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John Boehner’s Wife

March 8, 2012 by · Comments Off on John Boehner’s Wife 

John Boehner’s Wife, For someone who fashions herself a Washington outsider, Debbie Boehner sure knows how to stay on message. Mrs. Boehner, wife of the newly elected speaker of the House, the Ohio Republican John A. Boehner, in an interview Tuesday kept hitting on the theme of how she and her husband are “just normal, average people.”

She talked about how she had no plans to move to Washington, worked part-time as a cashier, helped mow the family lawn and ironed Mr. Boehner’s shirts when she was in town — “even though he says he does them all,” she added, laughing.

“I’m just me, I’m just approachable — I’m not going to change,” she said.

Her husband added, “She’s about the most down-to-earth person you’ll ever meet.”

Mrs. Boehner, 62, watched Wednesday from the House gallery, flanked by the couple’s two grown daughters, as her husband assumed his new role. He swept into power on an anti-establishment wave of conservative change, and is working to cast himself as an outside-the-Beltway crusader even though he has served in Congress for two decades.

But it is Mrs. Boehner — sandy-haired, lightly bronzed and plain-spoken — who is truly not a creature of Washington or immersed in politics. She was a limited presence on the campaign trail, has never lived in the District of Columbia — she said she came to town “if there’s a fun event” — and has no plans to become a Washington figure.

“His job is to do this job, and I’m just going to do whatever I can to stay out of the way,” Mrs. Boehner said, wearing a chunky pearl necklace and cream-colored vest in the interview near her husband’s Capitol office. “I just live the life at home that he would be living if he was there.”

Most days, she said, that means “Pilates in the morning, and then I just try to keep up with him.” Mr. Boehner calls every day at 8 a.m. to update her on his schedule, and then they go their own ways, checking in from time to time.

Mrs. Boehner is a real estate agent in suburban Cincinnati — her current listings include a condominium for under $100,000 and a house for more than $3 million. The job requires some of the same skills her husband’s post does — making a sales pitch, reassuring the wary, bringing a deal to a close.

She serves on the board of directors for the Community Foundation of West Chester/Liberty, a philanthropic group, and also works at the Delhi Flower and Garden Center, where she handles the cash register and occasionally does some pruning.

“Everybody was like, ‘What are you doing working here?’ And I go, “Well, I get a good discount,’ ” she said, adding that her daughter Tricia, 30, is getting married in March and that Delhi will be doing the flowers. “I’m working, just like everybody else.”

By the standards of Congress, the Boehners are neither superrich nor just scraping by. Last year, Mr. Boehner listed his minimum net worth at $1.8 million. Mrs. Boehner said she was “not a frivolous person” and described buying a $100 beige dress from Dillard’s to meet Queen Elizabeth II at a state dinner in Washington in 2007.

“I was in a room with people who buy $10,000 gowns, and I can’t do that kind of stuff,” Mrs. Boehner said. “Would I wear it again? Probably not. It worked. It was fine.”

Though she is getting more comfortable in Washington and feels like she is “part of the team,” she said she had “a great support group” of friends and fellow golfers back home.

“That’s probably why I stay there,” she said.

Wives Of Politicians

March 8, 2012 by · Comments Off on Wives Of Politicians 

Wives Of Politicians, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has acknowledged having an extramarital affair with Callista , then a congressional aide and now his third wife, while he was married to his second wife.
Political wives have been at the top of the news this week.

There’s Maria Shriver and her husband’s infidelity; Callista Gingrich, the third wife of presidential candidate Newt Gingrich; and Cheri Daniels, the politically reluctant spouse of Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels who, years ago, divorced her current husband, married another man, then came back.

It’s striking, really, considering it wasn’t so long ago that the private lives of politicians were considered off limits, and even protected by the media.

Not so today. The question is asked every election: What right to privacy does a candidate’s family have – and what’s fair game?

Connie Schultz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, watches as her husband, Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown, gives his victory speech after being elected senator in 2006.

Jamie Rose/Getty Images
Connie Schultz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, watches as her husband, Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown, gives his victory speech after being elected senator in 2006.

‘A Mere Appendage’

“There is no definition of ‘fair game,’ ” says Republican political consultant Mary Matalin. “So whatever you think it is, you can disabuse yourself of any of that notion.”

Matalin has worked with some of the most powerful politicians in the country. She says being the wife of a high-profile candidate – along with the accompanying media exposure and the combing through your past – is just awful.

“It’s unfair, it’s irrational, it’s pain that’s relentless,” she says. “And if you can develop a defense for yourself, you can never develop a defense for your loved ones.”

When a nasty campaign hurts the family’s children, says Matalin, even the most steeled political wife breaks down.

There is no definition of ‘fair game.’ So whatever you think it is, you can disabuse yourself of any of that notion.

– Republican political consultant Mary Matalin

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and for the past seven years, the wife of Ohio politician Sherrod Brown.

“I was not prepared for morphing into a mere appendage of my husband’s campaign,” she says.

Schultz campaigned with her husband when he ran for the Senate in 2006. She says young staffers, or even just bystanders at political events, would tell her to cut her hair, wear other clothes or act differently onstage.

Schultz thinks this is, at least in part, plain old-fashioned sexism. “I wanna buy tickets to that show if anyone thinks they’re going to start lining up husbands and telling them how to behave,” she says.

Schultz believes that it’s up to the individual candidate and spouse to set the boundaries of their privacy, and that they should then defend them vigorously. The voracious appetite for private details, she says, doesn’t do anybody any good.

“Marriages are complicated things,” she adds. “The healthiest of marriages are complicated. And yet we want to make them caricatures.”

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