Why We Want To Meet The Missus

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One nice thing about Howard Dean is that he does what journalists tell him to do. The New Republic wrote that he was too secular, and he immediately found religion. In the past week reporters and pundits have started raising eyebrows about the near total absence of his wife, Dr. Judith Steinberg Dean, in the primaries. She has probably been the most absent spouse in the history of presidential campaigns. And he would probably like to change that. But it's not up to him, is it?

In the 1954 movie Woman's World, three businessmen up for a big promotion are judged on the basis of who has the best wife for the job. We are no longer impressed with the notion of the woman behind the man. Lady Macbeth — never a good role model, to be sure — looks less like a brilliant schemer and more like a needy victim of unequal opportunity. In many states, it is now illegal even to ask whether a job applicant is married. Politics is not quite as advanced. Although women are streaming into elected office, plenty are still loyally trailing along after their politico husbands, chatting up voters and practicing their Nancy Reagan smiles — even if they have to do it after putting in 40 or 50 hours a week at their day jobs. Hillary Clinton said she was not going to bake cookies or be Tammy Wynette standing by her man, and then did the biggest Wynette in political history (although the last chapter of that story has not yet been written).

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The model for the liberated political wife, though, is someone who plays a real strategic role in her husband's campaign, like Hillary Clinton or Elizabeth Edwards (lawyer wife of Democratic candidate John Edwards). Or someone with an independent base of celebrity, like Teresa Heinz Kerry or Maria Shriver Schwarzenegger. We have no model for Steinberg, about whom we know almost nothing except that she is Jewish and a doctor. While her husband has been staging one of the most remarkable insurgent presidential campaigns in history, she has continued to cure the sick back in Vermont, as if there were nothing more useful she could do.

Our first instinct as good feminists, or as good-feminist wannabes, is to applaud this. Why should a doctor, no less, be reduced to an adjunct of her husband's ambition? But as we try to assess these men who want the most important job in the world, it's hard to avoid feeling that the big boss in Woman's World was on to something. We want to meet the missus.

The role of First Lady has become a near formal part of our political system. She picks an issue to be her own, or White House strategists pick it for her, and that issue gets serious attention and money. In every recent presidency there has come a moment when the press discovers or decides that the First Lady wields surprising power. She moderates her husband's tendency toward extremism. Or she stokes his ideological fires. Whatever. To the public, she seems adoring and deferential. But upstairs in the White House it's a different story.

More important, we need to know about a politician's spouse — wife or husband — in order to understand the candidate's character. Let's face it: whom a person chooses to spend his or her life with, what kind of relationship they seem to have, what their children are like — these are all matters a presidential biographer will want to explore when this President is history. And for similar reasons, they are matters that voters should try to understand before placing him or her in history's glare.

We need some of this understanding about Howard Dean especially. On first acquaintance, he is a tremendously appealing character. But as opponents and the press go to work on him, and as he exposes himself over a long campaign, the image becomes blurrier. A fuller picture of his life partner — and the opportunity to see and listen to them together — would help us understand him better. The few tidbits we have gleaned have been suggestive. Months ago, answering a very clever question about their different styles of doctoring, Steinberg contrasted her husband's tendency to leap toward a medical diagnosis with her more methodical approach. She told TIME more recently that she was caught unawares by the extent of his political ambition. In a joint interview on PEOPLE.com, she said it was "crazy" to think that Dean has a temper problem. She confessed that "there's this one thing I did which was pretty bad, which he forgave quickly and forever." (She didn't say what it was.) More of this stuff would help us, the voters. And a fuller picture would probably help Dean's candidacy too. A feeling that you know someone tends to produce empathy.

The voters' need to know who they're voting for is important enough to trump the right to privacy of a presidential candidate's spouse. And if the candidate can't convince his own family that becoming President is this important, that also may say something voters will find useful.