TO CLARIFY. Good to see someone using the Tapped holiday posting system (the office is down this week and those who are posting are doing so sans Sam Rosenfeld). Mark may be reading a bit more in my item that I intended to put there, however. Of course Hillary Clinton will have significant challenges in winning election -- heck, she'll have major challenges just getting through the primary at this rate. Nothing about her run will be a waltz. But I do think we need to make sure that those of us who write about politics don't look at her candidacy as a totally sui generis thing, or confuse issues common to women running for office with ones specific to her candidacy. That's especially the case because the politically incorrect historical precedent here is clear. Female politicians in the American system massively benefit from having either a famous political father or husband. This is just a fact. The first woman ever elected to the U.S. Senate, Hattie Caraway, was first appointed to serve out the remainder of her deceased husband's term; the first woman governor, Nellie Tayloe Ross, also was elected to that office after her husband's death; and fully 20 percent of women who have ever served in the U.S. Congress had husbands or fathers whose seats they took after their elected male relations passed away or resigned. In comparing Clinton to Ferraro or Pirro, I meant only to look at what we know about how women have succeeded in the political arena, and where they have been challenged, and on what grounds, rather than to suggest that they or their husbands have all that much in common. Whatever Bill Clinton will bring with him, the positive power of being married to a previously-elected man who can no longer serve has, historically, so far outweighed the negative that there is even a name for the political phenomenon of a wife picking up where her husband left off: "widow succession." Indeed, a 2005 story called such successions "the fastest and most historic route to Capitol Hill for women." By 2006, 46 out of the 230 women who had ever served in Congress were either elected or appointed to serve terms upon the death or resignation of a husband or father. Now, Bill Clinton is very much alive, so this is another admittedly inexact comparison, just like the one to Ferraro. But the underlying social principles at work strike me as being the same. He stepped down, and she became the first female senator from New York. He can no longer serve, and now she's the first serious female presidential contender. And this social phenomenon cuts across party lines: Liddy Dole, wife of former Senate Majority Leader and 1996 Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole, also enacted it when she considered a run for the presidency in 2000, and when she ran for -- and won -- a Senate seat in 2002. So, yes, we will never be able to consider Hillary apart from Bill, and she fails the "did it all by my lonesome" test that we think we apply to male candidates. But female candidates don't need to worry about being perceived as emasculated (as opposed to emasculating), and we also don't yet have a fair system for evaluating and promoting independent female candidates for the presidency -- if we did, there'd be a draft Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius movement, and though I've heard some rumblings from awe-struck young operatives, I'm not going to hold my breath on that one. Of course, Sebelius also comes from a political family, in that her father was previously governor of Ohio. And so does Nancy Pelosi, come to think of it -- her dad was a congressman and later Mayor of Baltimore. Indeed, I suspect that a close study of women in Congress during the 89 years they've been there would reveal that a shockingly high portion of those who did not follow their deceased husbands into office nevertheless came from political families. It's possible this is also the case for men (the example of the Bushes and the Bayhs come to mind, as well as the Kennedys), and that our system is more dynastic than we like to imagine, but I suspect the family phenomenon is more the case for women. If you know more, by all means, add your comments below. UPDATE: I see Chris Suellentrop wrote a fun little article about Clinton and Dole as new-style political widows back in 2002. And this page on Wikipedia lists America's 87 leading political families, including that of former Mass. Gov. and possible '08 contender Mitt Romney, whose father was governor of Michigan, and whose mother ran for Senate in 1970. His great-great-grandfather was a member of the Utah territorial legislature, as well, and an even more distant relation served in the colonial legislature in Connecticut during the 17th century.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
