LESLEY: Can we talk about First Ladies? I’ve covered the White House for so many years, and I have had just nothing but sympathy for these women who take on this strange, unelected role. And they live in terror of making a mistake. And if any of them ever tried to influence policy they got smacked around. If one hair is out of place, my God the world was coming to an end. And now you have Cindy McCain and Michelle Obama as candidates, both running as First Lady candidates. If you were to write a column giving them advice, what would you tell each of them?

GAIL: Oh, they know what they’ve gotten into by now. They don’t need my help. But I did wonder, during the primaries when everyone was getting so bent out of shape about Bill Clinton, this running amok, this must be that his heart surgery made him a new, strange, crazy person. There was just all this kind of speculation about why he was behaving in such an erratic fashion. I think it was just an alpha guy trying to deal with the role of First Lady, which as you said is a horrible role that requires so much self-control and so much humility and stomping on your own personality. It’s a very, very difficult thing to do. And clearly he’s not really a person that’s going to be able to do it all that well.

LESLEY: Both Cindy and Michelle are very strong women. Both have their own successful careers. Both have basically raised their children by themselves, because their husbands have come to Washington and the family didn’t move here, in both cases. So I can imagine both of them being used to running offices, and in Cindy’s case, running a company, that it’s especially difficult and closer to Bill Clinton than, say, Nancy Reagan was.

GAIL: I can’t think of them as Michelle and Cindy. I’m sorry. I saw Mrs. McCain in 2000, and she looked very, very, very unhappy. I mean, not in a sulking way.

Click here to read Nobody, Including Barack Obama Himself, Expected It, with Lesley Stahl and Gail Collins.

LESLEY: Even before South Carolina?

GAIL: Yeah. Sort of – not necessarily scared but just clearly a person who did not feel that this was the place that she wanted to be in the world, but trying very hard to do it. And Michelle Obama is clearly doing an amazing job of just trying to deal with this. But she doesn’t seem to be happy either. And we’ve heard a lot about how she’s told him that she won’t do this again. That this is the one time – if he doesn’t win this time they have to go back and have a saner life. But it’s a very, very difficult job.

LESLEY: Cindy McCain said exactly that last time.

GAIL: It’s true. That does tend to get washed away with the waves of time. But this is a very modern thing. Until Eleanor Roosevelt, there were only one or two First Ladies in all of American history who made an impact, who people could even have recognized or identified. And it’s really only been since Jackie Kennedy that there’s been this idea that the family life of the president is such a central thing. But I still don’t think that there’s … that when it comes down to it, people vote on the basis of a First Lady. I think sometimes they take the things that they like or don’t like about the candidate and kind of push that into or pull that out of, you know, the First Lady candidate. But I just don’t think that it’s going to be a big deal.