For Barack Obama, the serious questioning has already begun. Whatever the issue - the Iraq war, what to do about Iran, how to handle immigration, or how really to be a uniter and not a divider - Obama now needs to offer answers. CNN recently raised an issue that truly could make all the difference in whether he emerges as a candidate for the Presidency in 2008: What does his wife think?
For years, I have been studying and writing about people who are single and their place in contemporary American society. It is obvious that single women are endlessly harangued by hordes of judgmental peers and fretful relatives about when they are going to marry, and what will befall them if they do not. But single men get their share, too. Stay single, they are taunted, and you will forever be slovenly, horny, and irresponsible. (Or, if they are obviously none of those things, well then they are sexy, fastidious, frivolous, and gay.) I am exasperated by these inane stereotypes which portray singlehood as a problem for which marriage is the solution. Sometimes it is marriage that is costly, not just to the people in the marriage, but to society.
Here is what I wrote in my new book about a man who in the late 1990s was facing much the same situation as Barack Obama is today. The excerpt is from pages 157-158 of Singled Out: How Singles are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After.
"As Bill Clinton settled in to his second term as President of the United States, it was not at all clear that the person who would emerge from the other side of the aisle to vie for the Presidency in the year 2000 would be George W. Bush. A far more intriguing prospect for the Republican nomination was General Colin Powell.
As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the first President Bush during the Gulf War of 1991, Powell had achieved national and international prominence and respect. A few years later, he took a step that often signals an intention to run for the highest office in the land: He wrote his autobiography. My American Journey soared to the number one spot on national best-seller lists. As Bob Woodward would note years later, Powell "was poised at the epicenter of American politics, with stratospheric poll ratings, the Republican nomination nearly his for the asking, and the presidency within reach."
Then suddenly, the music stopped. On November 12, 1997, Colin Powell declared definitively that he would not run for President in 2000.
What happened? There is probably never just one accounting for such a momentous decision. There was, however, one piece of the explanation that never was denied, not even by Powell. Alma Powell would not stand for it. Woodward claimed that Mrs. Powell issued her husband an ultimatum: "If you run, I'm gone."
Colin Powell, had he run in 2000, was poised to be the ultimate uniter. He was a Republican embraced by Democrats, and an African-American adored across the lines of color and creed. In a nation never quite at peace with issues of race, the mere presence of an African American atop the Republican ticket could have offered hope for a better and less fractious country. Instead, the 2000 election split the electorate nearly down the middle, and the candidate with the short end of the popular vote took the White House. Four years later, even more Americans were passionate about politics, but as many seemed driven to the polls by scorn for the opposing candidate as by unmitigated devotion to their own.
Alma Powell alone did not change the history of the nation or the world. It is possible, though, that she had some small role in the events that unfolded at the turn of the 21st century.
When I hear scholars and pundits claim that single men lead "warped lives" until they marry and become magically transformed, and when I read that bachelors "eat poorly, carouse too much, drive too fast," and when I am treated to the thousandth rendition of the morality tale of how a young and foolish George W. Bush was saved from a life of alcoholism and recklessness by the firm admonitions of wife Laura, I remember Colin and Alma Powell. I think about what might have been, had it not been for the restraint of a spouse."