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party political convention, but she did so because FDR was a no show and his nomination was about to be unceremoniously withdrawn due to widespread unhappiness with his liberal vice-presidential choice.