Candidates' wives under media microscope

SAN FRANCISCO -- So now we know: Michelle Obama shops at Target, hates pantyhose ("painful") and made the "fist bump" cool.

And Cindy McCain does lots of under-the-radar charity work, favors Oscar de la Renta and has a credit card bill that's been somewhere between $100,000 and $250,000 this year.

But rest assured, America: With a major female presidential candidate no longer in the running, there's plenty more we'll learn about the stylistic, literary, grooming and culinary penchants of the two women who aspire to be first lady of the United States.

As Democratic Sen. Barack Obama and Republican Sen. John McCain battle for voter attention on the presidential campaign stage, their wives are marshaling their own armies -- the masses of handlers, hairdressers, photographers and press secretaries needed to confront an unusually high level of public curiosity in this campaign year.

In an election where reality TV, celebrity gossip channels and YouTube are raging 24/7, the challenge for each potential first lady is what advertising types call "brand extension," the tricky task of taking a successful product -- in this case, their husband-candidates -- and expanding the appeal to a whole new group of consumers.

Hence, last week's best-selling Us Weekly magazine cover featuring the embracing Obamas and the headline "Why Barack Loves Her," and Vogue's soft-focus profile of Cindy McCain last month, complete with fashion layout shot against the Arizona red rock.

John Quelch, a senior associate dean of business administration at Harvard University, said the unprecedented emphasis on the marketing and packaging of the candidates' wives in 2008 is an outcome of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's own highly competitive, ultimately unsuccessful, effort to win the Democratic nomination.

"What occurs to me is that there were three women running for president -- and now there are two," he said. "Such a large proportion of the U.S. population is interested in having a woman candidate, that the interest in the spouses is a knock-off effect following Sen. Clinton's withdrawal. There is still an absolute passion for the voice of women to be represented in the political dialogue in the highest office in the land."

Candidates' wives have frequently been pigeonholed into a few predictable roles: "as an escort, in a protocol role, in a noblesse oblige role and as a policy adviser," according to a University of Missouri study by journalism Professors Barbara Friedman and Betty Houchin Winfield called "Gender Politics: News Framing of the Candidates' Wives in Campaign 2000."

Michal Ann Strahilevitz, marketing professor at Golden Gate University in San Francisco, said a new generation of voters could change all that.

"I think young women and professional women ... want the first lady to be someone who is listened to, has something to say, and doesn't just say, 'Whatever you want to do, dear,' " she said. "Now that there's no woman candidate, it's the closest thing to what I want as a role model for my daughters, is who's going to be the first lady."

That means the efforts surrounding the marketing of Michelle Obama and Cindy McCain have included new venues to try to reach voters. Both have scheduled the requisite smiley co-host segment on "The View" -- where Obama's views on pantyhose were thoroughly explored -- and have sat for Annie Leibovitz portraits for predictably effusive Vogue profiles ("The hairdresser made a few nervous stabs with a comb. 'I think I should just put it up,' Obama said gently"). It hasn't all been slick packaging and smooth sailing, however.

Obama, a Harvard-trained lawyer and mother of two, already has drawn criticism that she is simply too outspoken, opinionated and, critics suggest, angry.

At a star-studded fundraiser in Beverly Hills hosted by David Geffen last year, she introduced her husband to the crowd -- which included Steven Spielberg, Ben Stiller and Jennifer Aniston -- by joking that she knew they all thought he was "a saint," but he didn't pick up his socks. She later made the gaffe of calling him "stinky and snore-y" in bed. In addition, conservatives seized on her comment that Obama's campaign made her "really proud" of the country for the first time.

Cindy McCain has had her own challenges, such as carefully explaining some of her more difficult personal history -- a past addiction to prescription drugs, and the couple's courtship while the senator was still married to his first wife. (Vogue said the McCains were "separated," while the senator's first wife has said she forgives John McCain for "acting like 25" when he was 40.) And then there was "Recipe-gate," where some of Cindy McCain's purported favorite recipes, published on the campaign Web site, were apparently borrowed -- by an intern -- from the Food Network.

So far, Strahilevitz says, Cindy McCain has appeared more wary of the media, and hasn't appeared as at ease in expressing her views on marriage, her husband or key issues. Michelle Obama seems able to project "more chemistry and pizzazz -- a flirty energy" with her husband as expressed in the "fist bump."

(E-mail Carla Marinucci at cmarinucci(at)sfchronicle.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)