You knew that Howard Dean’s campaign had hit a rough patch when his wife started talking about cookies.
Yes, as Judith Steinberg Dean confided in the Jan. 26 issue of People magazine, she has baked chocolate chip cookies for her husband’s staff.
It just happened once, she claimed. The cookies weren’t even very good, she swore. Nonetheless, the cookie moment had arrived. Then came the network television interview moment and the New Hampshire campaign podium moment and by early this week, the attempt to refashion the female Dr. Dean seemed well under way.
At first, the fact that Howard Dean’s wife continued to practice medicine and attend PTA meetings in Vermont while her husband campaigned for president was considered admirable, even ground-breaking.
It was part of the quirky Dean mystique, just like the Grateful Dead albums, the J.C. Penney suit, that crazy idea about using the Internet to raise money. “The West Wing” had come to life, without all the let’s-talk-really-fast-while-we-walk-down-a-hallway sequences.
That a Dean presidency seemed as much a far-fetched liberal porn fantasy as the Bartlet White House made the prospect of First Doctor Judy Dean charming rather than unconventional. When she naively proposed she would continue to practice medicine if her husband were elected, as though she could open a doc-in-a-box off the Rose Garden, people shook their heads and chuckled. Those darned lady doctors.
Then Dean became the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination and as the Iowa caucuses approached, the perception of Judy Dean suddenly shifted from medicine woman to witch doctor.
Reporters–and, if the reporters are to be believed, some voters–began asking why she hadn’t visited the Hawkeye State. What kind of wife would rather make housecalls than shake hands? Was something wrong with them, their marriage, his fitness for the presidency?
Finally, New York Times writer Maureen Dowd, in a column that suggested the Deans’ relationship was more “transcendentally wacky” than the Clintons’, pronounced: “Physician, heal thy spouse.”
Seventy-two hours later, Judith Steinberg Dean was in Iowa.
Who knows whether her last-minute arrival helped or hurt her husband or made no difference at all; he finished third. By the time this column goes to press, the New Hampshire primary will be over, too. It may be Elizabeth Edwards’ or Gert Clark’s turn under the microscope.
But, as the churn over Judy Dean illustrates, the wackiest relationship here is not the one between a candidate and his spouse, but that between the American public and its prospective first ladies.
The public asks more of the candidates’ wives than the candidates. They must be smart but not intellectual. Involved but not too involved. Adoring but not simpering.
They should champion a social cause but not one that anyone could actually have an opinion about. Reading is fine. Health-care reform is not.
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They should look attractive but not sexy. They should not admit they look attractive because they use Botox.
They should seem at ease in every situation. They should not seem at ease because they are addicted to prescription drugs. No one ran into more trouble with the political wife standard than Hillary Rodham Clinton. Hillary, of course, had a cookie moment of her own during the 1992 campaign, when she answered a question about possible conflicts of interest in her work by saying, “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas,” thereby dooming herself to a bake-off with Barbara Bush in the pages of Family Circle.
Those of us waiting for the day when a candidate’s presidential platform is not required to include recipes by his (or her?) spouse can take some comfort in historical precedent.
Before James Polk became president in 1845, his wife, Sarah, announced that if they reached the White House, she would “neither keep house, nor make butter.”
There’s a political wife who didn’t just refuse to make cookies. She wouldn’t even make an ingredient.
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Columns by Tribune staff reporters Steve Johnson and Louise Kiernan, who are husband and wife, appear in this space on alternating weeks.