Campaign Is a Labor of Love for the Wives of Republican Front-Runners

BRIDGEPORT, Conn. — They are two nice ladies from the Southwest, daughters of wealth and privilege, mothers who are panther-like in their protection of hearth and home.

Both left teaching careers to concentrate full time on raising children. Both are grateful that the circumstances of their marriages to successful men permitted them to do so.

Both are avid volunteers. Both are handsome women, with pastel eyes that might have wandered out of a Monet painting. Both favor expensive wardrobes, especially these days if the garments fare well in a suitcase.

So striking are the superficial similarities between Laura Welch Bush and Cindy Hensley McCain that in another life, the two might have been friends. But the growing antagonism between their husbands, Texas Gov. George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain of Arizona--the two front-runners for the Republican presidential nomination--makes that unlikely.

Instead, as the GOP presidential campaign spirals toward conclusion, the wives have surfaced as stealth campaign weapons. While the husbands duke it out, the two women with the country-club manners are there to smooth out the edges. Barely visible in the early days of the race, the wives are suddenly everywhere. For both, it is a part that is being written as they go along.

Spouses Play Pivotal Roles

Pros at their craft, Bush and McCain have perfected The Look, the wide-eyed gaze of adoration required of any First Lady. They know their job now is to market the next president as a man who is not only a whiz at foreign policy, but also an ideal husband.

Sitting in a hotel room last week in Virginia Beach, Va., Cindy McCain, 45, said, “People are very interested in seeing the two of us together. They want to see how we interact. There’s also a great deal of interest in me, seeing how I act and look, all those things.”

A few days later, in what was ambitiously described as the presidential suite of a chain hotel here, 52-year-old Laura Bush offered much the same assessment.

“People are interested in the personal lives of the candidates. People are interested in the family life of the people who are running for office,” she said. “I think that’s appropriate.”

But as alike as Bush and McCain might appear at first glance, in person they are as different as sugar and spice. Bush, a sorority girl at Southern Methodist University and the daughter of an affluent home builder, was a teacher and children’s librarian who married into a prominent family and seamlessly moved into the traditional domain of marriage, children and charity work. McCain used family money to set up a charitable foundation and has traveled the world as a volunteer relief worker. For 20 years she has juggled a commuting marriage to a man 18 years her senior, and in the course of her husband’s presidential campaign, she has been disarmingly candid about her struggle in the early 1990s with drug addiction.

As veterans of the political treadmill, both women are accustomed to scrutiny, though neither is particularly comfortable with it. McCain, for example, accepts that it is public record that her husband was married to someone else when they met in Hawaii in 1979. She was 25, and armed with a new master’s degree in special education from USC. He was a dashing Navy officer who survived five years in a North Vietnamese prison.

When her husband became a congressman three years after their marriage, McCain opted to remain in Phoenix with a family that has grown to include four children: Meghan, 15; Jack, 13; Jimmy, 11; and 8-year-old Bridget, the child Cindy McCain brought home from Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Bangladesh.

“Meet your new daughter,” she told her husband when he greeted them at the airport.

Far from some cookie-cutter nuclear family--the kind politicians like to pretend exists all over America--Bridget, the little girl with a cleft palate, joined what may be the ultimate modern household. Along with a menagerie of exotic animals, the McCain family includes the senator’s three children by his first marriage: Doug, 40, Andy, 37 and Sidney, 33. John and Cindy McCain remain on good terms with his ex-wife, Carol McCain.

Laura Welch and George Bush were in the same middle school class for a year in Midland, Texas, but neither admits to remembering the other. Both were 31 when friends fixed them up at, of course, a barbecue. The businessman and teacher married three months later, with a prenuptial pledge neither has lived up to.

“He promised I would never have to make a campaign speech,” Laura Bush said last week, addressing a roomful of Republicans. She promised she would jog with him. She never broke in a pair of Nikes, and insists her favorite sport is reading.

As first lady of Texas and the wife of Arizona’s senior senator, Bush and McCain also live with sometimes unflattering public images. Bush is often painted as almost pathologically shy and retiring. She is described as the subduing influence who reined in the carousing son of George and Barbara Bush. Even her twin 18-year-old daughters make fun of her sensible coiffeur, claiming her hair “moves as a unit.”

Bush admits that her initial hesitancy about leaping into the campaign only heightened the impression that she is remote. The fact that she is closely handled, giving rare interviews--and then for only five or 10 minutes at a time--magnifies this perception. As it happens, she is warm and outgoing while touring an adult literacy center, and in a brief, tightly managed interview, is gracious and relaxed, offering to share her hotel-issued cookies.

A Reputation for Being Reserved

As for the shy-and-reserved part of her reputation, “I was shy as a younger person,” she said. “You know, I am a librarian.”

For her part, McCain wrestles with the view that she is apolitical. Hardly: In a free-wheeling interview, she rattled off facts and figures about health care, foster care and her own pet interests, education and adoption. Still, she admitted that while she smooths his hair and dusts the creases off her husband’s jackets before he speaks--his arms are too badly mangled from his POW experience to do it himself--and stands beside him, looking attentive and adoring, she is seldom 100% there.

“I believe in him and I love him, and I don’t mind hearing the same speeches and punch lines over and over,” McCain said. “But I will freely tell you I’m about 90% there. Five percent of the time I’m thinking about my children, and 5% of the time I’m thinking about my sick parents.”

McCain is plagued also by her former addiction to prescription drugs that ended, cold turkey, almost eight years ago. Pain from a back operation, coupled with despair over accusations that her husband had traded political favors for free air travel, drove her to abuse drugs she stole from a foreign aid program she founded. She escaped prosecution by paying a fine, performing community service in a soup kitchen and joining Narcotics Anonymous.

The daughter of the owner of a Budweiser beer franchise makes no secret of the “very dark time” that surrounded her drug habit. On the contrary, she contends that it taught her and everyone around her about owning up to mistakes. The experience, McCain said, made her a better mother to the brood whose homework she monitors via computer while campaigning.

With her hair cropped as short as the fuzz on a tennis ball, McCain is known also for her mischievous sense of humor. She is fond of placing suspicious articles of clothing in the briefcases of campaign workers. Sometimes, she makes fake phone calls to campaign aides, describing fake crises that guarantee real headaches. While her husband holds forth on the big bus known as the Straight Talk Express, McCain set out with an all-female entourage, and named their much-smaller vehicle the Estrogen Express.

In the Bush household, humor plays a role as well. Laura Bush jokes, for instance, that her mother-in-law’s hair turned white after she served as her oldest son’s Cub Scout den leader. Laura Bush also has special love names for family members.

“Bushie!” an aide said she stage-whispered at a recent gathering where she arrived after her husband. The governor of Texas whirled around to embrace his wife.

Between her husband and her father-in-law, Bush has been through five presidential campaigns. McCain, meanwhile, did five congressional races before her husband threw his hat in the presidential ring. Both have become accustomed to strange questions, such as the little boy who asked Laura Bush if George Washington was her father-in-law, or, in the case of Cindy McCain, recurring inquiries about whether she plans to run for the Senate. Both agree that separation from family is the hardest part of the grueling ritual of campaigning.

“I make it a point to be home every second or third night, because our girls are still in high school,” Bush said. At the governor’s mansion, in their parents’ absence, Jenna and Barbara Bush--named for both grandmothers-- are looked after by aides and by a longtime family friend, their mother said.

In the universe of revolving nannies, Cindy McCain knows she is lucky to have had the same sitter for seven years. While the McCains are on the road, the sitter stays in their home. McCain, passionate about technology, sends her children daily electronic transmissions with pictures. She uses a laptop computer to receive pictures and missives from them. “I’d much rather go to CompUSA than to a fancy clothing store,” she said.

So habituated are they to the stale mores of political wifedom that without being asked, they talk about cooking. Bush does Tex-Mex. McCain hates all kitchen duty.

“I’m a terrible cook,” she said. “John’s a great cook. I love it when he cooks.”

With the “co--President” model of the Clinton White House looming over them, both women dance gingerly around the question of whether--or to what extent--they serve as advisors to their husbands.

Interpreters for Their Husbands

“Well, we talk a little about policy issues,” Bush said. For McCain, “I’m an advisor, in that he’ll bounce things off me.”

Where it will all end, whether either of them will end up in the White House, remains to be seen. For now, the two women know that as interpreters for their husbands--as simultaneous translators, in a way--their job is both to package their spouses in family-friendly wrapping and to sell themselves as women who make these candidates better men.

“What I want to do,” said Laura Bush, “is to do every single thing I can to help George be elected.”

And McCain: “This is something I came into fully thinking I would hate every minute of. But you know what, you just do what you have to do. I love him, and I’ll do whatever I can do.”