Krull: Personal lives give insight into candidates
Just how personal this campaign season has become came home during a conversation with a colleague.
Like me, she has spent a lot of her career covering politics.
We were chatting about Sarah Palin’s then upcoming interview with ABC’s Charles Gibson. I said, off-handedly, that, given Palin’s anti-abortion stance, it would be interesting if Gibson asked if she and her husband had talked about terminating the pregnancy when they found their child was going to have Down syndrome.
My colleague was aghast.
“Oh, that’s so personal. I think there would be a huge backlash and I would be so offended as a woman because it is so personal,” she said.
Perhaps that’s true, but this presidential campaign has focused a lot of attention on intensely personal questions of faith, family, friendship and lost loved ones.
Since the campaign began more than a year and a half ago, we have discussed at length the nature of Barack Obama’s faith – whether he’s a Muslim or just how much of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s mingling of theology and social criticism Obama accepted.
We have heard John McCain detail before the Rev. Rick Warren the shame and pain he felt at cheating on his first wife 30 years ago.
We have listened as members of Joe Biden’s family took us into the hospital room after the death of his first wife and one of his children and described his anguish at what doubtless was the worst moment of his life.
And then there’s Palin, who calls herself a hockey mom and asks us to vote for her because her life and her family are like ours. She’s one of us.
We’ve been told that we can and should focus our attention on one of her children – the son who is going to serve in
The Obama campaign has bought into this. Obama himself has said that children are “off-limits” for discussion.
But are children off-limits?
Most of us would not want to elect, for example, a child abuser to high office.
But what about a parent who neglects his or her children? Does that tell us something about how he or she views responsibility?
If a politician breaks a vow to a spouse, does that tell us something about how he or she views commitment? Does a candidate’s faith tell us how he or she views the world and our place in it?
When they’re drawing lines the media and public shouldn’t cross, politicians say that campaigns should be about issues. They don’t want us to judge them by what they do in their private and often weakest moments.
That is nonsense, particularly when it comes to the presidency. Voters always have wanted to know how presidents will behave at their worst as well as at their best. It isn’t – and never has been – only about where they stand on the “issues.”
If this particular presidential campaign were exclusively about issues, the polls would indicate that Obama would be 15 to 20 points ahead.
Instead, he’s running neck and neck with McCain because many voters have doubts about his personal qualities – whether he is tough, shrewd and committed enough to be president. Voters have similar doubts about Palin. They want to know if she will use public power to settle personal scores – the real reason for the attention paid to the Alaska State Trooper flap – and respect the fact that not all Americans think exactly like her.
The presidency is not just about position papers for most of us. It’s also about trust.
I may like a neighbor and agree with that neighbor on most things, but I’m not going to let my neighbor babysit my children until I know that neighbor cares about children and takes responsibility seriously. That matters more to me than his or her position on tax rates or hot-button issues.
When they step into the voting booth, many – maybe most – Americans will cast their ballots for president for the candidate they think they can trust the most.
A person earns trust by revealing his or her private core.
My colleague is right.
Asking Sarah Palin whether she ever considered having an abortion is intensely personal. So is asking Barack Obama about his relationship with his minister and his faith. The same goes for asking John McCain about the collapse of his first marriage or Joe Biden about his grief at the deaths of family members.
But Palin, Obama, McCain and Biden are asking us something intensely personal, too.
They’re asking us to trust them.
John Krull is director of
