A doctor gets the treatment -Globe

[Rose Siding]

It was only a matter of time, but even those of us who have been waiting for Dr. Judith Steinberg to get hauled before the culture cops did not expect the deconstruction of Howard Dean's spouse to come six days before the Iowa caucuses.

The worry of ''political experts'' that the candidate's wife is too ''odd'' to be in the White House now competes with concern that the candidate for the Democratic nomination is too ''angry'' to be president.

Steinberg's eccentricity, according to experts quoted in a front-page report in The New York Times yesterday, turns out to be her preference for seeing her patients in Vermont over watching her husband campaign in Iowa. What would seem to many of us to be a sensible choice for a woman with a medical practice winds up sounding like a potentially fatal political flaw for her man with a nomination to win.
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Steinberg (she uses her maiden name professionally) is in her office, apparently having decided that telling her patients not to get sick until after the primaries was not realistic medical advice. She is skipping Iowa, but how likely is it that the former Vermont governor got where he is without a lot of support from Judith Steinberg, the primary caregiver of their two children? She's plenty interested in her husband's career; she is just a little busy with her own.

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/014/metro/A_doctor_gets_the_treatment%2b.shtml