Spare Us the Family Album

By Charles Krauthammer

One more picture, one more tribute, one more podium kiss, one more word by a politician about family, and I'm defecting. Probably to Russia, where until Gorbachev came along and ruined everything (with glasnost and Raisa), the leader reigned in splendid, family-free isolation. We didn't even know that Yuri Andropov had a wife until he was dead.

In American politics, shows of familial affection have always cloyed, but things are out of hand. You can hardly see the candidate through the thicket of loving kin. Mr. and Mrs. Dukakis danced and smooched and hugged so effectively in public that George Bush, faced with an ominous family gap, counterattacked. First, with typical maladroitness, he patted his wife's fanny in a Dan Rather interview. Then at the convention, Bush's handlers improved his style by putting his procreative powers (five children, ten grandchildren) on display. Now, it seems, George and Barbara are constantly seen holding hands.

Family show, family rhetoric. In their acceptance speeches, Dukakis invoked family seven times; Bush, six; Quayle, eleven; Bentsen, a mere five. Every issue has become a family issue. Dukakis promises the "kind of America that provides American workers and their families" -- would single workers not have merited? -- "with at least 60 days' notice when a factory or a plant shuts down" and "jobs -- and I mean good jobs, jobs you can raise a family on." Bush averred that in business he learned that jobs "meant creating opportunity, which meant happy families." The unit of measure, and manipulation, in politics is no longer the citizen. It is the family.

Why is this family time? Pick your theory. Baby boomers are just now having families, and pollsters shape the candidates to fit the demographics. Or, in times of peace, political talk, like everything else, returns to domesticity, and there is nothing as domestic as family.

I prefer the more cynical explanation: demand for "family values" rises as the family, in reality, declines. With divorce routine, when 60% of America's children will live with a single parent before age 18, with inner-city families entirely shattered, our politicians are called upon to provide symbolic denial of facts they cannot change.

What's wrong with playing the game and showing a bit of family to a hungry public? First, the hypocrisy. "Marilyn and our children, Tucker, Benjamin and Corinne, are my strength, my pride, my joy, my love. They are and always will be my total life," confided Dan Quayle to 50 million TV viewers in his convention speech. This from a man who was on the road so much during his two terms in the House that his wife said she often felt like a "single parent."

Of all the people who should be talking about their devotion to family, politicians are probably the last. To enter the presidential arena is to invite 15,000 journalists into your bed and bath. It does terrible things to families. Anyone who chooses public life, particularly at the presidential level, declares to the world that he places ambition above family.

The real irony, however, is that there is nothing wrong with that. An ability to transcend family is exactly what you want in a President. You want someone who cares more about what's happening in Kuwait than about what's happening in his kid's kindergarten. You don't want a President who during an NSC briefing glances at his watch and thinks about the burning pot roast. You want someone whose family is grown up and gone, or who never had one. You want someone whose "total life," whose family, is his job.

Even monogamy is highly overrated in a President. If Eisenhower (perhaps) or Franklin Roosevelt (for sure) needed the company of a mistress or John Kennedy a procession of bimbettes to help him relax, the better to carry on his stewardship of the country, I'm not sure that the country ought to complain. A + wife certainly has the right to, but the electorate is paying for a chief executive, not a spouse.

There is something even more pernicious about family time in American politics, however, than mere hypocrisy and illogic. The obsession with the politician and his family is antidemocratic. It promotes the idea of dynastic politics. Bush arranged for his son to cast the vote that officially gave him the Republican nomination. Ted Kennedy was introduced by his nephew. And Jesse Jackson, who always operates on a grander scale, arranged to have himself introduced by all five of his children. Jesse Jackson Jr. is a member of the Democratic National Committee. That is no worse than Maureen Reagan being co- chair of the Republican National Committee. And neither is as offensive to democratic values as the Kennedy family's pocket borough of Massachusetts, where a congressional seat may be thoughtfully lent out until a Kennedy is old enough to claim it. ("When Jack became President," writes Tip O'Neill, "his Senate seat was kept warm by Ben Smith, Jack's old Harvard roommate" until "Teddy turned thirty," the minimum age for a Senator.) Nepotism has become so ingrained in American politics that it is no longer recognized as a vice.

The presidency was the founders' alternative to and improvement on monarchy. But it is the Europeans who have devised the solution to the problem of the encroachment of monarchical norms on democratic values: they kept their monarchs and stripped them of power. That way the wish for some kind of symbolic family is satisfied, while the politicians run the democracy. In the U.S., on the other hand, monarchical and presidential roles have been fused. The result is the absurd institution of the First Family, an ersatz royal family decked out in republican garb and capital letters.

Who needs it? In parliamentary systems, when a party leader faces election, he generally makes known his Cabinet or shadow cabinet. In America the party leader calls his wife and kids and movie-star cousin to join him on the podium and bless the assembled. How much more democratic it would be if a nominee called up to the podium not his grandchildren but, say, his Secretary of State and Attorney General. Leave Dad and Sis and everyone else you call by first name at home. If you must, do like the ballplayers: give Mom a TV wave and get on with the game.