Episode 2: Political Assets and Liabilities
Tammy Vigil discusses the roles expected of first ladies and how they perform those roles can be an asset or a liability to the president.
TRANSCRIPT
Teri Finneman: Eleanor. Dolley. Mamie. Jackie. They were the nation’s original influencers. Some were fearless, some were fragile. All left their mark on the nation’s history. In this podcast, we'll reflect on the fascinating legacies of the women forever tied to the White House. I'm your host, Teri Finneman, a journalism historian who studies media portrayals of first ladies with production editing by Bella Koscal. This is the First Ladies podcast.
Every first lady leaves an impact on a presidential administration, some more than others. Yet what's been called soft power leaves its own unique mark. In today's episode, we talk to Tammy Vigil, associate professor of media science at Boston University, about U.S. first ladies as political assets and liabilities.
Tammy, welcome to the show. Why did you become interested in studying first ladies?
Tammy Vigil (1:06): I've been interested in first ladies for some time. I became interested in them as a subject area when I was working on a project looking at speeches from national conventions, national nominating conventions, and I was doing chapters on all the different types of speakers that there were.
And when I dug into the first ladies as surrogates for their husbands during the conventions, they just became so fascinating to me. There was so much more to write than there was in just that one chapter. And the more I kept digging into their – particularly their activities on the campaign trail, the more fascinated I became with them.
So first ladies is just one of those things that I stumbled across them and then just sort of fell in love with the idea of digging deeper and deeper and deeper into understanding this really strange political group of women, well so far, women.
Teri Finneman (1:58): The role of first lady isn't in the Constitution. It's unpaid, and the women who serve in it are left to make their own way, trying to merge their own interests with how their predecessors have performed the role. What have been the main responsibilities of the first lady across history?
Tammy Vigil: You're right, the first lady is, you know, not a constitutionally mandated role. And as such, what's really happening is it's become a societally constructed role, very social, social impact role.
Society has impacted the ways in which the perceived responsibilities of the women are and, as such, it's sort of become a reflection of the role of American womanhood. And so, across time, the responsibilities of the first lady have really reflected what people have thought women should be doing, especially high-profile women. So, most of the roles include things like being a national hostess, being a figure of compassion, engaging in public social advocacy.
There's also the sort of sideline things like, you know, being fashionable, what it means to be fashionable, creating role modeling for motherhood, for being a good wife, those kinds of things. But mostly what I tend to focus on are things like the national hostess role, being a figure of compassion, and being a public social advocate. And then especially for the idea of assets and liabilities, how those impact the presidency, but also the perceptions of the first lady herself and her legacy.
Teri Finneman (3:26): Yeah, so let's break down some of these roles that you mentioned into more depth. What does the national hostess role involve and why does it even matter?
Tammy Vigil: Well, the national hostess role really evolved because the U.S. presidency isn't just the head of government, but also the ceremonial head of state. And so the first lady has always assisted in the fulfilling of that ceremonial head of state role. And so as a national hostess, what the first lady does is brings a sense of both ceremony and commonality to the position of, or to the presidency as a whole.
And what I mean by that is the ceremony side, she does things like hosts big dinners, she hosts especially the state dinners for international dignitaries. She tends to host smaller things like teas and luncheons for other kinds of important individuals and groups of people, but she also helps to coordinate things like Christmas celebrations and the Christmas decorations – that gets a whole lot of attention. Things like the Easter egg roll on the lawn of the White House, the holiday events like trick-or-treaters coming. So, she opens the house – the White House and the presidency to the public in a way that is important for the public to relate to the presidency and also to be able to fulfill some of those duties that, in other countries, the ceremonial heads of states do.
(4:57) So it's important because it's both political and personal wrapped up into one really complicated and yet seemingly simple duty. It's also one of the most enduring duties that the first lady has. It started with Martha Washington way back when the national capital was housed in New York, and she would host weekly events to open the president's home to different kinds of dignitaries, and also sometimes to common folk as well.
Teri Finneman (5:32): I'm glad you mentioned Martha because I want to talk about some of our early first ladies, especially Louisa Adams, a first lady who gets virtually no attention except perhaps in passing with Melania Trump since both were born abroad. What is her legacy as hostess?
Tammy Vigil: Louisa Adams is an interesting character because you're right, she doesn't get a whole lot of attention. Generally speaking, people talk about her as a well-traveled, one of the most well-traveled women of her time period, and she was very fascinating and interesting person.
But in her role as first lady, one of the things that is interesting was she is an example of both the pros and the cons of what some people refer to as dinner party diplomacy. She would invite people when her husband was, before he became president, when he was in the Senate, when he was, you know, fulfilling other roles, she would invite folks into their home very strategically. So she would invite members of Congress, she would invite particular newspaper editors.
(6:34) She would strategically – she would have these very strategic dinner parties and receptions where she built a lot of political capital for herself and also for her husband. And so what happened with Louisa is that in 1824, when her husband was running for president, there was no official winner of the election, nobody earned the majority, the necessary majority of the Electoral College votes, and so the decision about who became president went to the House of Representatives and many of the people who were voting were people who had been socially connected to Louisa Adams and her husband.
And she was eventually accused of being part of what they called a corrupt bargain to give John Quincy Adams the presidency in 1824, so she helped him to win the presidency, to earn the White House. But right after that, when people started questioning why somebody who hadn't won a majority of either the popular or the Electoral College was the president, she started to get a lot of backlash for her role in that and ended up – she used all of her political clout to get him in the office and had none to do anything afterwards. And so she basically had a very quiet, very reclusive first ladyship after having been a very open, buoyant social person in her pre-first lady days.
(8:00) So, it's kind of an interesting reflection of the double-edged sword of the social aspects of dinner party diplomacy and the ways that women were getting involved in politics.
Teri Finneman: I love that. I love exploring these little-known stories about first ladies. I want to move next to discussing the role of first ladies as public social advocates. How did Martha Washington begin this?
Tammy Vigil: Well, Martha Washington was an interesting character because she was really basically the financial stability of the Washington couple. Her finances allowed for George to be able to do the things that he did.
And so what she did, though, was she wanted to also be active and so, after the war, she used a lot of her fiscal and also her popularity, you know her popular resources, to help war widows, to help orphans, and to help veterans of the Revolutionary War because there really weren't the kinds of social services necessary to help them.
(9:01) And so she saw a need and started advocating for assistive programs, but also started funding them herself. And so she really started by being extremely active and set a tone for other first ladies to be able to be free to talk about the issues that they were concerned about. Although, more recently, the first lady has been able to do that more effectively, but it really set a precedent for the first ladies to be these sort of combined figures of compassion and social advocates together, wrapping those two ideas into one.
Teri Finneman: So, which first ladies' social platforms do you think had the biggest impact?
Tammy Vigil: That's a tricky question because you have positive and you have negative impact. You can make the argument that, for example, Rosalynn Carter's efforts at mental health have been – were extremely impactful. It was really hard for her to push that agenda at the time that she did, but she didn't back down from it. And so it started a conversation that we're still having today, and it opened up avenues for exploration of the idea of mental health that people weren't open to in the [19]70s as much.
But you can still see how we struggle with it, but we can have those conversations about mental health because of a lot of the work that Carter did as first lady and then afterward. You can also make the argument that Clinton and her efforts at healthcare reform, particularly giving more access to healthcare to children, was super impactful and so in positive ways you can see a lot of that, that kind of influence, but then you also have the sort of potential negative impact because I've seen a lot of really convincing arguments about Reagan and the “Just Say No” campaign arguing that it had such a devastating impact on the discussion of the use of recreational drugs.
(10:48) The idea that “just say no, just say no” oversimplified the idea and made it difficult to talk about both the mental health behind drug use and also the healthcare behind drug use and the rationale behind. And so it really stifled a lot of the pragmatic approaches to drug use that might have helped advocate for a better understanding and a much more impactful or more effective, I guess, way of managing recreational drug use.
And so you can kind of make the argument that social platforms, these women can have positive and negative impacts with what they've done. And I think Reagan was definitely an example of a big negative impact, but you've got those great ones like Carter and Clinton with positive impact.
Teri Finneman (11:33): So, continuing on this discussion of negative impact, there are plenty of presidents that are known for their scandals: Nixon and Watergate, Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, Andrew Johnson and his impeachment. What are some of the biggest first lady scandals and what impact did that have on the presidency?
Tammy Vigil: Well, it's kind of interesting because we tend to, of course, be a little bit more focused on the more recent stuff because that's what we remember and that's the impact that we feel the biggest, or that we think is huge. So a lot of folks will talk about Melania Trump as being a highly controversial, scandal-ridden first lady with things like her, you know, the jacket that she wore to visit on her trip to visit the children who'd been separated from their families at the border or the, you know, her lack of understanding in terms of when she went to the G7 summit in Milan and wore a jacket that was $57,000 itself and it was more than, you know, most people, most U.S. citizens were making at the time.
(12:32) And so we tend to have a primacy for … the ones that are more contemporary, as I should say, but really I would say that probably the most seriously scandal-ridden first lady was Mary Todd Lincoln. Mary Todd Lincoln was accused of misappropriating funds, of selling influence, of extortion. She had some serious, serious complaints lodged against her. Most of them were financially oriented because she tended to spend a lot of money and tended to need a lot of money.
But one of the things that I think is really fascinating is that in most cases, the scandals that first ladies end up having don't tend to have as strong of an impact on their husbands as perhaps the husbands’ scandals have on their spouse, their wives sometimes. (13:20) For example, with Mary Todd Lincoln, you know, Abraham Lincoln still managed to get reelected. He was doing many other things, and he actually gained a whole lot of sympathy from the public for having to deal with, who was referred to as Mad Mary Todd at the time. And so it actually kind of – and so, it actually kind of gained him, like I said, it gained him some sympathy as opposed to necessarily harming the perceptions of him. You could see kind of the same thing happened with the Clintons. Hillary Clinton was often accused of many different kinds of scandalous things during her time as first lady on the Whitewater scandal. They had the Whitewater scandal, you know, where people were even saying things like, “Oh, she was having people murdered,” and stuff like that. It was pretty outrageous, a lot of the claims.
(14:07) But, you know, there were a lot of scandals that came around there, around that particular issue, and yet Bill Clinton didn't really seem to take it on the chin very much for her scandals. He did for his own, but even at that, even his, you know, the Monica Lewinsky scandal didn't really harm him as much as people might have expected that it would. So, the first ladies tend to harm themselves when they're in scandal more than necessarily their husbands. In addition, like even with Melania Trump, though folks argue about her scandal-ridden, this scandal-ridden nature of a lot of her first lady actions, she didn't do anything, at least that we've seen so far, she didn't do anything that was illegal.
She didn't do anything that really kind of harmed the presidency, and her husband's scandals kind of still overrode anything that she ever did So it was sort of, you know, she didn't have a negative, necessarily negative impact on him. (15:02) So, I'm kind of hard pressed to find a first lady that really hurt her husband's presidency through any of the scandals that she was either accused of or actually engaged in.
Teri Finneman: We’re in another presidential election year in 2024. How have first ladies impacted the campaign trail?
Tammy Vigil: I think it's been an interesting year so far, and we have two first ladies, or a former first lady and a first lady involved. And so, with Jill Biden, I think Jill Biden has been exactly what people have expected her to be. She's been a surrogate on the campaign trail, she hasn't been as active as I would have expected by now, but I think she's probably going to save up a lot of her activity until closer to the general election. I would expect to see things ramping up for her in somewhere around May, June, July, and then really being very active in the fall.
(15:57) The bigger, I think, thing that we've seen is the impact of the – what people have referred to as the missing Melania, right? We often have issues with when we think first ladies should be doing something, or spouses generally of candidates, should be doing something and they aren't, they get a lot of attention for not being present. And some might even argue they get more attention for not being present than they do when they are present, and we certainly see that with Melania Trump right now, with the death of her mother and, you know, the illness that led up to her death.
You know, she's been off the campaign trail, out of the public eye. She wasn't even part of the family Christmas celebrations that, with the public, the publicity around those, and that has gained more attention than really most other aspects of any activity that she's gotten involved in. But she – Melania has been really quiet and I think that's raised a lot of questions.
So, it’s been a slightly negative impact on her husband. But Jill Biden has been mostly positive in terms of her surrogacy, but there have been some stories that have popped up with her that have been a little bit questionable in terms of the asset versus liability question. (17:08) Because, especially, like recently, we saw a story about how she had to escort her husband off the stage or how she had to remind him about what his favorite food was and things like that. And so in some instances, her engagement has actually become grounds for concern or questions about the fitness of her husband for office.
They haven't been huge concerns or huge questions, but they are things that have popped up. So, even though she's being helpful in some ways, it's also being slightly harmful.
Teri Finneman: So, this next question goes back to what we were talking about a little bit ago in that some first ladies have tried to mingle their interests with policy change. We talked about Hillary Clinton, for example, trying to work on health care. Do these attempts by first ladies tend to fall more under creating liability issues than helping the presidency? You know, we could also talk about Michelle Obama and her efforts to change school lunches, right, having a policy impact. Are these more of a liability or what do you think?
Tammy Vigil (18:13): Well, I think they do often create distractions from the work of the president because they become conversations about appropriateness of behaviors by the first lady and whether or not she's overstepping her bounds.
We saw some of that with Rosalynn Carter and mental health. You definitely saw it with Clinton. And even Michelle Obama, one of the things that has always surprised me is when my students complain because they're now at the age, they were the ones that were having their school lunches changed, and my students complain about Michelle Obama as sticking her nose where it didn't belong.
And so that's often a conversation that pops up when women start to try to engage, when this first lady starts to really try to engage in policy activities. When they're just doing advocacy, they don't tend to have that same problem. So it does create a distraction. It creates a different conversational thread for, you know the White House to try to address.
(19:10) And also the East Wing as well, the Office of the First Lady needs to address that as well. But the other thing that it does that I think is kind of interesting is it continues to increase our conversations around the role of women and whether or not women, and particularly first ladies, have retained their rights as citizens because oftentimes first ladies are expected to simply go along, get along with their husbands, and when they start to engage in ways that people think are inappropriate, it's not inappropriate for our citizens, it's inappropriate for a first lady.
And I think that distinction in that conversation is an important one and so while it does create a distraction from other governmental work, it also opens up conversation about what should and shouldn't be expected from women when they have access to power in different kinds of ways.
Teri Finneman (19:58): Every now and then you'll see rankings of the presidents, which I sometimes question the accuracy of, but you briefly discuss evaluating first ladies at the end of your chapter. There hasn't been a first lady ranking in quite a while now. How do you think first ladies should be evaluated?
Tammy Vigil: Well, yeah, that's a great question because, you know, we want to rank everybody, and we want to compare everyone. It always seems to be a drive that we have, and so when we – what we have historically done is we talk about first ladies, we try to compare and contrast them as though they are all exactly equals or as though there is some kind of set standard for the position that we can use to evaluate them.
And those things don't exist. What the first ladies do is they serve in a capacity that is unclear, that is, you know, that is only based on the expectations created by their predecessors and by society at large. And so, it's really hard to actually effectively compare them without looking at them individually.
(21:00) So if I were to say how should we evaluate them, I would say start at the individual level: think about who they are, what they bring to the table to begin with, and thinking about the socio-historic context that they're serving it because you have different kinds of constraints that are placed on them.
And different first ladies come with different experiences that either help or maybe hinder their effectiveness in terms of getting their message out and in terms of understanding what the role should be or how they should best enact it. And so it's really, I think, a challenge to be able to really just say that these are the set standards and here's the best first lady ever.
Because if you try to say best to worst, you then have to really clearly define what that means, and I don't know that that's really possible. So, when I think about evaluating first ladies, I tend to say do it individually and then create points of comparison that are actually clear and fair.
(21:57) And I think we try to do that most of the time as scholars, but there's often the sort of push to rank order or push to overlook certain kinds of elements of a first ladyship, and so, they're all idiosyncratic and it's hard to really make them out to be the same. So, I think that's a challenge to be able to do that. The best we've been able to do so far, in terms of polling and rankings, has been the favorability poll, which is basically how much you like them. And I think that's a challenge because liking doesn't mean necessarily more or less effective, and you have people who are doing different kinds of things or facing different kinds of challenges.
For example, if you compare and contrast, say, Michelle Obama and Melania Trump, or Melania Trump and Jill Biden. If you're trying to compare and contrast the two of them, you've got Jill Biden, who had a lifetime, not lifetime but many decades of experience, as a political spouse before becoming first lady.
(23:07) Melania Trump had zero experience as a political spouse before becoming first lady, so understanding the expectations, understanding the audience, understanding how you're being assessed, and what the expectations of the role are, those two women would come in with very different toolboxes and very different teams around them.
So to compare and contrast them directly without taking that into consideration gives you really a false comparison between them. And that's just an example of two. And that's probably a little bit longer than the “briefly evaluate.”
Teri Finneman: No, that was great. It is a very complicated issue. What do you think are additional avenues or perhaps specific first ladies that still need exploring in relation to first ladies as political assets and liabilities?
Tammy Vigil (23:55): Well, I think some of the stuff I was talking about before, thinking specifically about the context in which the first lady serves I think is incredibly important. The first ladies themselves and their personalities are important as well. I mean, you get somebody like Eleanor Roosevelt, who by all accounts had at one point been pretty shy, and then when she was first lady, you couldn't tell it by the things that she's done. So trying to understand the evolution of the women in the role as well as the role itself.
I think that and how the role impacts the women and how the women impact the role like that back and forth relationship is something that I think we all try to think about but don't always explore as deeply as we can. So I think that's an avenue of exploration, especially in terms of the assets and liabilities component because are they improving or are they not?
The other thing I think is, too, whether or not they're the influence as a political asset for themselves, you know. Are they being an asset or liability? We'd like to think about it in terms of the presidency because the presidency is why they're in that role.
(25:01) But at the same time, a lot of the first ladies outlived the role by a significant amount of time, so their legacy as a first lady then carries over. And so I think thinking about themselves and what they do for their own political legacy is important, too.
Teri Finneman: Why do you think studying first ladies matters?
Tammy Vigil: Well, I think studying first ladies matters for a number of reasons. I mean, it reflects the roles, the evolving roles of women in society, the first ladyship does, and so exploring it is super important from that perspective. It also tells us something about American politics in interesting ways, especially about the people who are not in elected or appointed roles, but are sort of, and I don't want to say political celebrities because the first ladyship is more than that, even though it's been called that.
(25:48) The folks who have influence, how they have influence, looking at first ladies, this is a really great encapsulation of that kind of unstated, unclear position that does exist in multiple places in our system, that it gives us a better understanding of how things like soft power in politics works. But I think it's also important and probably maybe one of the reasons why I think it matters a lot, is that first ladies are a valuable part of the American mythos, and so they're fascinating historical figures, and they deserve attention in their own right. You know, they're often paired, you know, obviously paired with their husbands, and often are discussed in the shadow of their husbands.
But they do things that their husbands can't. They do things the president can't actually do, and they help and they hurt in ways that are important to understand. And so I think understanding who they are, what they've done is important because the influence that they have should be interrogated both to, you know, like try to understand our past, but also to try to inform our future in terms of the first ladyship, in terms of how we think about people, power, gender roles.
(27:01) First ladies encompass a whole lot of different kinds of components to the American society and American politics in ways that really deserve a lot of attention.
Teri Finneman: All right. Well, thanks so much for joining us today.
Tammy Vigil: Thank you for having me.
Teri Finneman: We hope you enjoyed the show. Tune in next time to uncover more untold histories of the nation's first ladies. I'm Teri Finneman, and this is the First Ladies podcast.
Show music credit: "Winning Elevation" by Hot_Dope.