Down with "Family Values"

By Charles Krauthammer

Election time, and the "family values" season is upon us again, kicked off right after football with speeches by that unlikely duo of Bill Clinton and Dan Quayle. Both praised family values and, sportingly, each other -- for praising family values.

"Bill Clinton is right to talk about family values," Quayle told the Commonwealth Club of California, tipping his hat. Clinton's gesture, in his address to the National Baptist Convention, was more oblique, but he firmly agreed with the proposition that politicians should use the bully pulpit to uplift the morals and improve the behavior of the citizenry.

When a liberal Democratic President and a favorite of the Republican right concur, the First Law of Politics kicks in: If everyone agrees on something, it must be wrong (see the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, the nuclear freeze). I am all for values, family and otherwise, but the last people who should be offering us moral guidance are the polticians.

It was obnoxious last year to hear Hillary Clinton preaching that Americans lack meaning in their lives. It is equally obnoxious this year to hear Dan Quayle saying in almost identical language that "with all this wealth...the average American felt that their ((sic)) life, their future and their family was somehow empty."

To hear politicians of any stripe talk about the state of our souls is enough to make one cringe. First of all, who are they? What moral qualifications do they bring to the work of the spirit? Upon hearing he had been named Prime Minister, Disraeli exclaimed, "I have climbed to the top of the greasy pole!" -- perhaps the most apt description ever of the politician's vocation. Climbing greasy poles is dirty business. It requires a willingness to step on other pole huggers and a certain insouciance about the various moral stains thus acquired. It is hardly a school for spirituality.

& And politicians are as suspect regarding family as they are regarding values. The blatant public manipulation of one's own family -- displaying spouse and kids in gauzy campaign commercials, on convention stages, in tearful speeches -- is by now a common practice among politicians. An even more common practice is the neglect of one's family. Ambitious politicians almost by definition find more fulfillment in coffee klatches and subcommittee meetings than at Little League and the PTA. Quayle's quite valid critique of Murphy Brown and single parenthood is especially poignant coming from a man who spent so much time away from home during his two House terms that his wife confessed she often felt like a "single parent."

But the problem with moral lectures by politicians is not just the clang effect. Once politicians cross the threshold and begin to preach, it becomes natural for the flock to demand of the preachers an accounting of their private lives, if only to see how the pulpit pounders live up to their own proclaimed standards. And that in turn legitimates our current obsession with what is euphemistically called character but is really a prurient interest in the private lives -- actually, the private vices -- of our leaders. Campaigns turn into spectacles of dueling peccadilloes and mutual muckraking. The end result of this orgy of accusation and intimate revelation is a debased political discourse and a disgusted public.

No use blaming this on adversarial media or a general distrust of governmnet. With their preening about fmaily values and spiritual emptiness, the politicians have brought this on themselves.

Does that mean we should have no more family-value speeches? Yes. Cut out the preaching about how individuals are to reform themselves, and tell us instead how government is to be reformed. Gvoernment has profound effect on the American family, from a tax code that penalizes marriage to a welfare system that subsidizes illegitimacy. Enough about family values; let's hear about family policy.

Bill Clinton showed courage in telling his audience that illegitimacy "is a disaster. It is wrong... you shouldn't have a baby when you're not married. You just have to stop it." But when he continues with, "I'll try to do my part, but this is not a government deal," he is evading the obvious. A huge part of this is a government deal, and that part is precisely what Presidents are charged with addressing. It is in this transition form family values to famly policy that the politicians stumble. "Now I want to make it clear we shouldn't stigmatize these babies," added Clinton. "We ought to love the babies. We ought to love the parents. We ought to give them the best future we can." Nice sentiments, and obviously sincere. But when government gives "the best future" -- welfare and health care, then training and guaranteed jobs -- to those doing things Clinton calls disastrous and wrong, it is clearly (if unintentionally) encouraging more of the disastrous and the wrong.

Want to change values? Change government, the 800-lb. gorilla whose sheer bulk and reach powerfully influence private conduct. Government, after all, is the business of politicians. Preaching is best left to the clergy. They have the practice and the standing.