Desperate GOP Housewives

Looks Like Fred Thompson's campaign just took another hit:

http://news.yahoo.com/...

    While the article suggests Ms. Rozett's departure is due to her limited "campaign experience," perhaps there are other reasons:

In July, Thompson sidelined his campaign-manager-in-waiting, Tom Collamore, and watched a few other aides follow him out the door amid consternation inside the operation about the active role of Thompson's wife, Jeri.

more

Ah, the meddlesome, power-hungry spouse! Who can forget how the right savaged Hillary--day after day, month after month--for deigning to intrude on her husband's sacred office? Will we see a similar degree of outrage as these wives of the GOP frontrunners grapple for the golden ring?  Why, no! In fact, Robert Novak is already inoculating us:

The spectacle of Thompson's Republican adversaries demeaning his wife in conversations with newsmen suggests how seriously they regard his prospective candidacy. He starts his campaign in the top tier of candidates, and is already the candidate of the South and the favorite of social conservatives. His test is how he will do after Labor Day when his candidacy's phantom stage has been finished. Jeri Thompson will be at his side as an asset, not a liability.

http://www.townhall.com/...
   
    There's nothing wrong with a candidate's spouse being involved with his/her political campaign. There's nothing wrong with advising your spouse who he should or should not speak to, or even designing the bumper stickers.  But when the pros you've hired to coordinate a national campaign begin to jump ship because they've been nudged out, then something is obviously wrong.

     Part of me hopes Guiliani gets the GOP nod just so we can watch the action from the sidelines, like this eye-opener from last month's Vanity Fair about the..."ambitious" Judith:
http://www.vanityfair.com/...

     The article suggests several of Guiliani's close advisors live in perpetual fear of getting on the wrong side of Judith, and amplifies this with some remarkable anecdotes. For all the imagined crimes and malignant motives the right dreamed up about Hillary, I don't believe anyone ever actually painted her with these attributes (exploring the reasons why Judi left her second prior husband):

It was growing obvious to Judi that, to quote one of Bruce's friends, "his was not a bottomless pit of money." The couple had rented what is described by an old friend as "a teeny-weeny apartment on the Upper East Side."

"They never could afford a big co-op on Park Avenue and she wanted it," says another friend. "I think Bruce wasn't doing well enough for her, and she was ambitious."

Pretty soon these friends heard the same stories that would eventually find their way into court papers: Bruce would claim that his wife called him "'a kike,' when I couldn't afford something; 'a rich little kike,' ... 'Jew boy.'" Certainly he felt they had entirely different ambitions. "Unlike my wife, I was not a social climber," he would later observe. "My wife's 'main goal' in life was being involved with whatever was 'the in-thing' at the moment ... the 'right church' ... the 'right people'; adopting a child for status purposes."

    Yes, these GOP wives promise to be a class unto themselves.   But don't hold your breath waiting for the same indignant reaction from the right.

•  Tips

  by Dartagnan on Mon Aug 27, 2007 at 11:57:43 AM PDT

•  In my experience, women who

  are madly in love with money are too much trouble to bother, even if you do have enough money. Besides, they're liable to jump ship when a fancier car passes by. Blech. And they're usually no fun and all - not an original streak or an amusing joke in them. It's all Armani this and Gucci that.

  This seems to be the time for a handkerchief quote, but I'll refrain.

  by Dauphin on Mon Aug 27, 2007 at 11:59:04 AM PDT

  •  Money + power

    an inexhorable aphrodisiac.  My perception, is that both these women are so insecure in themselves and their relationships, that they will torpedo their husbands' candidacies.  You go girls!

    by pamelabrown on Mon Aug 27, 2007 at 12:03:31 PM PDT

    •  Well, if you need an aphrodisiac...

      Besides, despite all that money it still means you're dating a despicable creep of a man/woman.

      by Dauphin on Mon Aug 27, 2007 at 12:12:08 PM PDT

      •  Dauphin, that's my point

        by pamelabrown on Mon Aug 27, 2007 at 12:18:19 PM PDT

•  Desperate GOP Housewives?

  Leave Mrs. Vitter alone. She's suffered enough at Diaper Dave's hands...

  by brownsox on Mon Aug 27, 2007 at 12:09:04 PM PDT

  •  Diaper dave? n/t

    by Dauphin on Mon Aug 27, 2007 at 12:13:45 PM PDT

    •  Vitter.

      You don't like that one? I was a big fan of it.

      by brownsox on Mon Aug 27, 2007 at 12:18:08 PM PDT

      •  Dave did one thing that was very very smart:

        He picked a mistress with the same first name as his wife. That way you never call out the wrong name when talking in yer sleep.

        Ladies and gentlemen, I think we have just found our next attorney general.

        by ticket punch on Mon Aug 27, 2007 at 12:22:15 PM PDT

•  wife problem

  The visual of a guy who looks 112 with a very young looking wife-that's a sure vote getter with women.

  by Virginia mom on Mon Aug 27, 2007 at 12:45:34 PM PDT

  •  re

    Heh. 112.

    That's 789 in Basset Hound years!!

    by cookiesandmilk on Mon Aug 27, 2007 at 12:48:39 PM PDT

•  The model for these Gooper housewives is surely

  Lynne Cheney.

  Back in the day, Lynne flat out told Dick, a flailing college dropout, that there would be no future with her if he did not straighten out his act and get serious.

  For a couple of years in the early 1960s, Dick Cheney keeps returning to Yale, floundering again, before totally flunking out and losing his scholarship. In between he's on crews building power lines. His first-year roommate, Jacob Plotkin, doesn't quite understand why he keeps coming back to New Haven, since he still apparently doesn't study. Is it a combination of Lynne's insistence and his resistance?

     Then finally it's over. Plotkin vividly remembers seeing Cheney for the last time. "It was a cold day and he was standing on the approach to the library steps and I was coming out of Calhoun College and I greeted him because I hadn't seen very much of him, and he told me he was leaving and wasn't coming back." Plotkin says that in the memory, "I can almost feel the cold breeze blowing on me." Standing by the library, Cheney seemed to Plotkin not angry or bitter, but "resigned."

     Back in Wyoming, Cheney returns to his job on the power lines. Joan Frandsen says, "It is what guys do around here if you don't go to college." He continues drinking, gets arrested a couple of times for drunk driving in 1962 and 1963. At one level he seems comfortable with just drifting, as he had in high school. Resigned. Letting things happen. At another level he wants to succeed, whatever that means. But he can't find the engine of his own. Lynne has the engine. As Cheney later tells it, "She made it clear she wasn't interested in marrying a lineman for the county." When Lynne gives him the final ultimatum - succeed in the world or we're through - by his own account, everything changes. (Nichols 26)

     In short order, he enrolls in Casper Community College, then the University of Wyoming in 1963. He and Lynne marry in 1964. He follows an interest in the subject of politics. In 1965, he gets a degree from the University of Wyoming and follows Lynne to the University of Wisconsin for graduate work. She plans to make college professors out of both of them - but perhaps anything will do. The Vietnam War is on. Cheney gets five draft deferments during this period, the fifth one remarkably calculated. Cheney applies for his exemption three months into Lynne's first trimester of pregnancy, and then, exactly nine months and two days after the Selective Service eliminated special protections for childless married men, the Cheneys have their first daughter. Years later, the future secretary of defense tells a reporter that he didn't go to Vietnam because "I had other priorities."

  by Ammo Hauler on Mon Aug 27, 2007 at 01:33:20 PM PDT

  •  If only...

    ...Lynne had been willing to marry a lineman from the county.

    It's not every woman who is given the opportunity to avert national disaster just by telling her boyfriend "I love you just the way you are!"  

    by ChaosMouse on Mon Aug 27, 2007 at 02:28:40 PM PDT

•  That's disgusting!

  adopting a child for status purposes

  The poor children who are adopted by these people, just to keep up with the Jones.

  There aught to be a law!

  by Mulkum on Mon Aug 27, 2007 at 01:57:12 PM PDT