They just don't get it: from one prospective first lady to another.

According to the new book titled Dirty Politics (Oxford University Press) by Kathleen Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communications, slandering, smearing, lying, and distortion have been part of campaigns almost from the beginning, but in recent campaigns their effect has been magnified by the way in which they are treated by the post-Watergate news media. Journalists have virtually abandoned their obligation to inform about issues and candidates' stands to concentrate instead on chasing rumors and analyzing polls, as if choosing our leaders were a horse race or an athletic competition instead of the most important of our civic responsibilities.

Jamieson begins her book with the example of the Willie Horton advertisement used in the 1988 Bush campaign and the resultant news stories because it has become a synonym for the dirty politics of her title. Consequently, candidate Bill Clinton's observation following the Republican convention in Houston that Republicans were trying to make Hillary Clinton the Willie Horton of this campaign was a serious charge, one that no one who watched the Republican convention could take lightly. First ladies and the wives of elected presidents have been criticized, even vilified, in the past but this is the first time in my memory that the full force of opposition criticism has been formally, apparently with the approval of the official party leaders, levied against a candidate's wife.

Never mind that there has been a backlash and the heads of the Republican ticket have been waffling and back-pedaling. (The polls have shown that women everywhere resented the tactic as an attack on working women. And in the Washington suburbs a group of stay-at-home mothers retaliated by organizing a Hillary Clinton fan club, evidence that the resentment was not confined to working women alone.) Marilyn Quayle has written that her rather blatant, if indirect, attack was misconstrued. The vice-president is quoted as saying that he is sure that "Hillary is as much help to Bill Clinton as Marilyn has been to me." But ex-candidate Pat Buchanan is sticking to his poisonous guns and so is evangelist Pat Robertson. For good or worse, Hillary Clinton has been made an issue - the Willie Horton issue of 1992.

Does it matter? Yes, if a recent Time magazine cover story [September 14] is right. According to poll results, the public perception and approval of the candidate's wife can make the difference in the crucial few percentage points needed to win in a tight race. This, then, becomes a tricky proposition because the perception has to be formed by what the public comes to know of her. Whereas the coverage of a first lady is fairly consistent, the coverage of a candidate's wife is very spotty and always has been. Right now, even I, despite being an "inside-the-Beltway" person with some friends rather high in the campaign structure, have only a hazy idea of the substance of Hillary Clinton's speeches and the nature of her campaign activity.

There is no consistent coverage on which I can rely. Attention centers on a candidate's wife and children in a spasmodic way - and usually when things go awry. Admittedly things have changed a great deal since I myself was involved as a wife in a presidential campaign almost twenty-five years ago. The efforts of wife and children then were even more under-reported than now and often were considered so inconsequential that reporting them accurately seemed unimportant.

Now, so many years later, reporting on the wives is still very selective. Would we, for example, know as much as we do about Hillary Clinton if it had not been for the media concentration on the sleazy Gennifer Flowers story or on the unbridled Republican attack? True, there seems to have been a growing interest in wives over the years. In 1972 Eleanor McGovern shared a Time cover with Pat Nixon and later Rosalynn Carter had a Newsweek cover to herself Columnist Richard Cohen has attributed this increase to the reporters' need for celebrity chatter to fill up space.

The history of the Time piece on Hillary Clinton would seem to bear him out. The interview accompanying the cover was to have been done by historian Garry Wills. At almost the last minute Wills objected to the editing of his piece and withdrew it, leaving Time writer Margaret Carlson scurrying to fill the hole. What caused the difficulty over Wills's story? If one can guess on the basis of an earlier Wills story-review in the New York Review of Books (March 5, 1992), it must have taken Hillary too seriously. Carlson is quoted as saying that "there was a great deal of historical first lady stuff in his piece which, while very interesting, wasn't what was needed."

Carlson's own piece is succinct, surface-skimming, lively, and predictable. It sketches a Hillary who has to head back to Little Rock and daughter Chelsea at intervals "to feel grounded," a woman private about the faith she nourishes by carrying favorite Scriptures with her, a woman who tends to the earnest and serious yet has a playful side, but concludes eventually that Hillary is "a strong and determined woman used to dominating whatever situation she is in by force of mind."

The Wills New York Review article did much more. He showed readers a Hillary Clinton who is "one of the most important scholar-activists of the last two decades, a Hillary who has an impressive record of altering life for the better for parents and children in Arkansas." He documents his characterization with excerpts from her writing and speeches through 1988.

These show real development in her thought since the 1974 article "Children under the Law" to which exception was taken in these pages (Commonweal, May 8 and June 19). Not that Hillary has abandoned her theory that children's legal rights should equal their competency and ability to take responsibility but she has adopted a more comprehensive approach to social problems, largely as a result of her study of the treatment of children in many countries in her capacity as co-chair of The Children's Defense Fund - in particular the French approach since it is "a coordinated comprehensive system ... that links day care, early education, and health care." She helped institute neonatal clinics to prepare mothers for parenthood and brought back from Israel a program to help impoverished mothers to teach basic skills (especially speech skills) to their children. As head of the committee to raise educational standards in Arkansas, she rallied community support for changes that helped parents achieve an educational system that no longer limited their children's futures.

Whether we agree with her approach or not we cannot deny that both Arkansas parents and children have reason to be grateful to her and for her.