First Ladies (68 page)

In 2006, midway through her second term, CNN/USA/Gallup reported that Laura Bush enjoyed one of the highest approval ratings
of any president's wife they had measured.
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Nevertheless, while 82 percent of Americans liked what she was doing, only 43 percent felt the same way about her husband.

Some of her husband's harshest critics admitted they found little to fault in her, and they puzzled how husband and wife could appeal to such different camps. Novelist Curtis Sittenfeld, perhaps struck by reports that Laura had voted for Eugene McCarthy in 1968,
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popularized the view that Laura held more liberal views than her husband did, and that, given the chance, she might reveal this. Sittenfeld's best-selling novel
American Wife,
which she admitted was “loosely inspired by the life of an American first lady,” describes a thoughtful, spirited woman of liberal views who marries the fun-loving son of a politically connected Republican family and ends up living in the White House.
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Even she seems puzzled by how it all happened. The fictional First Lady admits to voting for her husband's opponent in both 2000 and 2004 because she “believed sincerely that his opponent would do a better job.” On the very last page of Sittenfeld's novel, as the First Lady considers the problems facing the nation and the president's role in them, she reminds the reader, “All I did is marry him. You are the ones who gave him power.”

In various interviews, Sittenfeld revealed she admired Laura Bush for her down-to-earth attitudes, her work for so many good causes, and her seriousness and caring.
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Partisan identification did not appear on the list. Indeed, Laura frequently reached across party lines. She explained away one of Michelle Obama's missteps during the 2008 campaign by saying Michelle was a newcomer to national politics and would soon learn to watch what she said. When asked about Hillary Clinton's strong run for the Democratic nomination that same year, the Republican First Lady had only praise for how Hillary had widened possibilities for all women.

By the time she left the White House, with a reported contract of $1.6 million for her memoir about living there, scholars viewed Laura Bush's record much less favorably than had Curtis Sittenfeld. In a poll released by the Siena Research Institute in December 2008, historians ranked Laura Bush #17 among post-1900 First Ladies, just above Pat Nixon, Ida McKinley, and Florence Harding.
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In the longer list of thirty-eight women who had held the job since 1789, Laura did little better, coming in #23, well below Barbara Bush (#12) and Hillary Clinton (#4). Although above average in “background,” “integrity” and “intelligence,” she came out at the very bottom in the “own woman” category.

Eight years earlier, when asked which of her two predecessors—her traditional mother-in-law or the activist-feminist Clinton—Laura
meant to emulate, she had refused to choose, saying she wanted to be “just me.” In some ways she did that. By putting enormous effort into international travel and initiatives that sought to help women and others suffering from malaria and AIDS, she exposed the role of First Lady to an international spotlight. Standing by an unpopular president without looking weak or manipulated, she won fans in quarters unfriendly to her husband. All the while, she maintained her image of a caring, intelligent, down-to-earth person. But she realized she left the job of First Lady without doing all that she could have. In an interview with
People
magazine, she admitted, “Maybe if I have a regret, it's just that I didn't do more.”
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THE YEAR
2008—
WHEN HILLARY CLINTON
came close to winning the Democratic Party's presidential nomination—marked a political watershed moment for women. But signs of change reached beyond one woman and one party. When the Republicans picked little-known Alaska governor Sarah Palin for the vice presidential spot on their ticket, they achieved a historic first for the GOP. In Washington, Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from California, had already made headlines in 2007 when she became the first female Speaker of the House of Representatives, a title that put her next in line for the Oval Office if anything happened to the president or vice president. With so many women at the top echelon of national politics, could a female president be far in the future?

Earlier predictions of who would break through that last barrier centered on women holding lower elective office. Wide speculation was that the first female president would, like most male presidents, come out of Congress or a state governor's mansion.
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Most probably she would be a lawyer and be married to someone who showed no interest in politics, such as Margaret Thatcher's husband, Denis Thatcher. By 2008, the number of women who fit this bill had grown, and the question was less “if” a woman would be president than “when.” Nine of the fifty states had women governors, several of whom boasted achievement records that put them on the short list to serve as running mates or hold high appointive offices. In the 110th Congress, sixteen of the one hundred senators were women, including one ex–First Lady; two states, California and Maine, were represented by
only
female senators. In the 435-member House of Representatives, seventy-four members were women, and although critics complained that added up to a measly 17 percent, it equaled nearly a third of all
women who had ever served in the House.
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The very first, Montana schoolteacher Jeannette Rankin, found the House a lonely place in 1917, when women in thirty-seven states could not even vote.
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Now, a female voice addressing Congress was hardly remarkable.

Before Hillary, First Ladyship was not perceived as a springboard for the presidency, although American history is peppered with names of White House women who hankered to play the political game themselves. Sarah Polk (1845–1849) and Helen Taft (1909–1913) stand out as women who in another age might have chosen to run for office themselves. But education standards for women of their time left them ill prepared; strong bias against women in politics would have stymied their efforts in any case. Sarah Polk's lament in 1843 that she could not go out campaigning with her husband but had to stay home where she had “not much to opperate [
sic
] on” indicates how completely she felt barred from the public political arena.
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Barriers against women campaigning for their husbands did not fall easily. In 1964 Lady Bird Johnson traveled on her own through eight southern states, the part of the nation most hostile to her husband's candidacy after he had signed the Civil Rights Act earlier that year. Her courage is all the more remarkable when compared to Eleanor Roosevelt's reluctance. In 1940, when Eleanor realized the difficulty Franklin faced in seeking an unprecedented third term, she finally accepted the idea of campaigning for him. Although she had no compunctions about standing up for other candidates, a speech for her own husband did not seem “ladylike.”

By 2008, such reluctance sounded quaint; several women, including the very persuasive Rosalynn Carter, had eagerly followed Lady Bird Johnson's example. Now wives of candidates typically prepared for campaigns by signing up for speech lessons and hiring consultants. Half a century earlier, Mamie Eisenhower did not even indicate a preference for one candidate over another when she urged women to “please vote.” Now impassioned spouses abandoned nonpartisanship entirely and faced large audiences to tout a husband's record and fitness for high office. That Laura Bush had raised $5 million for George's 2004 campaign simply underlined the fact that the two-person job of presidency started well before the votes were cast.

Spouses of both gender played an unprecedented role in the 2008 campaign, and one ended up a stronger figure than her husband. Elizabeth Edwards, a veteran of the 2004 race when her husband shared the Democratic ticket with John Kerry, had already captured popular sympathy with her poignant life story—which included the death of a child and a continuing battle with breast cancer. Now she
became a powerful voice in her own right for health care reform. Bill Clinton, back at the center of national attention as he campaigned for Hillary's presidential bid, made no attempt to duplicate Denis Thatcher's detachment, causing voters to wonder what role he would play were Hillary to be elected. Cindy McCain, the brewery heiress, tried to limit her participation to standing modestly at her husband John's side, but she ended up the butt of jokes about how many homes she owned. Michelle Obama, the first African American to campaign actively in a husband's presidential run, was chastised as an “angry black harridan” when she talked of being “proud of my country for the first time.”
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After her husband's election, Michelle Obama made more headlines. A Harvard-educated lawyer and former hospital executive, she was accustomed to bringing home a paycheck that exceeded her husband's Senate salary, but now she described herself as a stay-at-home “mom in chief.” Unlike the only other attorney to become First Lady, she felt no need to feign culinary interests by talking about cookie baking, and she used her first public event at the White House to celebrate a new law extending workers' rights. This willingness to combine professional expertise and a traditional woman's role marked something new—another sign that the 2008 election was an important turning point for women.

The watershed moment had been a long time coming. Even after the 1920 amendment guaranteed women the right to vote, many chose not to use it, letting six decades pass before they equaled men's numbers at the voting booths. By the time that happened, in 1980, a clear difference—a gender gap—showed up in voting patterns. Women favored candidates who supported what they liked: more government intervention to provide health insurance, day care, racial equality, and gun control. Women were decidedly less interested than men in issues such as the use of military force and expanded defense budgets.

All these topics appeared on the debate list of Democrats vying for the 2008 nomination. The two U.S. senators left standing by February 2008, one a woman and the other an African American, agreed on most of the important issues, so talk turned to how gender and race might affect votes.
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Many Americans could remember when neither women nor African Americans could vote in some states, but both populations had made enormous gains after 1965, when they experienced improved pay equity, gained fairer representation in professional schools, and took seats on the Supreme Court. In the first decade of the twenty-first
century, few Americans admitted that either race or gender should disqualify candidates for high office, but it remained to be seen how they would vote when faced with a presidential candidate who was not a white male.
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American history is peppered with names of women who stepped forward to offer themselves as presidential candidates, but their efforts were more educational than geared to victory. When the tiny Equal Rights Party put Victoria Woodhull at the top of its 1872 ticket, she got nothing more than a few headlines. The flamboyant stockbroker and her running mate, Frederick Douglass, the African-American abolitionist and newspaperman, drew attention to the subject of equal rights for both women and African Americans but attracted few votes.

The following decade, the Equal Rights Party, now renamed the National Equal Rights Party, nominated a lesser known candidate but one more qualified than Woodhull—attorney Belva Lockwood.
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A former teacher, she had earned her law degree at age forty-three and, in 1879, became the first woman admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court. With another woman as her running mate, Lockwood managed to get her name on official ballots for president in 1884, but when the tallies came in she had won only a handful of votes. A second run in 1888, this time with a man, Charles Stuart Wells, as her running mate produced no better results, but the article she published fifteen years later, “How I Ran for the Presidency,” indicates how thoughtfully she prepared for the race, by working out detailed platforms and organizing rallies.
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Decades would pass before women got their names on the ballots of either major party. In 1964, Republicans in a few states provided Margaret Chase Smith, a senator from Maine, with enough delegate votes to put her name in nomination at the GOP convention, making her the first woman to win that honor from a major party.
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But she quickly withdrew, and Barry Goldwater was selected to head the ticket.

In 1972, New Yorker Shirley Chisholm, who had already made history as the first African-American woman to win a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, put together an organization that collected more than 400,000 votes in primaries in twelve states, resulting in nearly 152 delegate votes at the Democratic nominating convention. But Chisholm recognized the odds against her moving into the Oval Office. That was not her goal. Rather, she wanted to “shake things up a little … [so that] the next time a woman of whatever color or a dark skinned person of whatever sex aspires to be President, the way should
be a little smoother because I helped pave it.”
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Single-issue candidates occasionally ran, and one anti-abortion candidate, Ellen McCormack, became the first woman to qualify for federal matching campaign funds. But few people believed any one-issue candidate had a serious chance at the presidency.
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Even women with good connections to major parties dropped out when money and support did not materialize. Pat Schroeder, a Harvard-educated lawyer who had won her first election to Congress at age thirty-two, had strong credentials when she explored a presidential run for 1988. In her seventh term as a U.S. representative from Colorado, she had done her homework in a variety of areas not usually considered women's domain. Aware that political analysts believed any successful woman candidate for commander in chief had to meet the “Sister Mister” test, that is, have “the body of a woman with the character traits of a man,” Schroeder had gotten on House committees that dealt with the military and defense.
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