Melania Trump, Heidi Cruz and sexism on the campaign trail

As dumb and ugly as the current presidential campaign has been for months now, we may finally be scraping the bottom of the well.

Nether Melania Trump nor Heidi Cruz, spouses of the respective GOP frontrunners, is seeking public office. Both women, while pleasant in their public appearances, have made it clear that campaigning is not their chief interest.

No matter: Both women have been made collateral campaign damage. Melania Trump was maligned by a poisonous campaign ad that showed her in a racy photo from her modeling days and questioned her fitness to be the first lady. It was a spiteful and deliberately sexualized tactic aimed at conservative Mormon voters in Utah and Arizona.

Donald Trump answered Wednesday with a Twitter threat to Ted Cruz, threatening to "spill the beans on your wife" in return. What "beans" there are to spill on Heidi Cruz is hard to say, but most adults have beans in their background that they'd rather keep in the can.

If these two remarkably unsavory candidates want to go after one another, fine - from what I can tell, neither Trump nor Cruz seems to possess the capacity for embarrassment or humility.

But dragging their wives into this ugliness is unconscionable. And in this no-holds-barred year of gross campaign vulgarity, women have become targets in a way men rarely experience. Just replay some of Trump's memorable remarks about Fox News personality Megyn Kelly, former GOP opponent Carly Fiorina, or Washington Post editorial board member Karen Attaih.

There's nothing new about trying to bully women into submission or insult their menfolk with idiot talk about appearance and sex. This glorious liberation from "political correctness" that so many people currently celebrate sometimes adds up to a license for smirking frat-house crudity where girls and women are concerned.

One reader who dislikes my political views recently expressed his disagreement by writing to my husband about what an unattractive, un-hot wife he chose. It was a novel approach: They usually write to me directly.

Women at all levels of public life put up with this rubbish as a matter of course, since complaining about it makes you (oh, the horror) a harpy, a shrew. The best advice, we tell one another, is to just shake it off and move on.

Yep, sticks and stones and so on. As I said, it's nothing new: Perhaps the most brainlessly vicious presidential campaign in American history (so far, at least) is generally regarded to have been nearly 200 years ago.

During a hot contest between Federalist John Quincy Adams and Democrat Andrew Jackson, Jackson's wife became a consistent campaign theme.

RACHEL DONELSON JACKSON (1767-1828). Miniature by Louise C. Strobel. She was the first presidential candidate's wife to be smeared by ugly campaign tactics, but not the last. -

Due to errors in Rachel Jackson's divorce from her first husband, her second marriage was technically bigamous. The Federalists had a merry old time, demonizing the staid Mrs. Jackson - who by then was in her late 50s - as an "adultress" who was prone to "open and notorious lewdness."

Biographers have said Mrs. Jackson was mortified and depressed by the insults. In fact, she died of a heart attack shortly after her husband's election. Jackson - no jewel of propriety himself - never forgave her attackers.

Two centuries later, our culture has evolved, but not as much as one might think. Women are still - paradoxically - demonized simultaneously for insufficient hotness and for any indication that they might have or have had sex.

Melania Trump and Heidi Cruz, from what I have read, are capable women who seem to have interests beyond their husbands' political aims. They're not running for public office.

It's naive to suppose that innocent bystanders shouldn't expect to get campaign mud slopped on their shoes from time to time. American campaign politics have historically been messy, personal, and mean.

But purposely targeting non-combatants ought to be off-limits. And reserving a special insults for women makes me question a person's good sense, unless he's running to be President of the Republic of Dudes.

Yes, women shake this kind of thing off every day, and they get on with their lives. They understand that the insults speak volumes about the people who make them.

It's a disgrace, though, that they have to.

Twitter @jfloyddmn