Is this a red flag moment? Barack Obama has used his personal story to promote himself to leader of the free world. This story has seemed inspirational, gutsy, and charming. Well, it might be shameless, too. Or at least getting out of control.
Yesterday, in Parade magazine, the soon-to-be president published a letter he wrote (or someone wrote for him) to his daughters. In the words of one of Newser's commenters: “Gag me with a spoon!”
Now, presidents need to spew all sorts of rote, insincere, maudlin baloney. But to do it in the name of your young children, to make them, as it were, cry on cue, is a bit savage (and to do it in Parade, sheesh).
(AP Image)
We ought to note the exceptionality of this bit of crassness, too.
At least since Jimmy Carter, presidential children have been treated as, at most, inadvertent players. Mild curiosities. There’s even been a certain not-too-photogenic reality to them. It’s been an
unspoken bargain between president and media: the White House won’t use the children as props and foils, and the media won’t pursue them too aggressively. The two minor children in the White House in the last 30 years, Amy Carter and Chelsea Clinton, were kept carefully on the sidelines. George Bush, at a moment in his presidency when he and the Republican Party were most desperate for a little bounce, had the dignity and good taste
not to marry off his daughter in the White House (both the Nixons and the Johnsons were guilty of this grab for attention and good will).
The Obama children are younger and more photogenic than any White House children since the Kennedys. And the next president is obviously availing himself of this positive imagery to tell a story of normalcy (they are certainly milking the grandmother for all she’s
worth in this regard) and youthfulness and family ties. All very uplifting in a downer time.
But he’s not even president yet and already flying near the sun with this stuff.
New York magazine noted the other day (and let me compete with the new president here: this was in an article by my daughter), that the Obamas had officially become part of the celebrity marketplace for the paparazzi—a candid, preferably embarrassing, Obama family shot would top Brangelina.
A vastly cynical exercise, on everybody’s part, has begun.
The thing in Parade magazine is gross. Credibility destroying. These are the words of a man (or the words of someone employed by the man) who will say anything—squeeze anybody for a tear. Claptrap is one thing, but when you personalize it like this—Dear Malia and Sasha—then you’ve got to take responsibility for it.
It’s creepy.
But maybe Malia or Sasha can try to get appointed to the Senate in 40 years or so.
