I’m guessing there’s a little-known codicil attached to the First Amendment that says you’re only allowed to make a certain number of painfully trite and pandering campaign ads in a month, so Rick Perry had to get his wife to do one, because he had exceeded his quota.
That would help explain the painful-to-watch phenomenon above.
Set aside the script, which makes me think that the Perry campaign paid the writers extra not to put in anything touching on originality or genuinely revelatory of character: No, this sounds too much like a real person — go back and watch another hour’s worth of ads from the 19950s and try again!
The appearance of a political wife in this one reminds me of the question Kathleen Parker raised yesterday: “Callista Gingrich: A Laura or a Hillary?” My first reaction, when I saw that headline on Twitter, was to think “Neither; she’s a Stepford.” But that one’s been done to death, so I didn’t Tweet it.
My next thought was this: I’m always a bit suspicious of political wives when they step to the fore. Like, why are they doing this? Is it their own ambition (I guess Hillary is supposed to stand for that) or are we to think they’re just so doggoned loyal and supportive that they’ll put up with all this, and with a fixed smile (I’m guessing that’s Laura)?
I mean, the candidates themselves are, by definition, not psychologically normal. No regular guy puts himself through that. He either desires power, or other people’s approval, or self-flagellation, or regular sex (the Alpha Male phenomenon), way more than your average Joe does, or he’s got a screw loose, or he is just ordained by Almighty God to be the nation’s leader (which would be my excuse, were I to run).
But hey, at the end of it all, he gets to be president and call the shots (which LOTS of guys would go for, if they didn’t have to go through a campaign to get there). But to run for First Lady? Where’s the reward? You have to show up for all the ribbon-cuttings, but get no real power. So I wonder. About all of them. (As for the husbands of female candidates — there are too few, and they stay too far in the background, for me to have formed many impressions, much less to have leaped to any generalizations.)
Whenever I’ve mentioned — just for the sake of argument, baby, just for laughs, you know, heh-heh — the remote possibility of thinking about considering running for office, I don’t get the sense from my wife that she’d be up for ANY sort of involvement in such madness. Because she’s a normal, sane person, and doesn’t need anything that such an experience has to offer. Which makes me wonder about the women who DO actively get involved in such goings-on.
It puzzles me.
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“…ordained by Almighty God to be the nation’s leader.”
That’s Mitt. And if he can have multiple political and/or/other wives, my husband has blessed my being one.
[Full disclosure: at my bequest, he also blessed my ‘marrying’ Sly Stallone, but Sly’s not running for president TMK.]
Well, this message was “I’m Anita Perry, Rick’s first and only wife. Rick served in the Air Force. We do wholesome homey things, not run up giant Tiffany bills. We’re back home kind of people, outside the Beltway [not like some candidates, not that we’re naming any names].
I think they get to live in a nice house with servants, and clearly, with a few exceptions (Dr. Jill Biden comes to mind), have subjugated their lives to supporting their husbands. Gabby Giffords is married to an astronaut. I wonder if Mark Kelly did ads for her campaign?
You used to be a reporter — give a few a call. I had a similar thought as to wives of football coaches, but never got a chance to write a story on it. Certainly there’s different reasons for different women. It’d be hard to imagine any five women — say, Jenny Sanford, Debbie DeMint, Jennifer Wilson, Deandrea Benjamin and Amy Sheheen — have the same motivations.
http://www.amazon.com/Head-Figure-Search-Hidden-ebook/dp/B006M38BQO
I recall reading a book on stress or happiness or something, and anyhow one of the findings was that while men rate their own well-being based on their own status, women rate their well-being based on their husband’s status.
Certainly seems to be the case in regular life. Other women can tell right away which secretaries are the wives of line workers and unemployed guys, and which ones are the wives of upper management. Maybe men don’t notice.
My apolitical wife is the only thing standing between me and running for local office.
““Callista Gingrich: A Laura or a Hillary?” My first reaction, when I saw that headline on Twitter, was to think “Neither; she’s a Stepford.” ”
Was there ever a first lady MORE Stepford than Laura Bush? I don’t recall her doing anything but standing beside GW with a frozen smile on her face.
@ Doug– Yes, Callista, for all her faults, is a paid singer at the Basilica AND a French horn player. French horn players, as anyone who’s ever been in a band can tell you, are NOT Stepfords–that would be the clarinetists.
@ Silence– Does anyone really pay attention to the wives of local officials, though? I couldn’t pick the wives of any of the City Council members out of a lineup except Deandrea, who I am familiar with as a lawyer, although I could ID Richard Gergel and Jamie Devine. Why not run for Daniel’s slot?
Jennifer, was that a current book? I’d hope that is not the case for MOST women nowadays, though I believe it could have been true at one time, and may well still be true for Mrs. Perry.
I’m not sure what to make of your comment that, “Other women can tell right away which secretaries are the wives of line workers and unemployed guys, and which ones are the wives of upper management. Maybe men don’t notice.”
Many or even most of the women I encounter are not secretaries and I don’t find myself necessarily thinking anything at all about the status of their husbands or even if they have one. I don’t tend to define the women I meet by their husbands. Maybe I’m just weird (entirely possible, I concede), but I don’t think that’s necessarily a common thing for women to do.
Scout, Jennifer’s pretty smart; she can probably tell the difference. As for men not noticing…
That reminded me of something from high school days. I remember, sometime when I was in the 10th or 11th grade and living on MacDill Air Force Base (my Dad, enjoying some shore duty after spending a year with the river patrol forces in Vietnam, was on the joint staff that would later become Central Command), one of my friends saying something to the effect of, “Well, you’re an officer’s kid, so you don’t notice….” I pursued the subject, with that friend and then with others, just enough to learn that my friends whose Dads were noncoms were acutely aware of a difference in status between them and those of us whose fathers were officers. And it had never occurred to me to spend a second thinking about it before.
I thought it ridiculous that they attached importance to the distinction. We certainly hadn’t earned our fathers’ ranks, and so nothing of that status should have accrued to us, this being America. The noncoms’ kids thought me terribly naive for thinking that. To them, such high-minded thoughts were the sort that only an officer’s kid could afford…
Well, I don’t doubt that I’m the odd one with the not noticing. I noticed a long time ago I tend to notice things that others miss, and miss things that others notice, often.
Scout,
It was a library book I read in the past few years. I’m sorry I can’t give you a title. It had to do with the very real correlation between wealth, status, and well-being.
To clarify, the finding is not that other people define women by their husbands. But that women themselves assess their own status by the accomplishments of their spouse, to an extent that men do not.
–> That sense of personal status is in turn is what other women perceive.
(Women also notice when a man has that kind of status-induced confidence. I picked out my husband’s CEO when he walked into a restaurant one day, even though I had never met him, never heard a description of him, and had no reason to think he would walk in the door. Group of guys in collared shirts walking towards our table, I knew right away which one was the boss’s boss. You could just tell.)
(Adding: The secretaries only come into it because it is one of the few professions undertaken by women of all walks of life.)
@ Brad– perhaps your story also illustrates the kind of privilege-denying of which you are accused sometimes–as a white male Christian heterosexual of the executive class…
@ Jennifer and Scout. I believe it has been easier for me to be the wife of a Harvard alum than it would have been to have been one myself. Accomplishments in women often seem to be far more ambivalent than the same ones in men.