US presidential candidates’ wives scrape the barrel in mawkishness

SAY WHAT you like about Irish politics but at least it isn’t rife with the kind of mawkish folksy smaltz that has become an unwelcome staple of American presidential elections.

The phenomenom of candidates’ wives giving gushing speeches about just how much they really love their husbands is completely alien in Europe, but Yanks seem to lap it up the cloying sentimentality.

It wasn’t always thus. In 1940, Eleanor Roosevelt was the first wife to address a party political convention, but she did so because FDR was a no show and his nomination was about to be unceremoniously withdrawn due to widespread unhappiness with his liberal vice-presidential choice.

She didn’t trouble delegates with saccharine recollections of her first date with her husband — in fact, she didn’t bother with any personal stories at all — and instead, in a powerful unscripted address, reminded those present that the country was on the verge of war and couldn’t afford their petty squabbling.

“We cannot tell from day to day what may come. This is no ordinary time. No time for weighing anything except what we can do best for the country as a whole and that responsibility rests on each and every one of us as individuals,” she said, duly securing the nomination for her husband.

Fast forward 52 years and the tradition of, what has been dubbed, the “wifely testimonial”, in which wives are reduced to the status of cheap political prop, was first pioneered by conservative paragon Barbara Bush.

As George HW Bush’s campaign floundered, despairing party handlers decided to give his matronly wife a primetime slot to try to calm nerves and sell her husband’s charms to dubious voters.

“You [delegates] make me feel wonderful but then I always feel wonderful when I get to talk about the stongest, the most decent, the most caring, the wisest and, yes, the healthiest man I know,” she trilled, as a nation struggled with its collective gag reflex.

In an unashamedly desperate plea, she then described her beloved’s main platform as family values, declaring, somewhat ambiguously; “However you define family, that’s what we mean by family values.”

Despite her best efforts, George Bush Senior managed to lose the election, but the mass appeal of a spouse’s personal endorsement was born and candidates’ wives now have to be prepared to publicly declare their undying love for their husbands, over and over again, in front of millions of voyeur voters if they are to have any chance of ever making it to the White House.

The premise is simple. Convince credulous voters of the enduring happiness of a candidate’s marriage in the hope of persuading them that a similarly happy and successful relationship beckons if they will just make him their president.

Implicitly, the female demographic, that wives are tasked with pandering to, are not interested in trifling matters, like the economy and national security, but rather, whether a candidate is good husband material — knowledge that is gleaned from the preponderance of cringe-inducing anecdotes about the couple’s early, always idyllic, life together that are shared with delegates.

Even firebrand feminist Hillary Clinton, in 1996, was forced to take the stage and try to convince the country that her philandering husband was the ideal family man because, evidently, women’s only credible area of expertise, no matter how stellar their own personal professional achievements, is families — their own and other people’s.

Most recently, giving a masterclass in sycophancy, Ann Romney told Republican delegates that she didn’t want to talk about unpleasant things like policies or politics. No, she wanted to talk to them “from my heart about our hearts…about love”.

She then described how a strapping Mitt Romney had won her heart at a dance four decades ago and promised that, messiah-like, he would “take [them] to a better place, just as he took me home safely from that dance”.

Now, I don’t know about the average American voter, but I’d certainly be looking for qualifications other than an ability to navigate one’s way from a dance hall to a front door before I got behind a candidate’s ambitions to become the leader of the free world.

While Mrs Romney’s speech read like she ripped up a couple of self-help books, fired them into a blender and regurgitated the mess that came out, Michelle Obama’s effort, although not nearly as brain-numbingly stupid, was no less obsequious and toadying.

The first lady managed to get through a 25-minute address, devoted to telling her life story in minutiae, without once mentioning her own high-powered legal career.

For the record, she went to college in Princeton, law school in Harvard and met her future husband when, as a practising lawyer in a top Chicago firm, she was assigned to mentor their green new recruit. She was his boss.

As recently as 2006, she was earning over $350,000 from prestigious research institute University of Chicago Hospitals, and a board membership, while her husband was toiling away as a senator for a mere $160,000.

However, to listen to much of the commentary during and after her speech one would be forgiven for thinking that her biggest accomplisments in life were having toned arms and the prescience to marry a handsome future president.

Now, of course, she was up on the stage to sell her husband, and not herself, but did that really necessitate the airbrushing out of any, even tangential, reference to the fact that her own role in life wasn’t always defined by her husband and his political ambitions?

THE real nadir came just before the end when, after delivering a transcendent account of epic struggles through the ages, from colonial era fights for independence to suffragettes’ battles to win the vote, this incredibly smart and accomplished woman concluded by describing herself “not just as First Lady and not just as a wife … my most important title is still “mom-in-chief” — a line that even Ann Romney would probably discard as being too dangerously emetic.

Amid all the soaring superlatives from commentators about Michelle Obama’s speech, which was, it should be said, universally lauded, few pointed out that it could easily have been delivered 60 years ago, when the feminist movement was a mere blip on the horizon.

Geraldine Brooks, writing about America’s presumptive first lady four years ago, noted that once she decided to prostrate her own career to her husband’s political ambitions her story could be viewed as “a depressingly retrograde narrative of stifling gender roles and frustrating trade-offs”.

This narrative, relentlessly expounded in all of the candidates’ wives’ speeches as far back as 1992, that women’s primary purpose is homemaking, with professional careers deemed too unpleasant to even mention, is anathema in a modern era when traditional gender roles are considered twee and outmoded.

There may be a dearth of women in Irish politics but at least the ones involved in public life are not given mandatory makeovers, which strips them of any shred of personality and professional ambition, before presenting them as simpering Stepford wife clones whose only function is to look pretty and procreate.