Two for the price of one was how Bill Clinton famously described it in 1992, an offer that was regarded then as dangerously bold but which now seems merely coldly predictive.

It’s part of the bargain of a US presidential election campaign. When Americans pick a president they get not just a leader, but a family soap opera. For four, or sometimes eight, years the relationship at the centre of the White House fascinates Americans.

Sometimes, as with the Clintons, the soap opera can look more like a Grand Guignol than a cosy episode of Coronation Street or EastEnders. Sometimes, as with the Kennedys, the presidential family seems to symbolise the whole nation’s cultural growth and captures the enduring image of national tragedy.

At the heart of the drama is the semi-formal role of what has been called for the past 228 years and 43 presidents, the First Lady of the United States (FLOTUS, in the acronymic brutalism of the Secret Service). The title is found nowhere in the Constitution, but it has become an essential part of the constitutional scenery.

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There’s a tendency to think of the position as the last bastion of prefeminist Neanderthal chauvinism, the symbolic linchpin of the traditional nuclear family. The First Lady, a wife, and often mother, stays at home and minds the nation’s maternal and wifely business: arranging the settings and state dinners and hosting Christmas decorating parties, espousing good causes and smiling adoringly as her husband leads the free world.

But Hillary Clinton was not the first First Lady to demand and get a role of her own. The images are enduring: Dolley Madison, scurrying to save the White House’s treasures from the advancing British in 1814; Eleanor Roosevelt, speaking out for civil rights; Nancy Reagan, helping her husband to make decisions after consulting her astrologer.

Laura Bush has been something of a reversion to type: kindly, less pugnacious than her mother-in-law, admired even by her husband’s critics. But she may be the last for a while. With the presidential campaign essentially down to three candidates, Americans have an unusually diverse field of spouses. There is a successful professional, African-American woman with two young daughters; a second-wife socialite to whom her husband owes his political career; and then there is a First Spouse who is no Lady at all.

Michelle Obama

Barack Obama’s wife cuts a striking figure on the campaign trail as well as in the boardroom. Almost 6ft, Michelle has that slightly stooped manner of tall women, an impediment that seems born of trying hard not to overshadow, literally and metaphorically, the men around her.

Born Michelle LaVaughan Robinson, the daughter of a firepump operator who lived in a one-bedroom Chicago apartment, she graduated from a couple of Ivy League universities and looked set for a successful career as a corporate lawyer. But like the man she married in 1992, she eschewed the chance to make a fortune on Wall Street or in Chicago and worked instead in the public sector. When her husband embarked on a political career she took a job on the board of the University of Chicago.

Though a powerful advocate for her husband on the campaign trail, she rarely fails to remind people that it is she, as a professional, a wife and a mother of two young daughters, Malia and Natasha, who has made the bigger sacrifices so he can run for office. “It’s hard,” Michelle once told an interviewer, “and that’s why Barack is such a grateful man.”

Barack himself observed wryly in his book, The Audacity of Hope, that as his absences on the campaign trail multiplied while he was running for Senate, Michelle grew increasingly frustrated. “My failure to clean up the kitchen seemed less endearing.”

It’s not clear what kind of role Michelle would seek as First Lady. Campaign advisers say that she would seek to use the White House as an opportunity to promote racial integration.

The interesting and largely unanswered question about Michelle is whether she views race in the same way as her husband. He has built a successful presidential campaign so far as the first black candidate able to transcend the traditional racial divides in US culture and politics. The black historian Shelby Steele has noted that Obama has avoided the traditional black politician’s embrace of the victim status of African-Americans. But it is not always clear that Mrs Obama feels the same way. If she does enter the White House, she will certainly have to do a little better at disguising what can seem at times like a disdain for the political process. “Barack is one of the smartest people you will ever encounter who will deign to enter this messy thing called politics,” she told a suitably grateful audience in Iowa last month.

Michelle Obama, 44
Occupation: Former Vice-President for Community and External Affairs, University of Chicago Hospitals (resigned in 2007 to focus on campaign)
How they met: Michelle was a lawyer at a Chicago law firm assigned to advise Barack. After a month of asking her out, she agreed to dinner and the cinema
Education: Graduated cum laude from Princeton University; Harvard law degree
Will she bake cookies? Only under duress
Rating:

Cindy McCain

John McCain gave his victory speech on Super Tuesday this week in the state he represents as a senator, Arizona. But as the man who now looks almost certain to be the Republican nominee for the presidency was savouring his moment, he indirectly acknowledged a debt of gratitude. “I was over 40 before I could claim a home town,” he said. “I cannot express how fortunate I feel to have found a home in this beautiful state.”

It was Cindy Hensley who brought McCain to Arizona and whom, thanks to her connections in the state’s Republican Party, opened the door to a political career for him.

McCain was a 42-year-old unhappily married man when he was introduced to Cindy, 25, at a reception in Hawaii in 1979. A few years after his imprisonment in Vietnam, he was serving as a liaison officer for the US Navy. He and his first wife quickly divorced and he moved to Phoenix, Cindy’s home town. She was from a wealthy family – her father’s company became one of the biggest distributors of Anheuser-Busch beer in the state. His political connections were instrumental in getting McCain selected as a candidate for Congress in 1982 and later as senator.

Today, at 52, with four children, she looks the most traditional of potential First Ladies. A former cheerleader, blonde hair perfectly bleached, she has been by her husband’s side through his 25-year ride up the escalator of American politics. But she has also used her own wealth and the senator’s clout to advance a number of philanthropic causes. She now chairs the company her father founded and 15 years ago established the American Voluntary Medical Team, which provides medical support to disaster-struck areas. She has taken an active role in the charity – often traveling to places where the team operates. On one occasion, visiting Mother Teresa’s Sisters of the Poor in Bangladesh, she was so moved by the plight of a child in their care that she and her husband decided to adopt her on the spot.

Bridget, as they called her, now 16, was the target of ugly smears during McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign, when his opponents, supporting George W. Bush, spread rumours that she was his illegitimate daughter by a black prostitute. Mrs McCain speaks occasionally about her own medical history, another subject of attacks during that campaign. After repeated serious bouts of back pain in her thirties, Cindy became addicted for a while to painkillers.

Then in 2004, at the age of just 49, she suffered a stroke, but is back to full health now. If she becomes First Lady she has said she would expect to use the office to campaign for other charitable causes.

Cindy McCain, 53
Occupation: Chair, Hensley & Company (one of the largest distibuters of Anheuser-Busch beer in the US)
How they met: In 1980, 42-year-old John met 25-year-old Cindy at a cocktail party in Hawaii
Education: Undergraduate and masters degree in education from the University of Southern California
Will she bake cookies? She already does
RATING:

Bill Clinton

The man who offered the famous bargain back in 1992 has spent most of the past year trying to sell it again.

It’s fair to say that Bill is unlikely to pursue anything like the traditional First Spouse’s role in the White House. Not for him the gentler side of political life. His performance on the campaign trail for his wife has indicated that he would be right at the heart of political decision-making.

There was a time, a few months ago, when the prospect of First Laddie Bill was seen as an unalloyed advantage for Mrs Clinton, especially among Democratic voters. After eight years of President Bush, voters tend to look back on the Clinton years of peace and prosperity with something approaching nostalgia.

But his remarkably high profile and aggressive role in the campaign in the past month has terrified not only his familiar political enemies but many of his friends.

Greg Craig, a well-connected Washington lawyer, who worked in the Clinton White House for Mr Clinton and defended him during the Monica Lewinsky impeachment hearings in congress, is supporting Barack Obama in this election.

As Bill was stomping the country last month, angrily attacking Mr Obama’s record and generally throwing the Democratic furniture around, Mr Craig mused politely: “If Hillary’s campaign can’t control Bill, how could Hillary’s White House?”

It’s a reasonable concern. Until the past month the main questions about Bill at a loose end in the White House were fodder mainly for the late-night comedians who wondered what he might get up to with the procession of impressionable young interns and assistants who might seek his counsel. Now the fear is that he seems to really believe in the idea of a co-presidency.

Clinton campaign advisers are eager to dismiss the idea. They point out that the former President has in fact already got a head start on some of the philanthropic activities a First Spouse is expected to champion.

His Clinton Foundation has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for global health care and poverty alleviation and climate-change initiatives. He has shown, through his surprising but effective partnership with the first President George Bush, that he can work in nonpartisan ways for good causes.

Don’t bet on him being truly side-lined. In fact it’s hard to imagine how, short of banishing him from the West Wing, President Hillary Clinton could possibly prevent the First Spouse from having an outsize role. Perhaps if she’s really smart she’ll devise some plan to keep him harmlessly occupied – perhaps such as giving him the impossible task of reforming the nation’s healthcare system. That should keep him out of trouble.

Bill Clinton, 61
Occupation: Speaker and philanthropist
How they met: In the Yale Law School library, Hillary went up to him and said: ‘If you’re going to keep looking at me and I’m going to keep looking back, we might as well be introduced. I’m Hillary Rodham’
Education: Graduate of Georgetown University. A Rhodes scholar, and graduate from Yale Law School
Will he bake cookies? Only under supervision
RATING:

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