Are the Presidential Candidates Exploiting Their Children?

With Dick and Lynn Cheney criticizing John Kerry and John Edwards for invoking Mary Cheney’s sexual preference when discussing the issue of gay rights in America, the 2004 Children’s Crusade has taken a nasty turn. For months now, the campaign trail has been overrun by young Kerrys, Bushes, Cheneys, Liebermans, and Clarks. Fresh-faced, alluring, hip, and fluent in the ways of popular culture, these junior campaigners have sought to give their respective, often terminally stiff fathers a coolness transfusion, in a brazen bipartisan appeal to the MTV crowd.

All the campaigns have sought to operate following the rules of engagement Bill and Hillary Clinton imposed on the press to protect Chelsea Clinton, who spent her adolescence in the White House. The Clintons basically demanded that coverage of the First Daughter be a one-way street. They felt free to trot Chelsea out whenever it was politically convenient. On the eve of the 1992 Democratic National Convention when polls showed that the Clintons were perceived by many Americans as an overly-ambitious, childless power-couple, Chelsea appeared in a group hug with the Clintons on the cover of People Magazine. During the 1996 campaign, deflecting attention from Dick Morris’s dalliance with a prostitute, Chelsea appeared at the Democratic National Convention. Most important of all, at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Chelsea literally walked between her two estranged parents on national TV as the family left for a tense Martha’s Vineyard vacation.

Yet, while deploying their daughter effectively when they chose, the Clintons made it very clear that they would not put up with reporters invading their daughter’s privacy. This stance became particularly important, and received widespread public approval, when Saturday Night Live did an insulting comedy sketch about Chelsea as a gawky adolescent, which would have traumatized any teenager. Early in the administration, Hillary Clinton consulted with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who had been forced to raise much younger children in the White House fishbowl, about how to protect Chelsea’s privacy – and equilibrium.

In fairness, it is an impossible task. In an era of celebrity politics, the American people and their journalistic surrogates, take for granted their right to pry. And in the age of the Monumental Presidency, when the president works in the Oval Office, flies on Air Force One, shares quarters with the First Lady, this aggrandizing and capitalizing Midas Touch extends to the First Family as well. Besides, what politician aching for a positive press, can resist the warm, benign, usually non-controversial coverage presidential offspring can secure?

Of course, in the caldron of American presidential politics, there are no truly safe zones. The grand tradition of presidential kids charming reporters and Americans is matched by an equally grand tradition of presidential kids embarrassing their parents. Reporters detailed the harmless antics of the Theodore Roosevelt kids, while spreading the more acerbic asides of Roosevelt’s daughter Alice. During the Truman administration, Margaret Truman did not seem to mind the boost her singing career received from her inherited celebrity, but her father almost burst a blood vessel when a music critic was too harsh in his assessment. Truman had long harbored guilt that, as he told his cousins, "I've made all my family... as much trouble as if I'd robbed the biggest bank in town, pulled a Ponzi, or taken the savings of all the widows and orphans in Missouri.” Harry dashed off a letter to the critic Paul Hume and had a White House servant mail it. The president did not want his wife or his aides restraining him, as they often did. In a harsh precursor to Lynn Cheney’s admonition to John Kerry, the president of the United States called Hume worse than a "guttersnipe" and threatened that, if they ever met, the critic would "need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below." Thirty years later, Patti Davis, Ronald Reagan’s daughter, repeatedly embarrassed her parents by criticizing Reagan’s policies and publicizing her frustration with her affable but distant father and her loving but smothering mother.

“You’ve got to protect Chelsea at all costs….,” advised Jackie Kennedy, who, after her thousand days in the White House, had become the Greta Garbo of American politics. “Keep the press away from her and don’t let anyone use her.” The true scandal – in this and every electoral season – is that the people who most “use” political children are their own parents – and we, the American people, absolutely delight in it.