Senate Bid by Hillary Clinton Could Redefine First Lady’s Role

Like a lot of American women who hold down at least one difficult, if unpaid, job, Hillary Rodham Clinton is considering taking a job outside the home, which in her case happens to be the White House.

But no metaphor aptly describes the balancing act that is required here. A first lady is about to run for a New York Senate seat, and these are uncharted waters. Clinton hasn’t even formally declared her candidacy--she’s expected to inch closer this week--yet the public is already wondering how it will all work. Clearly, the first lady and her husband plan to figure it out as they go along. Yet this much is certain: How Clinton manages to be both first lady and candidate could reshape the role of president’s wife.

Health Care Initiative Tested the Boundaries

Clinton has already tested the boundaries of that role, downplaying her duties as First Hostess to become Health Care Czarina for a time. But even she would concede that running for office is not part of the first lady’s job description.

So, just what will and won’t Clinton be doing for her family, her causes and her party as she attempts to serve two masters: the voters of New York and the taxpayers of the other 49 states--if not the women of the world who look to her as their first lady too? How will she keep her schedule? Who will pay for her campaign trips? Can she disagree with her husband’s policies, or--worse--will she try to influence him to change them to help her election?

Geraldine Ferraro, who knows something about being a first woman in politics, senses in all this heightened scrutiny and hyperbolic questioning a double standard. No one balks when the boys hit the campaign trail and leave their jobs behind, she says.

“The other guys don’t have to quit their jobs. Why should she?” says Ferraro, the first female vice presidential candidate and, later, a failed candidate for a Senate seat from New York. “Look at [New York Mayor and likely Clinton opponent] Rudy Giuliani. No one is worried about how he’s going to run the city while he’s off raising money around the country for his campaign.

“Last time I noticed,” Ferraro adds, “first lady wasn’t even a paid job.”

But that doesn’t mean people don’t take it seriously.

Just last week while in Cologne, Germany, the president indicated the Clintons are now trying to sort out the logistics the way two-career couples are wont to do.

” . . . She’s not going to stop being first lady and doing her other responsibilities, but she’ll have to spend a lot more time in New York and we’ll have to get a place there . . . ,” Bill Clinton said.

But nothing short of seeing Hillary Clinton “resign” as first lady is likely to quiet the true carpers, the critics who say she’s sure to shirk her first ladyship in pursuit of a Senate seat, which her harshest detractors describe as her way of acting out a midlife crisis.

The right-leaning Wall Street Journal opinion page went so far as to print a Vanderbilt University professor’s view that “a quirky constitutional land mine” might make it illegal for a first lady to be sworn in as a senator before her husband leaves office.

Even Clinton’s supporters, who portray her candidacy as a sincere pursuit of public service by a woman who for 25 years has lived her beliefs by advancing her husband’s career, wonder why she’d put aside top-of-the-marquee billing to be gnawed at by New Yorkers.

Does that mean Clinton will spend a Saturday night at barbecue in Buffalo instead of a state dinner in the East Room? Will she mark the new millennium at her husband’s side on the National Mall or with Giuliani in Times Square?

She has experience getting around such problems, like the night she received a Grammy Award in Manhattan at 5 p.m. and by 6:30 was in black-tie attire greeting White House guests at the North Portico.

“Mrs. Clinton knows how to be in two places at the same time,” says her former press secretary Lisa Caputo. “She is a woman, you know.”

But such jet-setting might not square with the demands of retail politics, where it’s important to shake every last hand from Syracuse to Southampton.

“She has to strike a balance between Hillary the diva and Hillary who really wants your vote,” said Paul Costello, a Manhattan public relations consultant who was press secretary to Rosalynn Carter and Kitty Dukakis. “Stardom is important in New York, but super stardom can be a problem.”

Certainly, there will be things she’s done as first lady that she will no longer have time for, including those wildly successful overseas adventures advocating for women and human rights. She is, however, squeezing in two trips this fall to Iceland and Poland.

And while she will be missed on the international scene, advocates for these issues say they don’t mind if it means they’ll have a new friend in the Senate.

Beltway Democrats aren’t as easy on her. They say Vice President Al Gore needs her to raise money and plug his gaping problem with female voters. But Terence McAuliffe, the Clintons’ fund-raising wizard, insists Hillary Clinton “will have time to do events for Gore. She’s committed to him.”

The candidates who will feel what might have been are Democrats running for House and Senate seats. In 1996 and 1998, McAuliffe estimates that Clinton raised “upwards of $50 million” for congressional candidates and energized female voters. But if she’s to raise $20 million for her New York race, “there’s only a certain amount she can do at the end of the day,” McAuliffe concedes.

Making sure that political money, and not taxpayer dollars, is spent to run her campaign is one land mine Clinton can avoid, says Ferraro. When she spoke to Clinton a few weeks ago Ferraro advised her to hire a “good lawyer” to ensure that taxpayers aren’t underwriting Clinton’s political dreams.

Jim Kennedy, spokesman for the White House counsel, said his office is already on that case and others, including how candidate Clinton will utilize the Secret Service. But logistical considerations aside, who said a first lady was under any obligations to do anything for anyone but her husband?

There were times when the first lady job was empty, and the democracy did not fall. At other times, as when Eleanor Roosevelt had it, a first lady’s pumps seemed too big to fill.

As Arkansas First Lady, She Balanced Roles

“The first lady’s job has always been difficult, full-time and unpaid, and many first ladies have approached their new position in the national limelight with deep ambivalence,” says a Smithsonian Institution catalog.

As first lady of Arkansas, Clinton balanced her official role with the multiple duties of mother, law firm partner, child advocate and reformer of public education. She was also her husband’s chief advisor; there was a “run it by Hillary” edict in the statehouse for all things important.

Then the Clintons arrived at the White House, hawking the notion that voters would be getting two public servants by having elected one. It was the first time a president’s wife was open about how much she advised her husband. Her more traditional duties took a back seat while she spent 80% of her first year heading a task force to restructure health care in America.

When her health care initiative imploded, Clinton famously mulled her possibilities and moved on to other, often more first lady-like issues, such as historic preservation of the White House and American treasures. But she never stopped agitating about all things important to children and families, including health care.

And should Clinton take campaign positions that differ from her husband’s policies, she would again be following the example of her role model, Eleanor Roosevelt.

“She was never afraid to differ from her husband,” says biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook. “In 1938, Roosevelt wrote a major essay that was a point-by-point rejection of FDR’s major international decisions,” according to the second volume of Cook’s Eleanor Roosevelt biography, which comes out this week.

(Unlike Clinton, Roosevelt declined in 1945 to run for Senate in New York, concerned that elective office would muzzle her. “They’d have to chloroform me first,” she said.)

But Clinton should not try to get the president to take positions that would benefit her candidacy, says Carl Anthony, a first lady historian and Clinton admirer. “If she gets caught, she’d be in trouble,” he says.

In fact, this unprecedented transformation of a president into a political spouse is likely to be tricky, especially as the first lady seeks Republican votes.

“We’ll know how bad it’s getting if she gets upstate and starts calling herself just plain old ‘Hillary Rodham’ and drops the Clinton,” says Sheila Tate, a press secretary to Nancy Reagan.