Twice in 48 Hours ...

Help me, I'm agreeing with Bird Dog again. After his fellow tacitusian macallan posted a link to this article about Howard Dean's wife, Dr. Judith Steinberg, Bird Dog said:

I came out of it thinking better of Steinberg. There's kids at home and she's helping people in her practice. In fact, she's got her priorities pretty straight, since she's doing more good helping patients than traveling around helping her husband's political career.

My feeling exactly. I like that she's her own person with her own life and career, not an adjunct to Dean and his plan of life. Unfortunately I think a fair number of people will have trouble accepting that, so they'll read into the relationship insidious things about her commitment to her husband. Being president is, for many voters, not just a job that we hire the most qualified person to do (though that's not true of all voters, as demonstrated by Bill Clinton's ability to escape the Monica incident relatively unscathed). The president is a sort of avatar of the American public, so people can be reluctant to elect someone who isn't, in character and personal life as well as in political views, representative of what they are or think they should be. And for a substantial sector of the population, the ideal of marriage hasn't caught up to what I, or Dean and Steinberg, think about it.