First Mates: Political Pros or Just Props?

“Marry well.”

That is how Barbara Bush once summed up the training necessary to become First Lady.

“You marry well. That’s all you need to know.”

But, in fact, the Silver Fox knows a lot more about this First Lady business than just picking a White House-bound mate. So much more that she masterfully crafted her own Pygmalion-like transformation from needlepointing grandma to one of America’s most beloved, admired women.

And so much more that Ann Grimes, author of a new book about the First Lady “wannabes” of 1988, calls her one of the great surprises of the presidential campaign and the Bush Presidency.

“Barbara Bush is a lot more politically shrewd than she appears to be,” says Grimes, author of “Running Mates: The Making of a First Lady.”

“From family members and friends, you get a sense that this is a powerful, careful, organized, smart woman,” Grimes say. “That’s a side the public doesn’t get to see. What is so brilliant about Barbara Bush is that publicly she feigns indifference to power, but privately she wields it. Few people realize that. It’s testimony to her political savvy.”

Grimes, a former political reporter in Chicago who now lives in Washington, believes that, although the American public is fascinated by the First Lady’s activities, it is still unwilling to accept much more than window-dressing from a political wife.

That is why the apolitical Mrs. Bush is such a hit, she says. And the influential Nancy Reagan such a flop.

“Nancy Reagan, despite her anti-feminist bent, removed the veil that surrounds the power of the First Lady and forced the public to acknowledge that these women are powerful politicians in their own right,” says Grimes, 38.

Mrs. Reagan made no secret of whom she liked and whom she did not like in the Administration and what she wanted “Ronnie,” former President Ronald Reagan, to do. “The public is uncomfortable with that,” Grimes says.

She calls the role of First Lady a “suffocating” and “conflicted” position, one that reflects society’s ambivalence about women’s roles in general, and one that is becoming increasingly implausible and incredible.

“There was Lee Hart standing by her husband’s side in this pathetic campaign trying to foster the image of the happy Harts at home. It was totally implausible,” Grimes says, alluding to former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart’s well-publicized problems with model Donna Rice. “We want these women (political wives) up there as podium props, to be seen, not heard. They stand there, seeming to be one thing when in fact they’re another.”

The conflicts of this “first cheerleader” role became especially salient during the 1988 presidential campaign--what Grimes calls “The Year of the Spouse”--when, for the first time, a number of the political wives, such as Cabinet member Elizabeth Dole and trial lawyer Hattie Babbitt, had solid professions of their own.

“If Bob Dole had been elected, would anyone really have believed that Elizabeth Dole, with all her government experience and her own talents, would be satisfied adopting a cause, running a soft public relations campaign?” says Grimes, who interviewed and traveled with each of the spouse-hopefuls on the campaign trail. “To expect these women to not ‘do’ issues didn’t wash. These women really grappled with how to move from an appendage to a political partner.”

Grimes believes, for instance, that it was not only the rigors of campaigning that led to Kitty Dukakis’ problems with alcohol and depression during and after the campaign, but also the questions of identity and role.

One of the most startling statements in “Running Mates” is Mrs. Dukakis’ post-election admission that “in the final analysis, I was grateful things worked out the way they did because I know I wouldn’t be able to handle it.”

Says Grimes: “Her sister told me she never would have been satisfied being an appendage of Mike’s. Kitty was coming into her prime at the height of the women’s movement and was still working out, ‘How independent can I be?’ ”

If the ’88 campaign is any barometer, the answer is “not very.”

Tipper Gore and her crusade against rock music lyrics, for example, turned voters and potential supporters away from her husband, Sen. Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tenn.), Grimes contends. “On the one hand, yeah, we want these women to have their own issues and their own minds, but everything they do reflects on the candidate. For modern women, it’s a terrible Catch-22.”

For now at least, the wives remain part of the package, “an integral part of the Oval Office publicity machine,” just as handled and managed as the candidates or elected officials themselves, Grimes says.

Mrs. Bush, for instance, “enables the Administration to have it both ways on some issues. Her pro-family manner cushions the Administration’s actual policies on family issues. And she seems to be pro-choice, while the Administration is taking a pro-life stance.”

Grimes says that, with the growing realization that these women do exert power and influence, whether overtly or covertly, the next time around, the public will take a harder look at them.