Presidential candidates’ children and grandchildren are turning up once again. Ted Cruz’s decision to cast his daughters in an attack ad and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “just like your abuela [Spanish for ‘grandmother’]” misfire make people wonder anew: Why do candidates seek advantage by shoving the next generations center stage while insisting that they remain politically off limits?
It is generally a bad idea to mingle parenting and politics. Donald Trump, as usual, exceeds all civilized norms. The 69-year-old Trump told the public that his daughter Ivanka Trump has “the best body” and that if he were not her father he would probably be dating her.
However, for decades, Americans have cringed at candidates and their children, as they did when Jimmy Carter cast his daughter, Amy, as a public school poster child.
Photo: EPA
In 2008 came the awkward tableau of Sarah Palin’s family on the Republican National Convention stage, all dolled up after a Mall of America shopping spree.
This week Cruz gave his daughters, Catherine, 5, and Caroline, 7, bizarre roles in a twisted Christmas ad in which Caroline became possibly the youngest person yet to go after Clinton’s private e-mail account.
The ad prompted political cartoonist Ann Telnaes to sketch a depiction of Cruz as an organ grinder and his girls as monkeys.
The Washington Post then tried to bury the cartoon while Cruz shouted, “They attacked my children” in an e-mail pleading for Americans to defend his daughters’ honor by giving him US$1 million over 24 hours.
Probably the best-known candidate offspring this cycle is Chelsea Clinton, soon to be stumping for her mother, as she did in 2008. Two public sides of Chelsea Clinton, 35, have emerged.
The campaign-ready Chelsea Clinton is an Oxford-educated Clinton Foundation public health expert, urbane and popular with millennial women, who has just written a book encouraging kids ages 10 and up to get out there and change the world.
Chelsea Clinton spent several days leading donors to the Clinton Foundation through hospitals and small businesses in Haiti last summer, so committed to her talking points that when a fire alarm went off in her Port-au-Prince hotel during an interview, she kept right on reciting facts about childhood diarrhea while her staff hustled her toward the exit.
The problematic public Chelsea Clinton lives in a US$10 million Manhattan apartment and appeared on the cover of Elle wearing US$20,000 worth of jewelry as her mother was addressing income inequality. This is socialite Chelsea Clinton, who, while her mom rumbled through Iowa on her “Scooby” bus, snorkeled in Sardinia off Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg’s yacht. Nothing wrong with that, except the Daily Mail was photographing it for all the world, including residents of Des Moines in Iowa, to see.
This might be why Hillary Rodham Clinton spends more time on the trail talking about her granddaughter, Charlotte Clinton Mezvinsky — or more precisely, talking about being her grandmother. Charlotte, the campaign announced, learned to say “grandma” right before the first Democratic debate.
On Monday, after Chelsea Clinton tweeted that Charlotte would become a big sister next year, a campaign “content strategist” posted a list, “seven things Hillary Clinton has in common with your abuela,” aimed at young Latino voters.
Latinos pounced: Inventing #NotMyAbuela, they slammed the list as tone-deaf “Hispandering.”
One woman, Veronica Quezada, tweeted that Clinton is #NotMyAbuela because “she didn’t have to live in poverty with 14 kids and suffer because over half were separated over a border.”
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