Weekly Reader: The Strange Dr. Steinberg

“She's leading a normal, modern, middle-class-professional life. She has been married forever. She has two children. She likes camping and bike riding and picnics. She volunteers. She has work she loves, as a community physician--not, you'll note, as a cold-hearted status-obsessed selfish careerist user, as professional women are always accused of being.”

So begins an excellent piece by Katha Pollitt on the catty way that so-called liberal media and its conservative denizens like Diane Sawyer treated Dr. Judith Steinberg, Howard Dean’s wife, who chose to stay in Vermont and tend to her family practice rather than spend the past year and a half campaigning for her husband.

Pollitt wonders why “[n]o one reprimands Laura Bush for abandoning her career as a librarian and spending her life as her husband's den mother. No one asks Hadassah Lieberman or Elizabeth Edwards or Gertie Clark how come they have so much free time on their hands that they can saddle up with their husbands' campaign for months, or why, if they care so much about politics, they aren't running for office themselves.”

OK, Judy Steinberg is not going to be First Lady, but the article is well worth reading.