First spouses no longer essential
With just a few weeks until the San Francisco mayoral election, candidate Gavin Newsom’s wife of two years is renting an apartment in New York to follow her dreams of television stardom.
The news of Kimberly Guilfoyle Newsom’s departure so close to the election triggered gossip about the state of the couple’s marriage (never better, they say). But few speculated about the political consequences for Newsom, mostly because there likely will be none.
The role of first spouses (and potential first spouses) has changed. Namely, the wife as political accessory is dead.
OK, maybe not dead. Laura Bush is like a leather-bound edition of “War and Peace” under her husband’s arm, an accoutrement that serves to elevate his frat-boy image. Maria Shriver is the Ms. Magazine under Arnold Schwarzenegger’s arm in the California governor’s recall election.
But wife-as-accessory is fading into anachronistic oblivion as surely as punch-card ballots and presidential press conferences. Howard Dean is omnipresent in the media, yet who has seen his wife?
One reason the wife’s role is changing is that with every election cycle, the wife is, increasingly, a husband. But some political experts attribute the change to the fact that wives today risk doing more harm than good for their husbands.
Just as Hillary Clinton was a Rorschach test for voters, so now are most politicians’ wives. They have their own jobs and their own pasts. They have their own points of view. They don’t always toe the ideological line. Worst of all, they might have no fashion sense.
Women voters, says pollster Merv Field, notice those things. Women are much more critical of politicians’ wives than men are. Older female voters, especially, can be judgmental of candidates’ wives who are assertive or ambitious, or who have committed the sin of working while raising small children (particularly when she didn’t need to work).
“It’s a gamble for a male candidate,” Field said. “Women who don’t work might envy or dislike women who do, and vice versa. There are so many more variables today in a spouse. It’s no longer Nancy Reagan sitting there looking up starry-eyed at her husband.”
City Treasurer Susan Leal is running for San Francisco mayor, and if she wins, then her first lady would indeed be a lady – another shift in the traditional image. Leal and her partner, Susan Hirsch, have been together seven years.
Former Police Chief Tony Ribera, another mayoral candidate, has been married for 34 years. His wife, who teaches at a Catholic school in the city, has attended about 10 percent of Ribera’s campaign events, Ribera said. It’s the longevity of his marriage, not the physical presence of his wife, that Ribera thinks might matter to voters. But he’s not sure even that holds much sway anymore.
“Mayor Brown has done quite well with his running around,” Ribera said.
Two-term Mayor Willie Brown has not lived with his wife in decades. He shows up at public events with different beautiful women on his arm. He recently fathered a child with a woman who is not his wife. And no one blinks.
Newsom said he fielded lots of phone calls when the news appeared that his wife would be living part time in New York. “People thought all kinds of things,” Newsom said. The fact is, he said, his wife is simply pursuing a career opportunity by signing a contract with ABC and CNN.
In truth, Kimberly Guilfoyle Newsom’s absence might be just the ticket for Newsom the candidate, if not Newsom the husband.
In the current climate, it’s risky for a candidate to have a spouse who is too assertive or too mousy, too pretty or too plain, too fashionable or too dowdy. Thus, today’s ideal political spouse should strive to be one thing above all others: invisible.
(Joan Ryan is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Send comments to her in care of this newspaper or send her e-mail at joanryan@sfchronicle.com.)