Running Mates - WSJ

[question everything]

If she's independent, we're wary. If she's a prop, that's worse.

A big career is an asset, unless she won't give it up. Her family has to come first -- but the campaign is paramount. He says she's his rock, his compass, that he couldn't do it without her. She says... well, that's just the point. The role of the candidate's spouse is being rewritten as the campaign rolls on. But no one -- not the voters, not the press, and certainly not the spouses themselves -- can agree on the script.

(snip)

To listen to the voters, what they most want is to see that the candidates and their spouses delight in their marriages. After Sen. John Edwards's wife, Elizabeth, presided at a house party in Portsmouth, N.H., last week, Chrissy Hanisco, a disabilities lawyer, didn't talk about the health-care issues that had been the focus of Mrs. Edwards's remarks. No, "What struck me," she said, "was her visible belief in and love for Senator Edwards.

(snip)

Each of this year's political wives is writing her own definition of partnership... Gert Clark... holds his coat, and he has been forced into a belated oh-gosh apology for saying she "doesn't work." ...when Mrs. Heinz Kerry met with voters in the Ida Grove, Iowa, home of John Sinnott last month, she spoke about... lead poisoning.

Hadassah Lieberman, who is soldiering through her second presidential campaign, and who helped buck up her husband, Senator Joseph Lieberman, during the long Florida recount in 2000 without ever a public complaint or misstep.

(snip)

Now, even speaking for the candidate is a big part of the spouse's job, and we are irritated when we're denied. Judith Dean's error wasn't that she maintained her medical practice and stayed home to care for her son -- that sounds like a lot of two-career marriages. Where we are uncomfortable is that we expect spouses to share the big things in life, and running for president seems like a pretty big thing. A longtime Washington political activist says that voters expect "a minimum threshold" of help and self-revelation from a candidate's spouse, and "zero days on the campaign falls below that threshold."