Michael Bennet’s campaign has finally figured out how to film an appealing political ad: Put his three girls before the camera praising their dad to high heaven.
The girls are cute, precocious and totally natural on air. And they even conclude the spot with Bennet’s familiar theme depicting the senator as a Frank Capra-like reformer shocked by the corrupt and dysfunctional state of the nation’s capital: “Dad’s been in the Senate for one year. He says it’s the biggest mess he’s ever seen. He’s our dad, and he’ll always fight for Colorado.”
We’ve all seen young children used as background props for candidates — remember former Sen. Wayne Allard’s grandkids? — but I can’t recall an entire TV ad being turned over to them in a statewide contest. Exploitative? Some suggest it, but count me out of that finger-wagging chorus. The girls are saying nice things about their dad, for goodness sakes. Nice things they presumably believe, even if they don’t fully comprehend the feel-good (and basically empty) political component. And they’re having a ball along the way.
For raw exploitation of kids for political causes, I’d point to parents who cart their children to emotional protest rallies and have them display incendiary signs whose implications they don’t begin to appreciate and might come to regret someday. Consider a young girl at a 2003 rally in San Francisco who held a sign depicting George W. Bush’s “tombstone,” whose picture you can find on the Internet in compilations of similarly vicious messages. She was used by adults to encourage hatred and perhaps violence.
Now that’s despicable.
Moreover, the fact that Bennet seems to have a pleasant family — and to be a success, so far, at the difficult job of raising kids — speaks well of him. Is he supposed to conceal that asset just because his opponent, Andrew Romanoff, has never been married? If voters want to take family status into account when sizing up candidates, so what? It’s one of the many indicators of experience, culture or character that voters use when deciding what to think of candidates. And every voter develops a somewhat different list.
Most of us aren’t idiots. We know that a fellow who seems to be a good family man may turn out to be a narcissistic monster like John Edwards, a scoundrel like Elliot Spitzer or a hypocritical scamp like Mark Sanford. And in a pinch, we’ll readily vote for someone who doesn’t fit our preferred profile. I wish Congress weren’t so top- heavy with lawyers, for example, but have voted for many a lawyer in my time.
If you’re trying to determine whether a candidate is a decent human being, you could surely do worse than consider what his priorities are outside of politics.
It’s Bennet’s priorities in politics, and his opinions about critics, that increasingly should give Coloradans pause. At a gathering last weekend, for example (you can hear the recording at ), Bennet described Tea Party activists as “people that are, you know, basically trafficking in a kind of nihilistic vision of the United States that says that somehow we don’t have a responsibility to the next generation.”
Yet according to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, most Tea Party supporters say the amount of taxes they paid this year was “fair.” What they obviously fear is a tax burden — and governmental role — akin to those in a European social democracy. Since when does that qualify as nihilism?
And believe it or not, senator, lots of those “nihilists” have sweet-looking daughters, too.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
