Ed Kilgore: Why the sure-to-be blistering GOP attacks on Michelle Obama won't work
[Ed Kilgore is the managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum and blogging site.]
In 1828, President John Quincy Adams's reelection campaign reportedly traded on innuendoes that Rachel Jackson had been imperfectly divorced from her first husband. Since her second husband, Andrew Jackson, once killed a man in a duel for the same insult to his wife's honor, Adams was perhaps lucky to lose no more than the presidency to Old Hickory.
So, while there are abundant signs that Republicans this year are itching to take the practice to new lows, let's not forget that attacks on first ladies, actual or putative, go back a long way. And for all of the fear in Democratic circles about the damage these attacks could do to the Obama campaign, there are equally abundant signs that the Republicans have chosen the wrong spouse to trash and bash. Indeed, the proposed demonization of Michelle Obama as some sort of radical, honky-hating Shadow (racial implication intended) Behind the Throne could well backfire.
Despite the long pedigree of presidential spouse-bashing, it didn't really become a regular feature of politics until quite recently. After Rachel Jackson, the first first lady to be thoroughly excoriated was Woodrow Wilson's second wife, Edith, who allegedly ran the country for a while after her husband's 1919 stroke (just prior to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote).
Then came Eleanor Roosevelt, whose many detractors created the current pattern of going after the spouse as a collateral attack on the president. Roosevelt, an outspoken (for her time) supporter of racial justice, was a particular target of southern white Democrats who didn't want to criticize the wildly popular FDR.
Fast forward to the mid-1970s, when Betty Ford's controversial remarks on "Sixty Minutes" supporting abortion rights and condoning premarital sex became a lightning rod for conservative unhappiness with her husband, who ultimately faced a tough 1976 primary challenge from Ronald Reagan. Reagan's own wife, Nancy, got a lot of early flack for her White House consultations with astrologers, and later on, was criticized by conservatives who thought she was tempering her husband's ideology out of concern for his historical reputation.
But all these skirmishes were merely a prelude to the savaging of Hillary Clinton, who throughout the 1992 campaign and the entire Clinton administration was variously denounced as some sort of hyper-ideological Red Queen, as an enabler of her husband's weaknesses, as a hateful and humorless shrew, and in the far reaches of right-wing crazyland, as a crook and even a murderer. Those who wonder about the tenacious loyalty of many feminists to HRC should remember how frequently and for how long she was treated by conservatives as the symbol of everything threatening to The Old Ways about the women's movement....
Read entire article at New Republic
In 1828, President John Quincy Adams's reelection campaign reportedly traded on innuendoes that Rachel Jackson had been imperfectly divorced from her first husband. Since her second husband, Andrew Jackson, once killed a man in a duel for the same insult to his wife's honor, Adams was perhaps lucky to lose no more than the presidency to Old Hickory.
So, while there are abundant signs that Republicans this year are itching to take the practice to new lows, let's not forget that attacks on first ladies, actual or putative, go back a long way. And for all of the fear in Democratic circles about the damage these attacks could do to the Obama campaign, there are equally abundant signs that the Republicans have chosen the wrong spouse to trash and bash. Indeed, the proposed demonization of Michelle Obama as some sort of radical, honky-hating Shadow (racial implication intended) Behind the Throne could well backfire.
Despite the long pedigree of presidential spouse-bashing, it didn't really become a regular feature of politics until quite recently. After Rachel Jackson, the first first lady to be thoroughly excoriated was Woodrow Wilson's second wife, Edith, who allegedly ran the country for a while after her husband's 1919 stroke (just prior to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote).
Then came Eleanor Roosevelt, whose many detractors created the current pattern of going after the spouse as a collateral attack on the president. Roosevelt, an outspoken (for her time) supporter of racial justice, was a particular target of southern white Democrats who didn't want to criticize the wildly popular FDR.
Fast forward to the mid-1970s, when Betty Ford's controversial remarks on "Sixty Minutes" supporting abortion rights and condoning premarital sex became a lightning rod for conservative unhappiness with her husband, who ultimately faced a tough 1976 primary challenge from Ronald Reagan. Reagan's own wife, Nancy, got a lot of early flack for her White House consultations with astrologers, and later on, was criticized by conservatives who thought she was tempering her husband's ideology out of concern for his historical reputation.
But all these skirmishes were merely a prelude to the savaging of Hillary Clinton, who throughout the 1992 campaign and the entire Clinton administration was variously denounced as some sort of hyper-ideological Red Queen, as an enabler of her husband's weaknesses, as a hateful and humorless shrew, and in the far reaches of right-wing crazyland, as a crook and even a murderer. Those who wonder about the tenacious loyalty of many feminists to HRC should remember how frequently and for how long she was treated by conservatives as the symbol of everything threatening to The Old Ways about the women's movement....