It's safe to assume that the Michelle Obama who shows up at a downtown Seattle fundraiser for Governor Christine Gregoire on July 17 will bear little resemblance to the Michelle Obama who appears on the cover of the New Yorker for the week of July 21. On that cover, Michelle Obama is portrayed as an Angela Davis type, standing in the Oval Office with a teased-out Afro and camouflage pants, an ammunition belt slung over her shoulder and a clenched fist bumping up against her husband's.

This is satire. But it points, in part, toward the incredible amount of energy that is now being invested in figuring out who the candidates' wives really are. Unlike their husbands, Cindy McCain and Michelle Obama haven't spent most of their lives preparing the kind of bulletproof personal narrative that now seems to be required of everyone involved in a presidential campaign. As a result, there is plenty of room for people to let their imaginations—and fears—about these two powerful women run wild.

Obama, a wealthy, Harvard-trained lawyer, is not some intemperate radical unused to polite company and civil discourse. Yet—in part because there is no precedent for imagining a black first lady, and in part because it's basically impossible to cast her husband as an angry black man—she has become the one who is the repository for fears about black rage infiltrating the White House. She is trying, with her grace and keen fashion sense, to come off as a new Jacqueline Kennedy. But she is being cast—out of bigotry, sexism, and political convenience—as a Manchurian canditrix for the Black Panther Party.

Cindy McCain is in a somewhat better position. Unlike Michelle Obama, whose seeming flawlessness inspires a relentless search for flaws, McCain has the kind of troubled past that Americans love to ignore. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, she became addicted to painkillers to such an extent that she began stealing them from a medical relief organization she was running. Like many a political success story before her, she then admitted her addiction, sought treatment, and turned the whole ordeal into a redemption narrative. Don't expect to see Cindy McCain pushing some sort of "Just Say No" campaign like Nancy Reagan, but also don't expect to see her caricatured on too many mainstream magazine covers as a Valley of the Dolls character.

She's been through an ordeal, after all.

Plus, she's an heiress to a beer-distributing fortune and she's blond and tall—what more could you want in a Republican first spouse in the era of Fox News? The only thing she has going against her is that, like Michelle Obama, she represents a type for which there is no recent precedent as first lady: McCain is much younger and more financially successful than her husband.

Which means, no matter which of them ends up in the White House, there will be much to caricature—and much to call progress.

eli@thestranger.com