Andrew Sullivan's column in "The London Times"
First Wives Club
A Democratic Dilemma
Hollywood, we're told, is preparing a new version of the 1975 feminist cult classic "The Stepford Wives." I caught the movie again recently, channel-shopping on a very dark and cold winter's night. Alternately camp and chilling, it nevertheless felt almost prophetic in one narrow political sense: the wives of American politicians have increasingly become either air-brushed creatures of little definable edginess (Laura Bush springs instantly to mind) or suffered a thousand cuts from the press and public. The Stepford wife syndrome is in danger of taking hold. Hillary, of course, was an exception to all these rules. She used nepotism as a means to feminism, and acted as an unelected co-president, skewing all serious discussion of the First Lady as a separate institution for a long, eight years. (She's much less encumbered as a Senator.) With that obvious exception, the insistence of political handlers that the wives of American politicians be bland even by mid-Western standards has taken root. Never mind that this is rarely the actual case - Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush were steely politicians in their own right. They still felt the need to present themselves as selfless servants of their husbands and the people. The Stepford orthodoxy has endured.
And there's a reason for this. The last few decades have seen a complete cultural revolution in the role and power of women in American society; and the culture is still deeply confused and conflicted about it. This plays out, like many current American cultural clashes, on "Red America" and "Blue America" lines - a dichotomous split in which the place of women in the American heartland remains at serious odds with the ambitions and convictions of many women on the coasts and in the big cities. One America wants the cultural reassurance of "Little House on the Prairie." The other wants "Sex In The City." I exaggerate, of course. But the tensions are real enough. And within the presidency, which has more cultural and psychic resonance in America than a premiership does in a European polity, one marriage and one woman have to somehow absorb all these internal conflicts.
It cannot be done. That's why America needs not just one White House, in Washington, but a liberal "Blue America" counterpart in "The West Wing," on television. And, in this respect, the two leading Democrats in the field right now - Senator John Kerry and former governor Howard Dean - suggest a real and fascinating cultural choice for Americans. Both are married to women with strong streaks of Blue American independence, feistiness and conviction while needing the votes of heartland, Red America to win office. Their very names conjure up a kind of feminism that still hasn't truly sunk in in some parts of America - Judith Steinberg and Teresa Heinz.
Heinz is the multi-millionaire heiress of the ketchup fortune. Her first husband, the condiment heir, Senator John Heinz, died after 25 years of marriage, leaving her with a cool half a billion to accompany the chips. She has five houses and a private jet and a big mouth. She's a classic example of the hyper-rich American liberal. And so far, she's done a lot to worry the political operatives fluttering around her husband's lack-lustre campaign.
First off: the name. She has always gone by Teresa Heinz, but for the purposes of the campaign, she recently agreed to be called Teresa Heinz Kerry. This was a stretch in itself, but when asked by Elle magazine how she felt about it, she didn't exactly smoothe it over: "Now, politically, it's going to be Teresa Heinz Kerry, but I don't give a shit, you know? There are other things to worry about." Not since Barbara Bush opined of vice-presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro that she was something that rhymed with "rich," has a prominent political spouse been so forthcoming about her true feelings. The Washington Post clucked that Heinz-Kerry was "ungaggable." In the same interview, she remarked, in respect to Pat Nixon, that "Well, we know Richard Nixon wasn't too much in contact with how women should be." The New York Times subsequently tutted that she had managed the rare feat of "casually insulting a dead president and first lady." Heinz has also spoken openly of her enthusiasm for plastic surgery, her use of Botox and her firm belief that, in matters of marriage, "you've got to have a pre-nup." With half a billion at stake, you can see her point. But such insistence is not exactly designed to win over the lower-middle-class voters of, say, Oklahoma.
Judith Steinberg represents another kind of Blue America: not the lefty plutocrats who now run the Democratic Party, but the earnest Northeastern career professionals who tend to vote for it. Steinberg is a doctor married to Howard Dean, and has kept her maiden name in her own practice, which she once shared with her husband. She has a starkly refreshing approach to the role of First Lady, which is to say, she would essentially abolish it. She has refused to go to almost any social functions with her husband as the wife of the governor of Vermont; and has said that if he won the presidency, she would simply move her medical practice to Washington and leave the White House alone. It doesn't seem to have dawned on her yet that the Secret Service detail required to vet and screen every patient would not exactly be conducive to a regular practice.
Her reticence to be public isn't just in her career choices. In all the photographs of the candidate on the campaign trail, none have included Dean's wife or children. He is, in this respect, a European politician - protecting his privacy, focusing on issues and debate, and leaving the whole "personal story" aspect of modern American campaigns out of the picture. "I'm very close to him politically and I've barely met her," former Vermont governor Thomas Salmon, told the Los Angeles Times. "She has fundamentally shunned public events of all descriptions." When Dean became president of the National Governors' Association and had to go to many social functions, he even asked the wife of another politician to be his consort. He says he'll do the same at the White House: "I'm not going to drag her to all the state dinners."
I have to say I find both these women refreshing in their forthrightness and desire not to conform to a constructive and essentially banal role of First Lady. But it's another question altogether whether Americans are ready for them. One of the truly excruciating sights of the last couple of decades has been watching liberal "blue" Americans go through contortions trying to make themselves and their lives match the expectations of the socially conservative majority. Hillary's poll-driven hair-styles, her dishonest books, her bland rhetoric and schmaltzy cynicism were the result of a woman who put power before integrity at every stage of her life. Steinberg and Heinz are like cold showers after that muggy, sticky mess. But America is still, at heart, a traditional country. And Americans, in general, like the representations of their family lives to reflect more their nostalgia than their own reality. That's why "Sex in the City" is on cable, not network television. And why both Dean and Kerry will have a truly Sisyphean struggle to make it to the White House with their marriages still intact.
September 14, 2003, Sunday Times.
copyright © 2003, 2003 Andrew Sullivan |
