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Samantha,
I don't think it's fair to compare Obama allowing his girls to accompany him on the campaign trail to the Ty Co.'s shameless marketing of Sasha and Malia dolls for profit. In American politics, it's standard operating procedure, and the expectation of voters, for political candidates—especially male candidates seeking high office—to show that they are "family-oriented men," i.e., husbands and fathers who love baseball, apple pie, and Chevrolets. For some irrational reason, images of candidates standing with their wives and children grants them legitimacy in the eyes of voters, no matter if they are cheating cads like John Edwards, Bill Clinton, Gary Hart, Eliot Spitzer, David Paterson, or the legions of other skirt-chasing politicians who are too many to name here. Obama may have thrust his daughters in the public eye, as you say, but I don't think he "cashed in" on his daughters' cuteness. He didn't try to promote them in books, market them as dolls, or put their pictures on T-shirts. Granted, his cutie-pie daughters did melt some voters' hearts—how could someone with such typically precocious American children be a closet Muslim terrorist and secret black militant?—and demystified their daddy with the weird name and nontraditional background. Still, no amount of cuteness can get you the White House if you don't have the goods the run the place. Just look at Sarah Palin and her boatload of cute kids. McCain's brood isn't too shabby, either, although the cute factor diminishes after age 10. G.W. Bush's win was an anomaly, and one I'd not like to see repeated.
Obama certainly could not lock his girls in the family's basement until after the campaign. They are a legitimate and important part of his personal bio, much as Chelsea Clinton and the two Bush girls were for their dads. And sometimes, Obama aides have said, he just missed his family and wanted them with him.
The Obamas certainly do not forfeit their right to be outraged by companies exploiting their children's names. Although I argued for limiting the girls' exposure in the media, I don't think that Mom and Dad have crossed good-parenting lines. I just think it opens them up to more people feeling entitled to take liberties with their daughters' privacy. That's why I think they should be careful. I wouldn't be surprised if their displeasure with the Sasha and Malia dolls caused them to pull the girls back a bit.
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This is the word that stood out for me in Obama's list of values yesterday: "hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism." The rest have echoes in traditional and more safe political dialogue. But curiosity has a different sort of resonance. Curiosity is what led his mother on the many of what must have seemed like reckless adventures, that eventually created the motley family he has today. For a post-PC age, curiosity is a much better word than tolerance with its implications of holding your nose. Curiosity always has two shades of meaning—great interest or careful attention to detail on one side and danger on the other. From the red flag of Eve to Curious George, Western culture has often stressed the latter definition. Now Obama reclaims it as a noble character trait, which is how I've always taught it to my kids.
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Why is Barack Obama writing an open letter to his daughters? I guess when you become president, you talk to your kids via Parade magazine. Parts of Obama's letter to Malia and Sasha, 10 and 7, are the usual empty-ish rhetoric ("I want all our children to go to schools worthy of their potential"). In the part that's more real, he charges them with "righting the wrongs that you see and working to give others the chances you've had." Lovely, yes. But also a sentiment he could get across at a family dinner or bedtime. By doing it in public, doesn't he put a huge burden on them, adding to the one they're already shouldering? And isn't he using them, too? This combined with the release of those photos from the girls' first day of school at Sidwell Friends makes me wonder.
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Yes, it is embarrassing, but I am going to say it, anyway: How glorious to have a president I can not only stand to see on television, but would have watched over Desperate Housewives, had it come to that. I kept trying to think of the last time such a thing had occurred—is it time yet? the president's going to be on!—but the answer is: never. ("For the first time in my adult life ...") A year from now, Obama will no doubt have to do more than show up and say true things grammatically, absent any mugging or winking. But tonight, he had me at "America doesn't torture.'' And when he declined to place sole blame for deregulation on Republicans. And when he said he was not very interested in having the same old tired left-right tug-of-war. So for as long as this lasts, I'm going with it.
I was a little surprised that he put Eisenhower up there with FDR and Lincoln on his list of presidential greats; Was this post-partisan politesse, or was it Eisenhower's lack of drama he admires? His warning about the military-industrial complex, maybe? Or the taste and vision of his granddaughter?
It also came as news that the first couple's 60 Minutes interviewer, Steve Kroft, was such a T-Rex: "So, you have a new dog and your mother-in-law's moving in?'' (Right, it stinks to be Obama.) But 44 put the kibosh on that and on Kroft's suggestion that Michelle's whole mom-in-chief routine is going to get old in a hurry when she's "knocking around that big house'' on Pennsylvania Avenue. "Here's one thing I know about Michelle,'' the president-elect informed him. "She's serious when she talks about being a mom; that's why our girls are so wonderful.'' It doesn't happen by accident, in other words, or in five-minute snatches of quality time. So we shouldn't judge low-income families by one standard (stay home and read aloud all day; turn off that TV!) and Ivy League graduates by another (you're home with your kids? gosh, sorry to hear that). If parenting is so important, how come Kroft and Traister and maybe most of us at some point act as if no one who could get a decent job would spend their days doing it? Obama seems proud of his wife's accomplishments as a mother, among other things—and why wouldn't he be?
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I am trying to decide why I don't share the distress that Rebecca Traister expresses on Salon in her thought-provoking essay about the "momification" of Michelle Obama. Traister criticizes the press for covering not her departure from her former job at the University of Chicago Hospitals, but her clothes and her kid-piloting and her propensity for domestic-art shortcuts. Traister blames the media for its lack of curiosity about what it's costing Michelle to become "an extension of her husband" and for assuming that she, not he, is the one sheperding her family through their actual move. Michelle Obama, Traister concludes, "will come to stand in more prominently than anyone could have imagined for the shortcomings of feminism."
For a bunch of reasons, this seems more off-base than on-target to me—and also premature. First of all, I don't buy the reflexive blaming of the media. Michelle Obama is putting her own motherhood and sisterhood and wifely virtue front and center. She did that in her speech at the Democratic Convention, she did it during the campaign, and she's doing it now. You can wish she didn't feel like she has to, but she surely knows what she's doing. To wit, Michelle Obama can't risk repeating Hillary Clinton's rocky first lady performance. And so she won't. The media is merely following her lead. To be fair, Traister acknowledges some of this. But she soft pedals Obama's own choices while kicking the press, which is a little convenient.
Also, don't we imagine that the Obamas made their bargain about their roles a while ago? Didn't Michelle Obama effectively stop working at her hospital job long before now? That is a real sacrifice, don't get me wrong, but on the other hand, her husband is president. That is an accomplishment with its own set of rules. It's also one that requires a team effort, and that gives Michelle Obama, as crack defensive end aka first lady, enormous power. A weird and retro form of power, to be sure, but power nonetheless. Before we knock all of that, let's give her a chance to wield it. She is promising to focus on the concerns of working women. Amen and hallelujah: If she does it and gets somewhere, that will be concretely groundbreaking in a way that all this image-obsession never is, and she'll come to represent not the shortcomings of feminism, but its strengths. Maybe Michelle Obama is the woman to channel Eleanor Roosevelt (without the misery of marital infidelity, of course).
And in the meantime, yes, she is the one honcho-ing their physical move, or at least whom to delegate it to. I hope so! Because I want my president-elect working on other pressing matters like our economic crisis. I am glad Traister reminded us that the Obamas used to have a different kind of partnership and that Michelle Obama had to work hard to make her peace with her current role. But hey, when quitting your day job gets you to the White House, how much can the rest of us rue the trade-off?
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I am…
Wondering why it takes a week to count fewer than 350,000 votes in Alaska.
Anticipating D.C. getting its party plans on for our own version of Grant Park on Jan. 20.
Witnessing spontaneous conversations in public places between white people and people of color. (See Chris B. and Chris W.’s hilarious instructions for white people in The Root.)
Reassured by the assembling and assessing of financial experts to FIX IT!
Enjoying the inside-baseball gossip, mentioning, and positioning for the plum assignments.
Picturing Malia and Sasha playing with their puppy in the White House and appreciating hope and change.
Weeping at the Civil Rights images every time I look at them.
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In all the idle chatter I picked up today about which private school the Obama girls might attend (see this New York Times story for the first guesses), one thing was absent: any hint of the gossipy, snarky tone that usually descends on a first family as soon as they step foot in this insular town (especially when discussing something so ripe with humor as progressive private schools jockeying for their attention).
It's not surpising, I suppose, given the general goodwill toward them. But it does make me wonder exactly what political species they will fall into. Messiah implies eventual disappointment. He is more like a benevolent king. He has an almost old-fashioned, regal gift of making the nation's destiny seem in line with his own. Usually, when politicians give us all the credit, we see this as faux humility padding their own ambition. But when Obama repeats, over and over, "this is your victory," or "this victory belongs to you," we believe him.
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