Eleanor Clift: “People are expected to protect the people they love, which is why spouses aren’t compelled to testify against each other. It’s called spousal privilege. But some politicians operate under a different set of rules–call it ‘Blame the wife’–and as a strategy, it’s on full display in the corruption trial of former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell and his wife, Maureen.”
“A political wife taking the heat for what are ultimately her husband’s transgressions is not a new phenomenon. Richard Nixon famously invoked wife Pat’s modest cloth coat in his Checkers speech in 1952 as dubious evidence that he had not taken improper campaign gifts. Hillary Clinton took the brunt of the blame for her husband’s failure to get health-care reform passed, and she was the primary target in the Whitewater and Travelgate scandals that plagued her husband’s White House.”
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