resulting from incursions into her private life is sometimes cited as causing her stroke in 2004, when she was only fifty years old. And the stroke’s effect on her speech was cited as her reason for playing such a small part in the 2008 campaign, although during her brief appearances she showed no evidence of impairment.
In the interim between the November 4 election and the January 20 inauguration, while the McCains settled back into old routines and the Obamas packed for the White House, the Museum of American History at the Smithsonian reopened its popular First Ladies exhibit. The previous exhibit, “First Ladies: Political Role and Public Image,” had highlighted the women’s substantive contributions, causing Betty Ford to comment that she was happy to be remembered for something other than the dresses she wore. But the new exhibit returned to the old theme that had disappointed Ford. Although one of its three sections covered women’s contributions as campaigners and advocates, the main focus was on inaugural gowns and party gear.
Though no one would argue that the ceremonial role did not figure in a First Lady’s duties, it was only part of the picture. From the beginning of the republic, women had played “parlor politics,” using social situations to influence elections, shape policy, and manage personnel.36 But by the late twentieth century, presidents’ wives had moved out more openly into the political arena, and they were giving partisan speeches, taking stands, and making their influence felt. The twenty-first century had seemed to have promised more, but the new exhibit was a throwback to an earlier era.
Signs that women had indeed made impressive gains quickly appeared in President-elect Obama’s first appointments. Although he (and other Americans) had not supported Hillary Clinton for chief executive, he appointed her as his secretary of state. Journalists and political pundits found it easy to merge her two First Lady terms and eight Senate years into what amounted to sixteen years at the center of the nation’s political life. In the Senate, she had sat on the powerful Armed Services Committee, and her hard work on two important subcommittees, Emerging Threats and Capabilities, and Readiness and Management Support, had put her at the center of debates over national security.
Expectations ran high that as secretary of state Clinton would continue her advocacy work for women around the world and use her position to urge countries to improve women’s access to education and health care and to put their civil rights and opportunities on a par with their brothers and husbands. Her speech at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, when she argued that women’s rights are human rights, had received enormous publicity, but it was her many years of traveling the globe and speaking up for women that had rendered her face one of the most recognizable on earth. Her work to develop loan assistance programs and health care facilities for women in developing nations had made her popular in areas where she had never set foot. As the Boston Globe reported, in remote villages of Ecuador, in homes lacking electricity, women were “beaming at the thought that she would become the next Secretary of State.”37
By the time of her Senate confirmation hearings in January 2009, it was easy to forget that she had so recently focused all her energy on becoming president, but the confidence with which she explained her views and revealed her considerable knowledge made clear she remembered. To the millions of Americans who had supported her presidential bid—and those who had not—she gave no indication she meant to exit the national stage anytime soon.
While Hillary geared up for her important new job at the State Department, Michelle Robinson Obama settled her family in the White House. It was a move she had not expected to make when her husband first announced he was running. In fact, the November 4 victory had surprised many people, and viewers around the globe took some time to register the reality that an African American with the unlikely name of Barack Hussein Obama had been elected to the most important job in the world. His campaign had stressed the need for change—in Iraq, in health care, in how government worked—and a deep economic downturn, just weeks before the election, reinforced dissatisfaction with the status quo. At the time of his inauguration, expectations ran high for the forty-fourth president of the United States and for his wife, an attorney and mother of two who had taken a leave from her six-figure job to campaign for him.
Unlike her husband, Michelle Obama had strong ties to a single city, Chicago, Illinois, where she had been born Michelle LaVaughn Robinson. On the day of her birth, January 17, 1964, a rancorous debate in the nation’s capital centered on just what shape a new civil rights act would take.38 JFK’s assassination less than two months earlier had rocked the nation, but Lyndon Johnson determined to put that shock to good use and to get important legislation passed. He signed a new civil rights law a few months later, on July 2. That law, signed before she learned to walk, would significantly alter Michelle’s life path by enlarging her opportunities with magnet schools and affirmative action. The Voting Rights Act, which President Johnson signed into law the following year, helped send her to the White House.
Young Michelle did not look to Washington for her heroes—she found them right at home. Her only sibling, a brother named Craig who was twenty-one months her senior, provided an excellent example both inside and outside the classroom. But it was their hardworking parents, Fraser Robinson III, a city water plant worker, and Marian Shields Robinson, a homemaker, who pushed both children to excel. Rejecting the easy option—to send their son and daughter to a convenient public high school—the Robinsons encouraged their athletic son to enroll in a parochial school with an outstanding basketball program. For Michelle, they decided the newly opened Whitney M. Young Magnet School offered a quality education that more than compensated for the daily three-hour commute. Among racially mixed classmates who came from all over the city, she did well both academically and socially. She made the National Honor Society in her junior year and was elected treasurer of her senior class.39
After graduation in 1981, Michelle followed her brother to Princeton, and like him, she majored in sociology. Although one of the oldest colleges in America, Princeton had only begun to accept women as undergraduates in 1969. African Americans, first admitted after World War II, still comprised only about 10 percent of the student body. Even the “little sister” of a basketball star could feel like an outsider, and Michelle saw herself as a “visitor on campus, as if I really don’t belong.”40
According to Liza Mundy, a
Washington Post reporter who graduated three years ahead of Michelle, Princeton was not a congenial place for African Americans in the early 1980s.41 A small but vocal group of students made no secret of their opinion that admission standards had dropped to accommodate minorities, and the editor of a campus publication, Prospect, described “black culture” as pathologically violent and inferior to white culture.
Before Michelle had a chance to see how widespread those ideas were on campus, she encountered blatant racism in her freshman dorm. Her assigned roommate, a white coed from New Orleans, had no experience with interracial living. When she called her mother to describe Michelle, the mother immediately began trying to get her daughter moved. Princeton officials stood firm on the assignment, but eventually, when a larger room became available, Michelle’s roommate moved out. While not fully aware of her roommate’s maneuverings at the time, Michelle began searching for a spot on campus where she felt more comfortable, and she soon settled on the Third World Center, a gathering place for students of color.
When it came time to choose a topic for her senior thesis, Michelle decided on “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.” Working under the direction of Professor Walter Wallace, one of only five tenured African Americans on the entire faculty, she examined how the college’s African-American alumni had changed their attitudes while at Princeton. Specifically, she set out to learn if the Ivy League experience had made graduates more or less willing to help other African Americans who had not enjoyed the same privilege.
The eighty-nine respondents who answered her questionnaire provided too small a sample, she admitted, to draw many general conclusions. Indeed, what emerges from the thesis tells more about the author than about those surveyed. As the twenty-one-year-old senior struggled with ideas about race and class, she realized that many of her non-black fellow students came from economic backgrounds much like hers, and they found themselves equally bewildered by classmates with large expense accounts, considerable international travel experience, and important family connections that promised easy access to successful careers.
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