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"To reach voters, surrogates, especially wives, have become indispensable members of the presidential candidates' supporting cast... It is their strategic use within the campaign that has made wives a force in contemporary presidential elections, not their independent quantitative effect on the vote. "
Barbara Burrell (2001, 111-2)
"Having your spouse on the campaign trail is the most visible endorsement of your candidacy. It says to audiences, 'My wife or my husband is supportive of what I'm doing. ' We like to know the character of a candidate, and we put his or her family in that particular basket. "
Myra Gutin (Baer 2004)
"Very often in these campaigns, in fact more often than not, the wives are a separate campaign unto themselves because two can cover twice as much ground as one. So very rarely do candidates and their wives campaign together."
Candy Crowley (2007)
It is clear from the presidential primary campaign that 2008 can legitimately be labeled "the year of the spouse as surrogate." The sheer number of candidates on both sides of the aisle and the heavily front-loaded campaign season have made using the wives-and husband-of the candidates a "must." Never before has media attention been so heavily focused on the spouses. In fact, they have often been an equal, or in some cases, bigger story than the candidates themselves. The same pattern will characterize the spouses of the vice presidential candidates. The bottom line is that use of presidential and vice presidential spouses has become an integral part of presidential campaigns. In this article, we detail how the Bush and Kerry camps strategically scheduled spouses in the final days of the campaign-from Labor Day until Election Day. We conclude with some thoughts about what to expect in 2008.
Presidential candidates cannot be everywhere they need-or want-to be at once. Consequently, they have to rely on high profile surrogates to represent them on the campaign trail. Historically, their vice presidential running mates have played that role and/or, in the case of incumbent presidents, their most popular Cabinet members. Over the course of history, however, as women have gained clout at the ballot box, the campaignrelated activities of candidates' wives, primarily wives of winning presidential candidates, have gradually received more attention from scholars...