Tipper Gore bakes ginger snaps. Laura Bush makes chocolate cowboy cookies. The great cook-out staged in the pages of Family Circle may squeeze a few voters through the icing tube, but it ain't gonna help the world sleep safe at night.
This is American democracy, wife style. All good-hair days and "gosh, I love that man." Wannabe first wives get special pin tucks just below their cheekbones, so they can keep smiling while their man gets tough. Only joshing. But you wonder how they keep them on.
What is this obsession with perfect families? You can't even think about being US president unless you've got the kind that gives good photos sitting round a Christmas tree.
The typical American family matches the White House perfect profile to less than 50 per cent. So if everyone votes, and they won't, they're voting not for reality but for some impossible dream people are finding more difficult to achieve, and are less willing to work at, because it is so apparently inadequate compared with what "should" be. In the real world you might conclude that being a First Lady is definitely bad for you. Your man gets to do all the important stuff, while you get to pretend you're a Mother Teresa with a sex life.
Rehab clinics are named after former American first ladies, books written about their fights with alcohol and drugs. Jackie Kennedy was a shopaholic, who kept buying things to make up for what she didn't get at home. Pat Nixon had to behave like an embalmed mummy to survive.
When Tipper Gore became second lady she made an inventory of everything in her official house. Each little bitty bit from snuffboxes to those cutesy table napkins some old lady in Wichita crocheted for the vice-presidential family.
You know what Tipper did next? She started a collection of Christmas ornaments so every second family in the future could spend their family time together with little baubles dancing all around them. And then she put it on her website. God, she needs to please.
Laura Bush isn't quite so puppyish, but you get the sense watching her and her man they haven't been this close in years. She told a TV interviewer George never really wanted her advice anyway. He did the good ol' boy smile and corrected her straight away. Mind you, his home state of Texas makes it harder to buy a dildo than a gun.
Laura stopped smoking eight years ago so her man's campaign could get ready, and set. She'd been smoking since she was a teenager who crashed a road sign one night and smashed into a schoolfriend's car. The friend died.
Tipper does good mental health work, and she knows it from personal experience. Campaigners say her depression happened after her son was nearly killed in an accident, but maybe it's the strain of always having to be so nice.
And who wants to spend up to seven years being nice? Nothing wrong with nice, nothing wrong with baking either. But is this the perfect role model for wife in the third millennium? Has the US taken people so far, only to drop them back into a set-up where you have to be a Mamie Eisenhower arranging gladioli, not even a pint-sized Eleanor Roosevelt?
Then there was Bill. Gore tries to make hay of that stuff - good boy/bad boy, you know the game. The only former girlfriend Gore's staff trotted out wouldn't tell if they had "made out", to borrow that curious phrase. She said it was between Al, herself and God. And God wasn't telling.
Spinning wild stuff about how Clinton and Gore haven't spoken for months, except when they met at a funeral (which could be telling), Gore's advisers now paint this picture of him as a life-long virgin, Tipper excepted.
Tipper dodges questions about their relationship that she's usually set up herself, then gives one of those smirky little smiles that let the world know he's more than a man, and she's feeling sweet. If she keeps smiling and he gets elected, every unscrupulous White House intern is going to want to find out about old Al for herself.
Gore has the best economy ever, minimal unemployment, low crime rates, a loving wife and he still looks uneasy. On really bad days, he looks like Reagan when Ronnie didn't quite know what to do.
ANYONE starting to miss Hill? Hillary had to put up with rumours she was frigid, or had lesbian tendencies, as if only such a woman wouldn't want to go to bed with Bill. She did the cook-out too, years ago with Barbara Bush, when Clinton's campaign advisers were telling her to add on his name and ditch the feminism and stop letting everyone know she was so darn smart.
But you knew Hill had the sense to buy in the cookies when she needed them.
Hill had a lot of sense - except when it came to Bill. If Gore doesn't win she could be a serious contender for the democratic presidential nomination in 2004.
Hill is a woman who played lady. Fundamentalists used to charge her with being part of a feminist conspiracy to take over the White House. Now, they stay silent. Hill made the wronged wife role so her own that if ever she's seen out in a New York eaterie with a handsome interesting man, even the tabloids may cheer.
Not gonna happen, because Hill is a full-blown politician, and she's getting good at it too. She probably knows that if Bill is allowed to speak up for Gore where it matters, Gore may get the turnaround he needs. If so, she can kiss 2004 goodbye.
By Wednesday the world will know which lifestyle candidate won. Wars will rage, disasters happen, but equal opportunities now mean everyone can dream of a life of good-hair days too.
mruane@irish-times.ie