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Video History: The Sad Plight of the Political Wife

Getty/John Moore

On a January 1992 appearance alongside Bill on "60 Minutes," Hillary's death grip on the couch was the one sign of tension as the couple talked Gennifer Flowers. "I'm not sitting here some little woman standing by my man," she said. "I'm sitting here because I love him, and I respect him, and I honor what he's been through and what we've been through together. And if that's not enough for you then heck, don't vote for him." 

Wendy Baldwin Vitter was visibly mortified during this press conference with her husband David Vitter after the D.C. madam scandal in July 2007. Then she took over the mic to announce: "To forgive is not always the easy choice but it was and is the right choice for me."

Larry Craig didn't admit to anything during this 2007 press conference. But his wife Suzanne Craig, standing beside him, looked stoic in a strategic pair of sunglasses.

Silda Wall Spitzer became an icon of humiliated political wives everywhere after this 2008 press conference, in which her thousand-yard stare did little to endorse Spitzer as a human. 

And, of course, there is the sad spectacle that was last week's Weiner press conference, at which Huma spoke up to defend herself and her husband's mayoral ambitions.

But perhaps the strangest press conference of all featured no wife: a solo Mark Sanford in 2009, waxing romantic about his "dear, dear friend from Argentina."