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Candidates discover it's the Year of the Spouse

Dan Janison

8:24 PM EST, February 21, 2008

Even Janet Huckabee was in the news Thursday, despite her preacher husband's electoral status as Hucka-been.

She raised a few eyebrows by attending a middleweight prize fight last weekend in Las Vegas -- Sin City itself -- to root for fellow Arkansan Jermain Taylor and, with the explanation that the other places were booked, staying over at the Hooters Casino Hotel.

At certain moments it seems as if the partners of the presidential candidates count more than the candidates.

This is truly the Year of the Spouse. Nobody would know it better than Janet Huckabee, Cyndi McCain, Michelle Obama and Bill Clinton.

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Just what do we seek in a White House spouse? "The problem is, we don't really know what we want," said Myra Gutin, a professor of communications at Rider University in Lawrenceville N.J., who wrote a book, "The President's Partner: The First Lady in the 20th Century."

Cyndi McCain, 53, the wife of Republican front-runner John McCain, became Thursday's spouse-in-the-spotlight, rushing to his side to help bat down a story that he had once grown too close to a female lobbyist. She said: "My children and I know that he would never do anything to not only disappoint our family but ... disappoint the people of America." And the Arizona senator turned to her and said: "I should have had you conduct this meeting."

It was her second big appearance of the week. On Tuesday, Cyndi McCain stood before the cameras and, without naming names, razzed the wife of Democratic front-runner Barack Obama. "I am proud of my country," Cyndi McCain said. She was playing off Michelle Obama, 44, who told a campaign crowd the day before that the movement around her husband made her proud of her country for the first time in her adult life.

Cyndi McCain knows the pain of the political wife. In the 2000 South Carolina primary, someone opposed to his winning the GOP nomination spread the smear that the McCains' daughter, adopted and of Bangladeshi origin, was really the senator's own illegitimate black child.

National newcomer Michelle Obama's speech on Monday could have been more provocative actually, if she'd elaborated on this line: "I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction, and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment."

But what she did say was enough to draw fire as sentimentally incorrect, which is a rival sibling of politically incorrect. The mini-flap that followed was as widely publicized as her husband's decision a few months ago to ditch his flag lapel pin -- a symbolic move in support of, well, action over symbols.

Above all, the Year of the Spouse is brought to us by the candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton. She claims her role as first lady in the 1990s as key White House experience. Bill Clinton, running for first husband, made waves with his recent whacks on rival Obama.

"When Hillary Clinton became first lady, I heard people complain she was too involved, and was not accountable, and 'who elected her?'" Professor Gutin says. "Then I heard about Laura Bush, 'I don't know who she is and why is she not doing anything?'

"For Americans it's an ambiguous position, with very mixed feelings about what they want."

At some point down the road, some test-tube-savvy political consultant may try to create the perfect combination of the bionic woman and Mamie Eisenhower -- if, of course, the polls call for it.