WANTED: First Lady. Must be able to chat easily with heads of state, make speeches on humanitarian issues and bake a decent apple pie. Should look immaculate at all times, smile whenever cameras are around and build a strong working relationship with the chief floral designer. This is an unpaid role.
As job descriptions go, it's one of the more unusual ones. But this much-coveted position is currently being eyed up by both Michelle Obama and Cindy McCain, the respective wives of Barack and John, the two men who later this year will go head to hea
d for the most powerful job in the world – that of President of the United States.
The role of a First Lady is unpredictable. Despite the attempts of various former FLs, its exact position has never been clearly defined. There is no salary, she is not elected and has no official duties – yet having another job is so severely frowned upon that no First Lady has ever done it. Unlike in the UK, where the wife of the Prime Minister is free to work and has no governmental staff unless she specifically chooses, America's First Lady has her own offices within the White House and a staff that includes a chief of staff, a press secretary, the White House social secretary, the White House executive chef and, of course, that chief floral designer.
"The position of First Lady is a derivational position," says Melanne Verveer, Hillary Clinton's chief of staff when she was First Lady, in Suzanne Goldberg's book Madam President: Is America Ready to Send Hillary Clinton to the White House?. "You only have it by virtue of your marriage. You have not achieved it on your own."
This, of course, can create very different types of First Lady. Rosalynn Carter, wife of Jimmy, sat in on Cabinet meetings, while Nancy Reagan kept strictly to flower arranging. Hillary Clinton – perhaps the most politically active of all FLs to date – turned the Office of the First Lady into a political operation with real teeth, attempting to push through her reforms on America's healthcare system (she failed), campaigning against female genital mutilation and for the rights of children living in poverty both in the US and abroad, only occasionally pandering to the more traditionalist First Lady role – her book on White House pets being a case in point.
Laura Bush, the current incumbent in Washington, has seemed happy to stay, with her smile glued on, quietly in the background, arranging social occasions and appearing at her husband's side when necessary. She keeps well away from any political leanings, maintaining the more traditional First Lady position of 'president's consort'.
So what can we expect of our two prospective First Ladies when one of them makes it to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? Michelle Obama will make history of her own if her husband wins in November, becoming the first black First Lady to grace the private apartments of the White House. Born into a working-class African-American family on Chicago's South Side, she is a graduate of Harvard law school and a former vice-president at the University of Chicago Medical Centre (she scaled her job responsibilities back to just 20 per cent in May 2007 after her husband announced he would run). She is expected to give up her career should Barack win.
At 44 she is young, accomplished and also a mother to two girls, Malia and Sasha, aged nine and six. She employed an all-female team of aides on the campaign trail and gave powerful stump speeches on race and motherhood. She has become known within the team for being the one to give Barack Obama the final word of advice on many of the political issues he has faced during his campaign.
"She's too smart to run," her husband told a campaign crowd recently. "It is true my wife is smarter, better looking. She's a little meaner than I am."
She herself is perhaps a little unsure of her own First Lady role. When, back in February, she was asked by a student what she thought her 'First Lady platform' would be, Michelle barked: "To make sure my kids have their heads on straight. We can talk about the high-falutin' notion of a First Spouse platform, but here I am, a woman professional who has to work on top of my first job as a mother."
Her Republican counterpart, Cindy McCain, is an entirely different kettle of fish. An heiress from an affluent background in Arizona, she first met John McCain while he was still married to his first wife, Carol. The two embarked upon an affair and McCain left his wife for Cindy, 18 years his junior and now aged 54. In the late 1980s she developed an addiction to the prescription drugs Vicodin and Percocet and was the subject of a federal investigation after she stole drugs from the American Voluntary Medical Team (a non-profit organisation she herself had founded, which allowed medical personnel to provide medical care to disaster-struck areas across the world).
Since then she has cleaned up her act, and in 2000 – when her husband ran for the Republican nomination – became chair of her late father's $300 million-a-year beer distribution company, Hensley & Co. She is deeply involved in charity work, including Scotland's own HALO Trust, which works to clear landmines in Africa and South-East Asia, whose board she sits on and whose headquarters in Dumfries she last visited three months ago.
She and her husband have four children, Meghan, 23 – who has been blogging throughout the campaign in an attempt to connect with the youth vote – Jack and Jimmy, 21 and 19, who are both in the armed forces, and Bridget, 16, whom the McCains adopted from Mother Teresa's orphanage in Bangladesh. A visible presence on her husband's campaign trail, she has tended not to get involved in the political side of the campaign to the same extent as Michelle Obama, suggesting that she would make a more traditional First Lady.
"She will be quite visible, but (won't] break the mould," says Barbara Kellerman, professor of public leadership at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "She'll find some middle ground between those First Ladies who have been quite conservative, such as Laura Bush and Barbara Bush, and those who have been more cutting-edge, such as Rosalynn Carter, Betty Ford and, in some ways, Nancy Reagan."
What both women have in common is that they seem intent on turning the role into their own, and creating a truly 21st-century First Ladyship. May the best lady win.
The full article contains 1126 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
