Families Add Pain of Loss to Campaign Toll

Winning may not be everything in American politics--was it former President Richard Nixon who said that?--but losing is definitely no fun.

When Massachusetts First Lady Kitty Dukakis ingested rubbing alcohol last week on the eve of the anniversary of her husband’s presidential campaign loss to George Bush, the Dukakis family’s private problems thrust attention on the price of losing a public office.

As Kitty Dukakis’ treatment for alcoholism last year and her hospitalization last week would seem to indicate, the cost may be far greater than the forfeited job. Personal lives and family concerns often are left untended in the crush of a campaign--and the effects of that neglect may not surface until much later.

“There is no time to deal with personal problems,” said former California congressional candidate Monty Hempel. Hempel, now the assistant director of the Center for Politics and Policy at Claremont Graduate School, said his own unsuccessful foray into the fray of electoral politics showed him just how exhausting and emotionally draining “the strain of posturing (for the public)” could be.

“The chaos of campaigning,” said Hempel, interfered with a personal relationship and made any semblance of a normal life impossible.

And Hempel was the candidate. For the spouses of political candidates, the pressures are no less.

Increasingly, as campaigning becomes a family matter, political spouses are sent out with schedules almost as daunting as the office-seeker’s.

In the case of Kitty Dukakis and the wives of other 1988 Democratic presidential aspirants, that meant the travel, the hand-shaking and the nonstop smiles and speaking engagements began more than a year before the July, 1988, nominating convention.

But where the candidates can bask in the adulation even as they brave the chaos, the spouses must live vicariously. While their roles still call for the perfect hairdos and adoring gazes of past political eons, today’s political spouses also are expected to serve as stand-ins for the candidates.

Once, these spouses--mostly wives, as the candidates for higher office remain almost exclusively male--were supposed to hand out brownie recipes. But the new generation must deliver policy positions on everything from nuclear weaponry to federal farm subsidies.

It is understood, of course, that they are speaking not for themselves, but for their husbands--the candidates.

No matter how enthusiastically they perform this task, they may be feeling a certain ambivalence, suggested Marcia Cohen, the author of a history of the women’s movement called “The Sisterhood.”

“I think you get a really terrible frustration when your deepest ambitions are dependent on another person,” said Cohen.

As a consequence, Cohen added, political spouses may have a sense of being “out of control” of their lives. They are programmed to win what is really someone else’s victory.

“They’re not supposed to be disappointed for themselves if their husband loses,” Cohen said.

In the case of an incumbent governor who is running for higher office, such as Michael Dukakis, “he at least had a job to go back to,” said Lewis L. Gould, a professor of history at the University of Texas who teaches a popular undergraduate course called “First Ladies.”

“It may not have been the most pleasant job, but there were duties, things to attend to,” Gould said. “For the spouse, there is no sort of on-the-job therapy.

“Obviously, campaigning, and then losing, does put a lot of pressure on the spouses,” Gould continued. “But they don’t have any way to relieve it.”

Gould, who also was a contributor to a book published by the National Archives called “Modern First Ladies,” believes they are saddled, too, with a kind of negative identity crisis. “In August, you were going to be the First Lady of the United States. In November, you’re the wife of the defeated candidate.”

At first, Kitty Dukakis seemed to have rebounded admirably, garnering a six-figure contract for a book that would present her side of the campaign experience.

But even then, said Gould, she was positioning herself as a kind of “successful loser,” someone whose “success depends on endlessly going over the same questions about what happened, what went wrong, on the campaign.

“It wasn’t ‘What did you do about art in public places in Massachusetts?’ or ‘What about the environment?’ It was ‘What happened? What went wrong?’ ”

For the Dukakis family, the troubles that surfaced publicly when Kitty Dukakis entered an alcoholism treatment center three months after her husband’s defeat were only compounded by the governor’s growing problems with the budget and plunging popularity in his home state. By the time Kitty Dukakis was hospitalized last week, the state’s deficit had grown to $730 million and Michael Dukakis’ approval rating had sunk to 17%.

“Quite frankly, his world is crumbling,” said Larry Berg, director of the Institute of Politics and Government at the University of Southern California.

Politics is “an unforgiving business,” Berg said, adding that the emotional toll is only heightened by the “what have you done for me lately?” attitude among voters and the media. Having invested hope, time and energy in the bid for public office, political spouses are often affected by a shift in political fortune, Berg said.

While stressing that she could not speak directly to Kitty Dukakis’ case, Marianne McManus, clinical associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at USC, did say she has found that families of “charismatic people” such as politicians and entertainers sometimes find the price of fame to be high--particularly in terms of loneliness and isolation.

“There are very few people that you can talk to who are going through the same thing,” McManus said, especially at the rarefied level of a bid for the presidency of the United States.

“There’s a great loneliness,” she said. “ . . . One never knows if someone is really a friend or some sort of political benefit.”

With her treatment for alcoholism last winter, and now, with her hospitalization for what some say was a relapse of her alcoholism and what others speculate was a suicide attempt--as well as the disclosure that she has long suffered from depression--Kitty Dukakis joins a list of well-known women whose personal troubles have made headlines.

Catherine Simpson, chair of the National Council for Research on Women, contends that the ordeals of such famous women who have become involved in drugs and alcohol now constitute “a spectacle about women . . . a spectacle about degradation and redemption.”

These struggles seem to be much more publicized than similar battles fought by male athletes or other famous men, Simpson said. She described the Betty Ford Clinic, founded by the former First Lady after her own treatment for alcoholism and drug abuse, as having become a “station of the cross” for well-known women seeking to recover from chemical dependencies.

Ford, whose treatment for addiction was highly publicized in the 1970s, declined to comment on the Dukakis case. Nor could Rosalynn Carter, also a former First Lady, be reached for comment.

But on an earlier occasion, Carter commented about the difficulties she and her husband encountered in the first year after his defeat for re-election in 1980. “Jimmy and I were in a crisis,” she has said. “I took the election very hard. I felt that people had hurt Jimmy very much. I was hurt that he was hurt.”

Not that every political family sinks into despair when the candidate loses. Former Rep. Geraldine Ferraro, who ran for Vice President with Walter Mondale in 1984, remembers feeling jubilant even in defeat.

“For me, because the campaign was such a personal headache, I couldn’t wait for it to be over,” Ferraro said.

On a vacation in the Caribbean with her husband and children soon afterward, Ferraro said she marveled that her family seemed so unaffected by the loss.

When she asked her children how they had managed to bounce back when the Mondale kids seemed so glum, “they said, ‘The difference, Mom, is that we never expected to win.’ They said the campaign had been terrific, that they had gotten to travel all over the country and meet lots of people, but their whole life was not geared to being the candidate’s family.”

Later, however, Ferraro’s family ran into trouble. Her son was tried and convicted for selling drugs and her husband faced charges of bribery and extortion. Ferraro blames those problems “in large part” on the prominence that arose from her candidacy.

“But I am a street kid at 54 years of age who has been shoved around a lot,” Ferraro said. “One of the things I have learned is that if you get shoved around, you pick yourself up and get on.”

Her comment was not unlike a statement issued late last week by Michael Dukakis, in which the governor expressed the family’s intent to persevere, despite what he described as a “difficult year.”

Entering the hospital with an armload of magazines for Kitty Dukakis, the governor would not comment on why his wife took the rubbing alcohol, except to say that “my wife’s an alcoholic. Sometimes you slip a little.”

Voicing love for his wife, and a determination to “stand by her, just as she has always stood by me,” Dukakis also expressed confidence that she would scale this latest personal hurdle.

“Kitty has been through a number of trying moments in her life,” he said. “But she’s a strong and tough and loving person, and I have great faith in her and her ability to rebound.”

Staff writer Garry Abrams in Los Angeles also contributed to this story.