Spousal Abuse

New at Reason: Who will be the next Queen of America? Nick Gillespie bends the knee to no man, nor no woman neither.

Comments

[Kevin Carson]

Jozef,

There were quadruple negatives in English, before the Augustan Age grammarians and nineteenth century schoolmarms "reformed" it:

"He never yet no villainye ne saide,
In all his lif unto no maner wight...."

Chaucer, "The Knight's Tale"

[Kevin Carson]

On topic, Dean's wife is a refreshing change from both the traditional first lady role and Hillary's spin on it.

The traditional role was to be an insipid Stepford Wife, looking on hubby with awe at all his public appearances, and displaying appropriate hairstyles and clothing to interest the womenfolk in the kitchens of America. Upon election, she was to adopt some apolitical "social issue" like literacy or some disease or other to make her special concern for the next four years.

Hillary, as the first yuppie first lady, had the monstrous presumption to act as unelected co-president ("two for the price of one"). I'd have been quite happy to see her relegated to "baking cookies and having teas."

It would be refreshing to have a first lady who has an independent life of her own, instead of either being a decorative accessory for her husband, or helping him run the country.

[ed]

What are the chances that a bachelor will ever again be elected to the highest office?

Hmmm...thin, neat and single...

[mak_nas]

the theoretical: should it matter? perhaps not.

the real: does it matter? yes. and not just because rural christian conservatives think it should.

i've witnessed many times in my line of work the deleterious effects of problems at home on business performance. in the ideal, a person can compartmentalize issues; but my experience (as antithetical as it may be to libertarian idealism) is that real people cannot and do not. it effects their state of mind, their approach to problems and opportunities. watched several good funds go down the tubes when someone in the command circle filed for divorce.

chances are there's nothing troubling at all in the dean household. but, because such problems do often matter on the job, i would expect voters to look for mrs dean and attempt to evaluate her and their relationship. that's pragmatic, imo.

[Senator Pimp]

"What are the chances that a bachelor will ever again be elected to the highest office?"

Obviously when the divorce rate hits above 70%, which would be about the time when the Bush marriage promotion plan is deemed a failure.

[David McElroy]

To ask whether this issue of Dean's wife SHOULD matter is like asking whether it SHOULD matter that people judge candidates by looks, speaking ability, mode of dress and dozens of other things. It's a fairly useless discussion, because the truth is that it DOES matter to many people for reasons that are mostly intangible.

I've spent the last decade as a political consultant working with state and local candidates, so I can say first-hand that the things which I used to think mattered a lot (principles, policy, etc.) play amazingly small roles in getting people elected. People are trying to elect someone who is their ideal of a leader, not necessarily someone who always agrees with them on the issues. (As we know very well, many people don't really have a clue WHAT they believe, anyway.) They want someone who looks the part, acts the part and who they believe would be confident and sure as their leader. They want someone who won't embarrass them in little ways. (For instance, I had a client once who was an incumbent governor, and some people privately told me that they opposed him because he was embarrassing when he spoke on television, because they didn't like the image he portrayed to the rest of the country.)

To talk about whether it should matter to people that Dean's wife is invisible and ... ummmm ... apparently less than attractive ... makes just as much sense as it does to worry about why people prefer politicians in red ties instead of yellow ones. Whether we like it or not, elections are mostly contests about image, not about ideas. That is not going to change as long as humans remain human. For most people, their rationality will be used to justify what their emotions wanted anyway. The lack of understanding of that (and the continued desire to spit into the wind on the issue) is one of the things which continues to hold back libertarians from gaining power. Because we tend to think that something SHOULDN'T be so, we tend to act as though it ISN'T so.

End of rant.

[fyodor]

mak nas,

That's a good point that home life can interfere with public life. However, just like the analagous issue with drug use, the proof of the pudding is still in the public life and the public life only. If someone performs well publicly, who cares if he or she is overcoming a difficult home life? And if someone performs badly in public life, who care if it's his or her home life that's causing the poor performance?

Another point is that just because Steinberg Dean doesn't make all of Howard Dean's functions, that doesn't indicate there's any strife that would impact presidential performance. Maybe their marriage just works best that way!

Nay, I think that whatever interest the public has in this is more in the emotional category. People want to relate to their prez like he was a bud, and most of the people we know have their spouses around most of the time, and it makes us feel warm and gooey too. Hopefully we can outgrow this.

[fyodor]

"For most people, their rationality will be used to justify what their emotions wanted anyway."

Ha-ha, probably true! Ho-ho-ho, hee-hee...

"The lack of understanding of that (and the continued desire to spit into the wind on the issue) is one of the things which continues to hold back libertarians from gaining power. Because we tend to think that something SHOULDN'T be so, we tend to act as though it ISN'T so."

What!?!?!?!?!?? BITE YOUR TONGUE!!!!

[R. C. Dean]

OK, ed, why is the WW2 British Army "Oliver's Army?"

Just guessing here, but Oliver Cromwell formed the "New Model Army" during the English Civil War. That army won, of course, in no small part due to Cromwell's reforms and leadership skills. It was very much "Oliver's" army. The current British Army is direct descendant of the Cromwell New Model Army. It would be just exactly like the British to keep calling it Oliver's Army 400 years later, mixing familiarity with pigheaded adherence to tradition as only the Brits can.

[ed]

If that means I'm right, I agree.

[ed]

But I think it has more to do with Elvis's dense and not necessarily intelligible writing style.

[s.m. koppelman]

Kevin, why single out Hillary Clinton as the first of any kind? She may have been kinda-sorta the first to telegraph an active White House role ahead of time, during the '92 campaign, but she wasn't really any more activist than Eleanor Roosevelt once she got there, was she? Didn't JFK appoint his own brother to a Cabinet post? Surely that's more nepotism than putting a Yale Law alumna wife on a policy task force.

What about Nancy Reagan? Edith Wilson?

[mak_nas]

If someone performs well publicly, who cares if he or she is overcoming a difficult home life? And if someone performs badly in public life, who care if it's his or her home life that's causing the poor performance?

i agree wholly -- some people (few, i think, but some) will even sparkle under such duress. i think of it more as an unfavorable risk factor -- as i would evaluating an practicing alcoholic or similar drug-user. it doesn't mean they have to fail; it's simply an added risk. some would ignore it, others find it unacceptable, and the reasonable note it and include it in the overall picture of the candidate.

[Tom from Texas]

White House wives are important because they let us know that the guy with one finger on the button and the other hand on the red telephone puts up with much the same shit we married slobs endure. Rather than giving you a ration of shit just as you're falling asleep about whether you paid the phone bill and the identity of that little slut clerk you were flirting with at the grocery store, the First Lady can dish out a ration of shit about whether you returned Tony Blair's call and the identity of that little slut intern you were flirting with at the staff meeting.

We married guys could never trust a bachelor president. He gets to go to sleep whenever he wants, and maybe with whoever he wants.

[Kevin Carson]

s.m. koppelman,

Because I really dislike Hillary, I guess. And Nancy Reagan didn't feel entitled, by virtue of her "professional" credentials, to semi-officially run as co-president. She just controlled the presidency the old fashioned way, by keeping a death grip on Ron's balls.

But I meant to add that Barbara Bush really put an unprecedentedly perverse spin on the apolitical social issue thing, choosing the drug war as her issue.

Come to think of it, I don't like Barbara all that much, either.

[Julian Sanchez]

Jozef-
I believe Tim was making a nod at Hamlet, the bit where the prince tells Rozencrantz & Guildenstern (something like): "No, man delights not me, nor woman neither... though by your smiling, you seem to say so."

[fyodor]

mak nas,

Hmmm, not sure if I got my point across. Totally aside from the issue that not everyone who has a difficult home life fails but more do than those with good home lives, my point is that we have the candidates' record and public performance to judge them by, regardless of what factors go into that performance. If an alocoholic or drug-user has a good performance record, do you evaluate him lower than a sober person with a poor performance record? I suppose there are those who might, but the only rational reason I can see is if you think that they're a greater risk for the future even if they've performed well under difficult conditions thus far. More to the point, if one liked Dean's record as governor and as candidate, why care about his home life since it evidently hasn't affected him (in this fictional person's view) yet? Unless one thought the home life problems were very recent and likely to manifest themselves in the future in ways they hadn't yet, but to reuse one of my favorite terms, I think that's a stretch.

Anyway, I think David McElroy has the best analysis of why wifey matters. I would only disagree with him that that doesn't necessarily make it worthless to discuss! But that's a whole 'nother matter....

[David McElroy]

Fyodor:

I'm sure you're right that there's absolutely nothing wrong with discussing it, so I'm engaging in hyperbole to that extent. I suppose I just get tired of seeing libertarians caught up in very minor things when there is better work to be done. The discussion of this subject is probably dragging up memories of when I was a vice chair for a state LP. Executive committee meetings were a joke. They would stretch for hours and consist of very bright people debating how many angels can dance on the head of the libertarian pin. It just seems a waste of a lot of good intellectual energy.

There's no subject that's not worthy of discussion for some people. I guess I just wish that libertarians as a group were more capable of making things happen instead of debating side issues. I remember a conversation with Marshall Fritz back when he was still running Advocates for Self-Government. We talked about this issue, and he said that he wished that we could learn to work together as people who agreed about 80 percent or 90 percent (or whatever) of the issues, instead of feeling the need to bludgeon each other over the small things we disagree about (small in relation to the things we DO agree about).

I know that last paragraph isn't directly about the issue at hand, but my reaction to it simply triggered bad memories of apparently useless discussions. Sorry. But at least I admitted at the time that it was a rant. 🙂

[Heather]

"We married guys could never trust a bachelor president. He gets to go to sleep whenever he wants, and maybe with whoever he wants."

Mmmm, projecting much there, Tom? Perhaps before you got married you should have checked with your bride to be on your desired bedtime and how she feels about marital infidelity. Better luck next time!

[ed]

Lighten up, David! We're stuck at our dead-end jobs with "free" internet service and lots of time. Sure beats working!

(Just kidding, boss.)

[fyodor]

"[I wish] that we could learn to work together as people who agreed about 80 percent or 90 percent (or whatever) of the issues, instead of feeling the need to bludgeon each other over the small things we disagree about (small in relation to the things we DO agree about)."

Oh, you're no fun! 🙂

All seriousness aside, I suspect the biggest problem is that libertarians are such a small percentage of the populace, which makes it tough to get much done in a democracy. And if the libbers seemed to compound the problem with a lack of pragmatism and common focus, maybe that's just cause deep down they knew their cause (their immediate cause that is, i.e. electing someone) was hopeless? I suspect that if a campaign became winnable, libbers would suddenly snap to. Not because libbers are good people per se, I'm just making what you might think of as an economic analysis. Wasting time becomes more of a loss when there's actually something to gain.

I'll add to that that my one brief period of hanging with libbers over a dozen years ago (I generally hang with leftists, one of the curses of being autisticly, I mean artisticly inclined) showed them to be kind of an odd lot who came from very different social milieus (sp?) and thus often had little to nothing in common outside libertarianism. Perhaps a contributing factor?

Anyway, I can understand your frustration!

[ed]

Good one, Heather.

[David McElroy]

Ed:

That's what happens when you're using socialized Internet connectivity. 😉

Fyodor:

You touch on a point that I think is ignored by too many people -- and realizing it a few years ago was a real "light bulb moment" for me. Politics is more about social groups than about ideology. There are thought leaders who debate ideas and come up with beliefs they try to rally people around. The followers, though, tend to come from people who identify with them socially, not necessarily people who rationally think the ideas through. Why are most artists leftists? Is it because they've all thought the ideas through and come to that conclusion? I don't think so. I think that most of them are subconsciously following what they think artists are supposed to be. They're fitting in. The same thing happens with religious people and blacks and lots of other social groups. I think that seeing politics as having to do with social groups is more useful than seeing it as about ideology (at least in how it really functions).

For understandable reasons, libertarians don't tend to be a cohesive social group -- and many libertarians quite frankly aren't the sort of people who others yearn to be like. Most libertarians tend to be the antithesis of what our society considers cool or hip. Whether we like it or not, that has more to do with our problems than our ideas.

David

[mak_nas]

my point is that we have the candidates' record and public performance to judge them by, regardless of what factors go into that performance.

but only every four years -- unless you govern california.

i get your point, but think about it differently. you can try to evaluate dean as an individual, but it's very difficult. even if you get through all the spin, what do you really know? he has little track record (vermont is like managing the local a&p) and he's taken a major philosophical departure to run for higher office. look at dubya -- did anything he did in texas obviously indicate where he is and what he's doing was likely? very difficult to evaluate the individual beyond saying he has some level of competency or some core idea.

when we're talking about risk factors, we're talking about the whole population -- and i think assessing dean (or any candidate) as a unit in a population of presidential candidates *at least in part* is very smart. as an individual, he is almost certainly a beneficiary of some tremendous luck -- survivorship bias favors him. thousands of doctors become political -- how many run for president? this run of luck can end at any time and his various risk factors, which so long left him alone, can bite him in the ass. assessing those risk factors may differentiate him from others, either making his run of luck more or less improbable or grading the severity of the possible crash when they come home to roost.

akin to evaluating a hedge fund, the individuals involved make a difference -- but virtually every hedge fund has "good" people at startup. that doesn't prevent the vast majority from drifting uselessly or dangerously imploding. those that perform do so in part because they were good, but perhaps also because they were lucky -- their risk factors haven't quite caught up with them yet. the more such factors they have, the higher the probability that they will destroy themselves in time -- even if they have done marvelously heretofore.

the best example i can give of this is LTCM, the notoriously leveraged derivatives fund that nearly brought down the american banking system in 1998. two nobel prizes and a staff replete with intelligensia put in several years of stellar performance -- only to collapse spectacularly in five disastrous weeks. nothing about their track record would have told you it was coming -- they barely had a losing month until the end. but the risk factors were there, if you were looking for them.

If an alocoholic or drug-user has a good performance record, do you evaluate him lower than a sober person with a poor performance record?

so the answer to this question becomes, yes, in fact sometimes i would, if i felt the higher-risk performer was benefiting from a run of luck despite dangerous behaviors and the poor performer was low-risk. when the position is important, safety means something.

[fyodor]

"many libertarians quite frankly aren't the sort of people who others yearn to be like"

Damn you're a cruel dude!!! LOL...

[fyodor]

mak nas,

"the risk factors were there, if you were looking for them"

But then, that's based on hindsight, in which case we could likely say that about anyone or any organization that has crashed and burned.

Still, I do take your point up to a point, and I realize that if Dean & wife were displaying what I genuinely thought was an underlying bitterness or hostility towards each other or otherwise showing signs of marital instability, I might possibly think of that as a strike against the guy. Of course, as I've already said, I don't see their behavior (or what I've learned about it thus far) in that light at all.

[keith]

Heh, I was all about to say that the Dutch Republic in the 16th century was the first modern functional republic, but then I noted, with a good, nay, great scholar of the Commonwealth linked apparently close at hand, never mind. I really enjoyed the flow of this article, Nick. Thanks!

Vis a vis Dean, you could have compared his situation to (and linked to) the story in Slate about Teresa Heinz Kerry:

http://slate.msn.com/id/2092399/

not as appropos, http://slate.msn.com/id/2091886/

[AJMB]

So Dean's wife is a no-show? Good for her. And him. Those nights of rubber chicken are best avoided. I sure as hell would.

[Jozef]

"no man, nor no woman neither."

English is not my first language, which is maybe why I'm still trying to make sense of this quadruple negative...

[joe]

Off Topic: "Oliver's Army" is the name of an Elvis Costello song. The song is about the modern British army. Why is it any more "Oliver's Army" than "King Such-and-Such's Army?"

[ed]

Oliver Cromwell?

[inky]

best ending to an article ever...

[ed]

PS
Can't be too modern: he mentions "...just a word in Mr. Churchill's ear."

[James B.]

There is a precedent, albeit a fictional one, for a first lady MD to continue her medical practice. In the Tom Clancy novels, after Jack Ryan becomes president his wife Cathy continues to work as an eye surgeon. I want to know if all the rightwinger Clancy fans who eat this stuff up have a problem with a real first lady practicing her profession

[joe]

OK, ed, why is the WW2 British Army "Oliver's Army?"

[ed]

Me not know.
Me just pawn in game of life.

[JSM]

The Dean family looks a lot like many families across the spectrum, a two income household. How many birthdays or anniversaries have been missed because the average spouse had to work?

It appears the liberal media is setting up the eventual loss of the moderate Dean in favor of their social engineering and expanding government incumbent president.

[fyodor]

mak nas,

Fair enough!

[DFH]

A First Lady's place is in the First Kitchen.

[lost soul]

That Heather chick is really getting me hot.

[mak_nas]

Of course, as I've already said, I don't see their behavior (or what I've learned about it thus far) in that light at all.

yeah, neither do i, fyodor. just a tangent i got on!

[Jeff Smith]

Let's see ... healthy middle aged guy. Lots
of travel. Lots of adoring young wonks. Lots
of money. Never sees his wife.

A good story awaits, methinks. Does Reason
have its reporters trailing around Mr. Dean
right now, waiting to catch him in the act?

It's late. The mind wanders.

Jeff