Exhibitionist parenting

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Time for Oratorical Contraception
By FRANK BRUNI
Published: July 2, 2011

ELECTIONS routinely start with candidates’ pledging more debates than they’ll ever really consent to, committing to a positivity that sours faster than unrefrigerated milk and promising to listen as much as they talk, a congenital impossibility.

For the 2012 presidential race, I’d like them to make a different vow — and actually keep it.

How about everyone’s agreeing to shut up about their kids?

In its infancy (pardon the term), this campaign season has already become excessively showy with exhibitionist parenting. Just last week President Obama asserted that Congressional Republicans, playing brinkmanship with the deadline for raising the debt ceiling, should emulate his daughters, Malia, 12, and Sasha, 10. The girls regularly finish their school assignments a day in advance — or so their proud finger-wagging papa crowed. We await an Andrew Breitbart investigation into the claim.

The president’s boast came hard on the heels of the first lady’s southern Africa tour, from which seemingly every picture and television clip had the girls on splashy display. With the cameras rolling, they even read aloud from “The Cat in the Hat,” a little Dr. Seuss for the savanna.

It was adorable, yes, and inspiring, sure, but also confusing, like their subsequent deployment as metaphors in the protracted budget showdown. Are the girls off limits, as the Obamas have repeatedly (and commendably) insisted? Or are they in play when the stakes are high, victory is uncertain, the president’s frosty image could use some warming up and there’s easy, convenient political theater to be had? That’s one of the problems with converting progeny into props. It has a facile, cheap tinge.

At least the president shows more restraint than many of his Republican challengers, who used the opening minutes of their presidential debate a few weeks ago to engage in a kind of reproductive arms race, each of them one-upping the other on the fecundity front.

Rick Santorum mentioned his seven children. Michele Bachmann followed up by plugging her five children and her 23 foster kids, making the latter sound like permanent charges rather than the temporary lodgers they were. Mitt Romney ticked off five sons, five daughters-in-law and, lest he let Bachmann lap him, 16 grandchildren.

Then Ron Paul outpaced them all. Instead of giving a count of his own kids (five), he tallied roughly 4,000 lives that he, as a physician, had helped usher into the world. Go, babies, go.

Jon Huntsman wasn’t on hand, but a week later he answered his rivals’ verbal ploys with a visual one. He and his wife rounded up six of their seven children for an endless trek across a verdant lawn to the podium set up for his presidential announcement. As the Huntsmans marched in a photogenic phalanx, each step was like a mantra: family man, family man, family man.

Of course a big part of what all of these Republican candidates are doing is trying to appeal to anti-abortion voters. But they and other politicians, including both the Democratic and Republican members of Congress who brought up their offspring during last week’s fiscal wrangling, are also sending the message that they can be trusted to whittle down the debt, shore up the country and otherwise safeguard the future precisely because they have a direct biological stake in it. If they breed, they lead, or so their self-promotion holds.

That’s ludicrous. Progeny aren’t proof of caring and farsightedness, qualities manifest in politicians who never procreated — George Washington, for example. This Founding Father fathered none. He nonetheless proved eminently capable of the long view.

How many children someone has says nothing about how well he or she will govern, and the tableaux of family bliss that candidates choreograph regularly prove to be fictions. During the 2008 presidential election, which was unprecedentedly awash in little kids, John and Elizabeth Edwards made the most extravagant show of a tightly knit brood, transplanting their two youngest, Emma Claire, then 9, and Jack, 7, from the classroom to the campaign bus, a rolling romper room. Need I even finish this paragraph?

Because so many politicians make such a studied pose out of their parenthood, it’s fair to point out that jumping into the fray of a national campaign and hauling the clan into an unforgiving spotlight don’t necessarily do children any favors, especially if they’re young. For all that candidates chatter about building a better tomorrow for their kids, they may be building a worse today.

It’s funny how much things change. Not so long ago female candidates had to deflect charges that they’d be distracted by the responsibilities of motherhood, or that they would be shirking them. Now they’re presented as paragons of multitasking: Ms. Bachmann and the Democratic National Committee chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and of course Sarah Palin, who graduated from self-described hockey mom to self-anointed Mama Grizzly. She is mother, hear her roar.

But let’s take a look at her cubs.

Last week she joined the book tour of her daughter Bristol, who previously sold the news of one of her two failed engagements to Levi Johnston to Us magazine; elected “Dancing With the Stars” over, say, a college education; disappeared briefly to have surgery to reshape her jaw (for medical reasons, she contends); and will haul her and Mr. Johnston’s 2-year-old son, Tripp, into a reality television show, sure to be a profoundly formative experience for him.

Tripp’s welfare was no doubt foremost in her mind when she wrote the book, “Not Afraid of Life,” which eviscerates Mr. Johnston and encourages the world — and Tripp — to see him forevermore as a date rapist of sorts who ended her virginity after feeding her so many wine coolers that she blacked out. True or not, that’s going to be an awfully heavy piece of baggage for their son to carry around. And it’s an awfully troubling example of Palin family values.

Having kids isn’t the same as doing right by them, and candidates who seek credit for parenthood are also asking to be judged by the results. That may be the best reason of all to keep them far from the trail.
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