Why Does a President Need a Wife?

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Why Does a President Need a Wife?

For politicians in this country, family is not off limits—not really, at least. How can it be, when every time I go online I see a smiling Michelle Obama asking me to join her in supporting her husband, and Ann Romney is out deploying the first person plural? “Mitt and I have compassion for people that are struggling,” she said this spring.“That’s why we’re running.” Both of them are on Twitter, sidekicks if not running mates, with what must be approved and vetted tones and takes. It feels like voting for a Presidential candidate, in this country, means casting a vote for his marriage.

The reality across the Atlantic is different. In mid-March, Germans elected Joachim Gauck, a former Lutheran pastor who is not married to his partner, to the Presidency (a more symbolic job than Chancellor). Two weeks ago, François Hollande was sworn in as France’s new President. He and his companion, the veteran political journalist Valérie Trierweiler, are the first unmarried couple to reside in the Elysée Palace in its history. (The Times points out that the new Presidents’ domestic situations “raise some concerns about protocol—how to travel together to places like Saudi Arabia, for instance, where unmarried cohabitation is not accepted.”) Trierweiler, whom Hollande calls “the love of my life,” has been married and divorced twice before, and plans to continue her work, if with a tilt away from politics. I fear that, in the United States, Trierweiler would be considered something of a loose woman—or just too complicated—and a man who tried to run for President while with her would face multi-million-dollar attacks for a lack of “family values.”

The French writer Laurent Binet (whose first novel, “HHhH,” James Wood reviewed in The New Yorker) followed the couple during the campaign for a book he is writing (he was inspired to follow the runup to an election by the series “The West Wing”). “In France,” he told me, “we don’t consider it a crime to hide your private life: it’s even the meaning of the word ‘private.’ ”

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