A Delicate Position : Political husbands are still the exception rather than the rule. They must watch what they say--and stay out of the limelight.

Richard Roukema, the Ridgewood, N.J., psychiatrist married to Republican Rep. Marge Roukema, likes to portray the dilemma of a political husband:

Years ago, he says, they were “Dr. Roukema and his wife, Marge.”

When she took a local office, it became “Dr. Roukema and Marge Roukema, vice president of the school board.”

Then it was “Congresswoman Marge Roukema and her husband, Dick,” when she went to Washington in 1981.

And this summer, there was a newspaper photo of an open convertible in a July 4 parade--bearing Rep. Marge Roukema and an unidentified person.

Political husbands are oddities and, like Richard Roukema, they generally take it well. They talk about it. They joke about it. They even welcome the anonymity.

They are, after all, men in an anomalous position, married to women in an anomalous position, and they have to be careful.

“Denis Thatcher stayed out of the limelight, and no one ever accused him of running No. 10 Downing Street,” says Jim Schroeder, the lawyer-husband of longtime Rep. Pat Schroeder (D-Colo.) and the dean of political husbands. “My view is that husbands can’t really help their wives. All you can do is hurt them.”

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Political husbands form a species still barely described, but everyone expects an explosion in its numbers, this being, politically, the Year of the Woman. Already, the Congressional Wives Club has changed its name to the Congressional Club, and the Democratic Wives Forum just voted to become the Democratic Spouses Forum. (The Republican Congressional Wives, however, are so far unchanged.)

Twenty-nine women have filed for Senate races and 224 for House contests his year, according to the latest count from the Center for the American Woman and Politics at Rutgers University. With nine states yet to hold primaries, more than a third of each group (10 candidates for Senate and 90 for the House) have won nominations, and many seem likely to be strong in November.

Not that many are in office yet, of course. Only 29 women sit in the 435-seat House (up from 13 two decades ago) and two are in the Senate--the highest count in history.

Until recently, a good many didn’t come with partners. In the past, congressional women often were widows filling out their husbands’ unexpired terms, a process known as “coming into office over his dead body,” says Ruth Mandel, the center’s director.

But over the last generation, more and more women have won their offices on their own, putting their husbands--when they have them--in what is still a rather delicate situation.

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The few now in that delicate situation are basically writing the book on how to behave--potentially a Baedeker’s for their even more controversial colleague, the political wife who also has a career.

To be sure, the life of a political spouse has never been easy. Even First Ladies, from Dolley Madison to Eleanor Roosevelt, have been attacked, vilified or totally ignored. Many politicians’ wives have therefore concentrated on being decorative hostesses. Some associated themselves with a safe cause--historic redecorating, perhaps, or highway beautification, or drug abuse prevention or literacy. Some sat home and drank.

Nevertheless, “at least for the wife, there’s a tradition to fit into or mold and reshape,” says Mandel. “For men, there are few precedents. They have to find a way to be supportive and useful at the same time they deal with feelings about occupying what’s traditionally been a woman’s position.”

Men, too, may encounter extra scrutiny, particularly if they’re financially successful. California Senate candidate Dianne Feinstein’s husband, merchant banker Richard Blum, was subjected to what he calls “high-interest, high-profile” questioning about his investments and his financial contributions to Feinstein’s campaign for governor two years ago.

Geraldine Ferraro’s husband, businessman John Zaccaro, was grilled over his finances and connections when she was the Democratic vice presidential candidate in 1984, and again now that she’s running for the Senate in New York. As owner of some Manhattan buildings that aren’t quite quality real estate, he’s accused by her opponents of being too slow to evict a Mob porno business--an attack that Ferraro damned as “anti-Italian,” “sleaze gutter” tactics and exercise of a “double standard.”

Even enduring scrutiny of income tax records can be hard, notes Harriett Woods, president of the National Women’s Political Caucus, who ran for the Senate in the 1980s. She says her husband, a newspaperman, was “concerned about baring his income--not that anything was wrong, but it’s a special affront to the male ego to earn less than a wife.”

This sensitivity was thought to be a factor in the flap that almost cost Eleanor Holmes Norton her election to the District of Columbia’s non-voting seat in Congress in 1990. As Norton became increasingly successful, her husband stopped filing local tax returns and would not let her release other tax records. Her defense was that he was in charge of handling the family finances and she had left it all to him.

When husbands are not being scrutinized, they’re ignored, which may be worse.

“You have to understand when you go to an event that she’s the star and the attraction and you’re the wallflower,” says Tony Morella, a Washington lawyer married to Republican Rep. Connie Morella of Maryland. “There’s a seat for you, and you get a nameplate, but the dignitary or the political leader is going to sit next to Connie. And if some senator brings his son, you’re going to wind up sitting next to the kid.”

A husband’s opinion is rarely sought--and rarely given. “I will never represent Connie’s position on anything,” says Morella. “If anyone asks what is her position, I say, ‘Ask her.”’

Most husbands attend fund-raisers, help work the room, even hand out a plaque in their wives’ stead, but they studiously “avoid giving issue-type responses” to questions, says Terry Jones, a St. Louis-based political scientist who’s the husband of Missouri Rep. Joan Kelly Horn, a Democrat. “Instead, I talk about what help people can give, or how (Joan’s) doing.”

In fact, some can’t speak at all. The rule in the household of California Rep. Barbara Boxer, now a Senate candidate, is that she is the candidate, says an aide, and she will do the talking. So much for husband Stewart, a Bay Area lawyer.

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Avoiding the limelight may well be the wisest policy, given what Richard Blum calls “the usual perception that the man runs everything.” In his wife’s case, he adds, this is a notion held only by those “who don’t know her to be the strong woman she is.”

Husbands may have some extra advantages as well--some defenses and strengths not generally enjoyed by Washington wives.

Many have political experience themselves. Jim Schroeder had been a candidate for the state Legislature and worked as a precinct captain. Tony Morella “lost with Nelson Rockefeller three times” and “burned out” on campaign work at the 1968 Republican convention. Terry Jones is a political science professor and a political analyst. Richard Blum met Feinstein when she was a San Francisco supervisor and he chaired a mayoral advisory commission.

Unlike their female counterparts, most maintained independent lives, which were not disrupted professionally or geographically when their wives took office. One sees no men at the Congressional Club’s orientation for spouses, at which members tell new arrivals about life in the capital and “what it was like when they moved their family to Washington,” says Dolores Beilenson, wife of California Rep. Anthony Beilenson and the program’s co-chair. Men do come the second day, however, when officers of the House talk on House rules and regulations.

Only Jim Schroeder changed his life completely--and famously. When his wife first won office in 1973, the Schroeders had a 2-year-old and a 6-year-old, and it seemed impossible to “maintain a traditional residence” more than one time zone from Washington. So he gave up his Colorado legal work--focused on oil and gas, mining and ski areas--and went into international law in Washington, while Pat became, he says, “the only congresswoman in 20 years to come to Washington with two young children and a traditional family.”

For the others, tied to jobs, companies, professional obligations and travel, being a political husband means only more events, more obligations and more travel. If Feinstein is elected, says Blum, who often visits the Himalayas, “the main thing is, I’ll be flying over the Atlantic rather than the Pacific.”

What these husbands present, to a man, is a vision of success. Taking a background position in their wives’ activities doesn’t bother them because in their own sphere, as Terry Jones says, “I have a foreground position.”

That personal assurance is, by all accounts, the characteristic a political husband most needs--particularly because it doesn’t come with the turf. A woman’s status is enhanced by her husband’s, but “when the wife has the prominence,” says Mandel, “the husband’s social status is not enhanced.”

A model for the breed was former New York Rep. Bella Abzug’s late husband, Martin, for whom the National Women’s Political Caucus named an annual award for exemplary political spousemanship. “When people asked him, ‘What’s it like?,’ he’d say, ‘You have to be secure unto yourself,’ ” says Tony Morella, who won the award in 1989. For those who don’t have it already, “if you don’t develop it,” says Morella, “it can be a problem.”

What their wives most value in them is supportiveness, a characteristic many people might consider a given in a husband. But when the Rutgers center surveyed officeholders some time ago, says Mandel, it got from the women (but not the men) “a high response that they had very supportive spouses and couldn’t have done it otherwise.”

Political husbands, too, see their role as trying to be “a partner, ally and confidant, and give my opinion when it’s asked for,” says Ed Crego, a Chicago management consultant married to Sheila Smith, a Democratic Illinois candidate for representative. Morella emphasizes the need to be a “sounding board for my wife, but to stay out of things. I’ve always been sensitive to the notion that people might think I’m standing back there behind her,” pulling strings.

So they take the opposite tack, minimizing their role. When people ask what he does, Morella likes to say, “I drive the car,” particularly relishing it when they respond, “Fine, you can go outside and wait in the car. We’ll call when we need you.”

Similarly docile, Blum says, “I just do whatever anyone asks me. If I’m asked to show up at a dinner, I go.”

Obviously, the smart pol husband has found the safest mien to be the humorous. They “take the oddity approach and make fun of (their role),” says Leslie Wolfe, executive director of the Center for Women Policy Studies in Washington. “It’s kind of cute.”

“Psychologically speaking,” says psychiatrist Roukema, “it’s a defense.” It’s also a good offense: The more someone jokes about being simply a spouse, the more obvious it is that he’s not one.

This fall, the political husband’s role might get more intense examination because of controversy over the political wife with a career, another oddity whose numbers are growing. They certainly seem similar.

Well, not quite. “The public judgment still is much harsher on a woman who pursues her own career than on a man,” says Mandel. Indeed, the political husband is respected for keeping and furthering his career.

But who knows if he would--or could--keep it if his wife became President, or even vice president?

Or would he, like Hillary Clinton and Marilyn Quayle, be expected to give it up?