Joe, the guy behind the counter at the store in Canterbury Center, has a way of sniffing out the Next Big Story. Maybe this is because Joe reads all the papers first thing every morning. Or maybe it's because as a conservative curmudgeon he is quick to tap into the zeitgeist of the largely conservative, largely curmudgeonly blogosphere, where small stories echo and bounce and expand until they evolve into Big Stories and wind up in the MSM ("mainstream media" in blogspeak).

In any case, Joe is a goldmine of ideas for a columnist, especially one of a liberal bent like me. Which is why when I walked into the store one morning a few months ago, and Joe said I had to see something, I paid attention.

He held up a newspaper photograph of Fred Thompson, the actor-politician-lobbyist who is flirting with the notion of running for president. Thompson had his arm around a sexy blonde dressed in a revealing gown.

"That's his wife," Joe crowed. "She's got to be 30 years younger than him. You think he's going to get the women's vote with a wife who looks like that?"

Now it's a funny thing about Joe and me. We come from opposite ends of the political spectrum. But we often agree about things anyway. And on this one, my gut told me he was right.

I made a snap decision from that one photograph that Fred Thompson was married to a woman half his age, a C-list Hollywood actress with sketchy fashion sense. Such a wife, it seemed to me, put the lie to Fred Thompson's social conservatism. Moreover, such a wife was hardly first lady material - she was way too, well, sexy. As socially evolved as we all wish we were, in our guts we still think of first ladies as the Moms of America. And we really, really don't like to think about our moms having sex.

But by the time I got into my car, I was feeling pretty ashamed of my sniffiness. I mean, I consider myself a feminist, someone who should know better than to judge a woman by her looks. And intellectually I know that it's not right or fair or useful to make judgments about an older man being married to a younger woman, to allow sexist terms like "gold-digger" and "trophy wife" to even enter my head, never mind make it into my column.

But I'm trying to be honest here. We all make these kinds of assumptions when we see older men with young, attractive wives. We automatically conclude that such men, because they are successful and wealthy, treat women like expendable commodities, trading "up" when their first wives gets a little too wrinkly and gray. That the new wives are mercenaries, deploying looks and youth to capture wealth and prestige.

Va-voom

As it turns out, Jeri Kehn Thompson is

40, 24 years her husband's junior, but hardly jailbait. And no, she's not a C-list actress. She had a career before her marriage as a lawyer and media consultant at the Washington firm Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson & Hand. Before that, she worked for the U.S. Senate Republican Conference and the Republican National Committee. And no, she's not a home-wrecker. Fred Thompson was divorced for many years before he even met his second wife.

Still, Joe and I weren't the only ones taking notice of Mrs. Thompson's va-voom photo last spring, and making snap judgments. Debate has raged in blog-land and in other media over the past few months, with the conversation veering from crass locker-room jokes (talk of pole-dancing and "the Thompson twins") to hagiographies comparing Mrs. Thompson to Jackie Kennedy. Last Sunday's New York Times ran a piece on the chatter entitled, "Will Her Face Determine His Fortune?"

The whole thing has got me thinking about what it is about first ladies that gets us so riled up in the first place. It's as if we've decided that the country needs its own Madonna, the mother figure to end all mother figures. A woman who is attractive but not too beautiful, feminine but de-sexualized.

Who is intelligent but not so brainy she's threatening. Who is elegant, graceful, tactful, tasteful, stylish, but not ostentatious. Who knows her way around a seating chart and a dinner menu and a wine list, how to hire a chef and choose a new china pattern, how to find the perfect White House dog but still has the common touch.

A woman who knows when to keep her mouth shut and when to speak. Who chooses her subject matter and causes carefully, apolitically. A woman who offers her husband wise council but isn't interfering, who protects him from distractions but looks the other way when he is indiscreet.

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