The victims of a presidential husband's power are considerably more sympathetic than those merely greedy for power. When President Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke in office and was seriously incapacitated, Edith Wilson stonewalled press and public about his condition and became the acting president. Hillary as first lady was pilloried for her health care scheme, but surmounted the ruins when she ran for the U.S. Senate. Whether she will be haunted for that failure next year is not yet clear.
Mrs. Fred Thompson, whose husband hasn't even declared his candidacy, is taunted unfairly as a trophy wife because she's a looker, she's smart and she's a smart dresser. Mrs. Mitt Romney, a Mormon like her husband, enjoys the distinction that, among the top-tier Republican candidates, she's the only one who's the only wife her husband ever had. No one knows what a first man might be like; we'll avert our eyes for now and not go there.
Jackie Kennedy affected demure feminine ways, and achieved for Jack Kennedy in his death what he never could in life. In his book "Camelot and the Cultural Revolution," James Pierson credits her for designing JFK's perfect funeral. She was beside herself when the assassin was discovered to be not the expected right-wing fanatic, but a one-time defector to the Soviet Union and a proselytizer for Fidel Castro. She bemoaned the fact that her husband "didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It had to be some silly communist."
But a state funeral modeled on that of Abraham Lincoln created the Kennedy legend as a martyr for civil rights and liberal idealism. She contributed much to the idea that modern liberalism is based not on reason, evidence or intellect, but on the spurious claim to superior virtue. Like ancient Camelot, the Kennedy Camelot was only a pretty myth.