Poll Mates : The Other Half Can Make a Whole Lot of Difference

Candidate’s spouse, 1968: A wife and mother whose main task is to keep the home fires burning, to smile in pictures, at the side of, and slightly behind, the candidate. Perhaps she engages in charity work. She surely trusts reporters not to write about any marriage or family problems.

Welcome to election year, 1988, where a candidate’s spouse is likely to be a worker juggling family and career; who can, and sometimes does, speak on the issues; who may be a man, and who, this year, thanks to Gary Hart and his relationship with actress-model Donna Rice, should no longer expect that skeletons will remain in the family closet.

“If there’s something, be prepared to talk about it, or not talk about it, and be prepared to pay the price either way,” is the way Orange County political consultant David Vaporean counsels prospective candidate couples.

At a recent Washington workshop for Republican candidates for the House of Representatives, Sam Richardson, communications director of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said he cautioned spouses not to be surprised when a reporter asks: “Did Lee Hart do the right thing? Have you betrayed your husband? Has he betrayed you?”

He warned spouses to have answers (other than “it’s none of your business”) to questions into any addictions in the family, prison records or credit history.

“If they don’t have answers, they shouldn’t be out in the public eye,” he said.

In Orange County, the spouses of politicians who are stepping down or hoping to move up play a full spectrum of roles, from reception line companion to luncheon speaker substitute. Here, the highest-ranking officials and most promising candidates are Republicans whose spouses--even the youngest and most active--speak highly of the intertwined priorities of God and country and traditional family values.

Claire Rosenberg, wife of Republican congressional candidate Nathan Rosenberg, is a 1974 Harvard graduate and a former budget examiner in the Executive Office of the President. She speaks fluent Spanish.

She has foregone office work to raise the couple’s three children, all under the age of 5. At the same time, she is president of the Young Republicans, serves on the alumni committee of the Harvard Club of Orange County and raises funds for drug and child-abuse programs.

Her main role as a candidate’s spouse is to “make sure everything works at home,” she said. “It sounds not of the ‘80s, but it’s keeping the home fires burning in such a way so he’s got that solid foundation of love . . . so there aren’t crises that would take his attention away.”

She encountered public scrutiny in 1986 during her husband’s unsuccessful campaign (also for the 40th Congressional District seat), in which their links to the motivational seminars known as est or The Forum became an issue.

Werner Erhard, est’s founder, is Rosenberg’s older brother, “and we love him,” she said. Claire, who attended est seminars before meeting Nathan, continues to attend workshops while Nathan, a management consultant, leads programs in leadership, money and accomplishment through the San Francisco-based Werner Erhard and Associates, she said.

Patty Baker, a working mother of two children under the age of 5, said she and her husband, David, an Irvine City Council member running for the same congressional seat Rosenberg is seeking, have discussed how to handle public scrutiny. She said they decided that while some parts of their private lives will be public, others will not.

“It’s important to keep a life separate from the public . . . for our own well-being,” she said. “We don’t talk about our personal lives. It comes up with city council (races) and it’s better if we keep it to ourselves.”

Baker’s priorities are husband, children and her job as regional staff assistant for a life insurance company. “Obviously, if we move to Washington, I would give up my job, and that’s all right,” she said. “I try not to think about it now. I think it worries my boss.”

What hasn’t changed is the spouse’s primary role--unquestioned loyalty and support--according to Ken Khachigian, Ronald Reagan’s former chief speech writer and now a San Clemente lawyer and political consultant.

“People don’t understand really, how extraordinary (campaign) pressures are,” he said. “It’s extreme.

“I think, despite the fact that we’re in a modern era, when it comes down to the last days of a campaign and you get nervous and stressed and everything else, there’s no greater role, male or female, than that of the one unabashedly, unquestionably loyal person in the entourage who always thinks the candidate is a hero,” said Khachigian, who campaigned with Richard Nixon and Reagan.

“One thing I learned from Richard Nixon is how presidents and candidates constantly need a lift. They spend so much of their time (getting) banged around, and questioned harshly under great stress.”

“I am Nancy Reagan,” said Anne (“That’s Anne with an ‘e’ ”) Badham, likening her role of adoring support for her husband, retiring Rep. Robert E. Badham, to that of the President’s wife. “He gets a lot of pillow talk. He is grateful for my ideas and values my opinion.”

Without her encouragement to quit, she said, “he probably would have stayed forever. I’ve seen too many (elected officials) stay too long,” she said. “They become elderly and ineffective. I didn’t want that for my husband.

“It’s better to leave on top, when you’re a winner, have respect and are young enough to start over.”

Badham, 58, a Newport Beach Republican, has been reelected to Congress every two years since 1976. He and Anne, his second wife, have been married for 18 years.

He might have listened when she urged him to quit in 1985, if it weren’t for Nathan Rosenberg’s challenge in the Republican primary, she said. “He didn’t want a young upstart with no elective or civic background to challenge him. He stayed in to prove it wouldn’t work.”

She believes she has played a “major” role in her husband’s career.

“I’ve ended up being his eyes and ears in a lot of ways,” she said. On their much-criticized worldwide trips, for instance, she said foreign-based American military personnel and others would often lobby her while her husband met with the country’s leaders.

“The public is getting their money’s worth when they have an elected official with a wife who plays an active role,” she declared.

“I get upset,” she said, over complaints that the congressman, a ranking minority member of the House Armed Services Committee, spent too much time away from his district on such trips. “Obviously, the constituency understands it, (or) they wouldn’t send him back every two years.

There was also widespread criticism of his spending campaign funds for personal items such as her own dermatology bills, Gucci gifts and a 1982 Cadillac.

While she doesn’t reply to those charges, “It doesn’t mean that I like (them). . . . I’m not in a position to fight back. I was reared to maintain my dignity. I wouldn’t stoop to the level of anyone who would attack me or my family.”

Now that the Badhams are spending more time in their Newport Beach home, she said she has realized that “life has gone by. We’ve missed a lot because of what he had to do. We missed intimacy with other people.”

Voters now obviously accept divorce and other aspects of disparate family life (as exemplified by the First Family). Even admissions of a spouse’s alcohol rehabilitation can play to a candidate’s advantage, according to Richardson. “Soon I’m sure we’ll have (congressional) candidates who have gone through drug rehab.”

While no polls have shown what voters prefer in a candidate’s spouse, most consultants assume that voters like a happily married family candidate.

Richardson said he worked on Bob Dole’s 1974 Senate campaign in Kansas when the candidate was newly divorced. Dole trailed by 20 points his opponent, Bill Roy, a physician and a lawyer with an attractive wife, also a lawyer, and “four to six kids, all good looking.”

“They were all over the state. Each kid had his own Winnebago. Dole had no wife, was recently divorced, his daughter was back in Washington.”

To counter Roy’s family identification, the campaign recruited Dole’s reluctant ex-wife, Phyllis, his brother, his daughter and his mother. “We had our own Winnebago army out. . . .

“His mother going out was one of the best deals. She’d sit back there in the Winnebago, and ask people to vote for her son, Bob. She called him Bobby Joe. ‘Yeah, please vote for my son, Bobby Joe.’ It’s folksy, you laugh, but it worked.”

Dole won by 13,000 votes.

In Orange County, Thomas A. Fuentes, chairman of the county’s Republican Party, said that traditional values translate into votes. “We sometimes get hacks wanting to be candidates. I say to them, ‘Where are the dimensions to your life? Where’s your family life? Your social and community values?’ If they lack those other sides, they’re flat, one-dimensional politicos.”

Emphasizing that she is not the officeholder (“He is the star. I’m just the helpmate”), Anita Ferguson said she often represents and speaks for her husband of 40 years, state Assemblyman Gilbert W. Ferguson (R-Newport Beach) when he is in Sacramento.

“I’m his voice down here when he’s (up there),” she said. “I can give the dissertation, too.”

The ultraconservative view they share is simple, she said. “Property rights is the key.” Also, she said, they are both committed to “Project 90”--a Republican push to dominate the state Legislature before 1990. “We’re only five seats away.”

It was that project that made him turn away from a congressional campaign this year, she said. “I said, ‘You’re not really going to Washington, are you?’ He said, ‘No, I’m totally committed to turn the state around.’ I said, ‘Fabulous.’ ”

Now that their four children are raised, she works as president of the couple’s development and remodeling company, takes on volunteer duties with his public relations business and devotes herself to her only cause--her husband.

Through receptions, dinners, breakfasts and luncheons, she said, she raises $250,000 a year for the assemblyman’s campaigns. On April 8, she is hosting a ball for all Republican assemblymen and their spouses. “No Democrats allowed.” The cost: $5,000 for a table of 10.

She said her husband was applauded recently for a speech supporting a bill to outlaw pornography from vending machines available to minors. When she called to congratulate him, she reminded him that his words were inspired by God, said Anita Ferguson, a Christian Scientist. Her husband, she said, was raised in the Evangelical Reform Church, but he sometimes attends church with her.

Charges, now under investigation by the state Fair Political Practices Commission, that Gil Ferguson diverted campaign money to his public relations firm, upset and anger her. “Any wife would be upset. So we find out who they (the slow-growth advocate who filed the original complaint) are and we tell people why they’re doing it. That’s politics.”

Members of a small, relatively new fraternity, the husbands of officeholders and candidates define their own places.

“I’m her Good Girl Friday,” said Irv Wieder of his wife, Orange County Supervisor Harriett Wieder, who is considering a bid for the congressional seat of Daniel Lungren, a Republican who represents the 42nd District and who is engaged in a confirmation battle to be state treasurer.

Wieder, president of his own export firm, said: “I try to give Harriett as much support as my time will permit.” In January, he accompanied her to Washington, where she “focused on her needs for the campaign” and he attended candidate workshops of the Republican National Congressional Committee. In the workshops, he learned not to be photographed in a white shirt and to leave the issues to the candidate.

Candidate’s husbands have a harder time than wives, because some men fear being “outperformed” by their wives, he said. “I don’t have that problem.”

“We are both free thinkers and have our own opinions,” he said. “We don’t coach each other as to what to think or say.”

Compared to Irv Wieder, Garth Bergeson is less involved with the career of his wife, state Sen. Marian Bergeson, a Newport Beach Republican.

He said he stays out of strategy, policy- and speech-making, and fund-raising but will attend dinners and receptions.

The couple, who met at Brigham Young University and married in 1950, have lived in the same Newport Beach home for 28 years. In the early years, it was Marian who changed the children’s diapers and did the cooking, he said.

When she entered local school board politics in the middle ‘60s, the youngest of their four children was in high school. Her decision caused “a little bit of fomenting,” but he adjusted. Now, she lives in Sacramento Monday through Thursday, and travels her district (Seal Beach to the Mexican border) on weekends. He cooks for himself, and for company, he laughed, saying, “I’ve got a dog.”

He is retired from McDonnell Douglas as a salesman and now sells commercial real estate from their home.

Unless there’s something “dramatically disjointed” with a candidate’s family or personal life, voters still vote for an individual, not a team, most consultants say.

“Voters have a zoom lens pulled in pretty tight on the face of the candidate,” Khachigian said. “Every now and then, they might pull it back to a little wider angle to see if they can pick up what’s around them. By and large, they keep it on a pretty tight close-up on election day.”

It’s apparently not much different at the end, either.

When Robert Badham held the press conference announcing that he would not seek another term, Anne sat by his side, actually a little to the back and, in the newspaper photo, out of focus.

He was ending 26 years of political life. For her, it had been 18 years of politics, being consumed every other year by a campaign. “You eat, breathe and sleep a campaign, you’re strategizing every single minute, you spend sleepless nights over the ‘what ifs,’ your adrenaline never stops flowing.”

But when the press conference was over, she said, “I thought, ‘How interesting: No one asked me one question. Not one.’ ”