In presidential politics, it’s the economy, stupid. But when it comes to conservative women, it’s The Treatment.

Not the treatment, but The Treatment.

It’d be one thing if our mainstream media merely treated Republican and Democrat presidents differently. But they don’t. In addition, they bring out the long knives for Republican first ladies, too.

Casey DeSantis, the first lady of the Free State of Florida and the wife of Governor Ron DeSantis, got yet another big dose of this Sunday when The Washington Post profiled her under the headline, “Tracing the power of Casey DeSantis.”

It was a vile but entirely predictable hit piece directed at a smart, talented, beautiful, and courageous woman, and it showcased the mainstream media’s hatred of conservative women. “As Ron DeSantis pursues the presidency,” the Post’s subhead reads, “his wife’s role is limitless. Casey, 42, isn’t a typical political spouse. Why does that inspire so much fear? Her rise in TV and insular marriage tell the story.”

So, you see, if Ron DeSantis ever becomes president, the American people will have been forewarned about his ambitious wife, Casey, who the Post’s Ruby Cramer tells us is the second coming of Lady Macbeth.

Notice, too, how they tend to use a woman to do their dirty work. A woman, after all, can’t be accused of misogyny. Can’t be called a male chauvinist pig. Can’t be as easily ignored when she tells us that her subject inspires all that fear. Indeed, it’s somehow permissible when someone named Katie Baker calls Casey DeSantis “the Walmart Melania,” even if some Keith Olbermann-type fed her the line. Even better if it’s two women, as with this Business Insider piece from last year by Lyz Lenz and Kimberly Leonard, which tells us about her carefully crafted image. About how “Casey’s narrative is closely guarded.”

“She knew,” writes the Post’s Cramer, “starting with his early days in politics, when Ron was still a member of Congress, elected at the age of 34, how she wanted to figure in his world. She knew the staff he should hire, former aides said, the invitations he should accept and the invitations he should decline. She knew his walking path at events, the people he’d stand next to on a stage. She knew his schedule, down to every meeting and call and fundraiser and congressional vote, because she asked to be copied on every calendar entry.”

Lady Macbeth indeed. The only thing missing is the Out, damned spot!

If we didn’t know better, we’d swear they were comparing notes. Notice this hatchet job from Politico last month titled “The Casey DeSantis Problem: ‘His Greatest Asset and His Greatest Liability’”:

The more complicated but also more instructive reality is that she is neither the fawning caricature she’s made out to be in conservative and even at times mainstream media nor a Shakespearean villain. She might well be a bit of both, say even some DeSantis proponents, and somewhere in this tension sits the central dynamic of the pending DeSantis campaign. She can ameliorate some of the effects of his idiosyncrasies. She can also accentuate, even exacerbate, his hubris, and his paranoia, and his vaulting ambition — because those are all traits that they share.

If you hadn’t yet noticed, there’s a double standard in the way the MSM treats Democrat first ladies compared to Republican first ladies. As Chad Banghart noted at RealClearPolitics last year: “Jill Biden was untouchable during the 2020 campaign. After all, this was ‘Dr. B, the compassionate and challenging educator,’ according to the Washington Post. The Post celebrated her ‘making history’ — how, exactly, remains unclear to this day.”

Now that he mentions it, we can’t remember anyone in the Leftmedia taking First Lady Herr Doktor Jill Biden to task for butchering the word “bodegas” or for likening Hispanics to so many scrumptious breakfast tacos. Nor do we remember anything but fawning approval for her preference of being called “Doctor Jill Biden,” as if the cereal-box Ed.D. she sports could hold a candle to, say, Bill Bennett’s Ph.D. or, for that matter, Dr. Ben Carson’s M.D.

Nor can we remember anyone questioning Doctor Jill Biden’s motivations for having foisted her clearly cognitively disabled husband on so many millions of low-information Democrat voters — and, by extension, the rest of us.

Jill Biden could’ve kept us from all this. She could’ve spared us from the man-caused disaster named President Joe Biden. But because she’s not married to a Republican, she’s off limits. She’s untouchable.

Not so for Casey DeSantis. Nor Melania Trump. Nor any other woman married to a successful Republican politician.