Obama's class
James Forsyth 9:32pm
I don’t want Barack Obama to be president but we should note quite how classy his comment on this whole Bristol Palin business was yesterday:
"I have said before and I will repeat again: People's families are off limits," Obama said. "And people's children are especially off-limits. This shouldn't be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Gov. Palin's performance as a governor or her potential performance as a vice president. So I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories. You know my mother had me when she was 18 and how a family deals with issues and teenage children, that shouldn’t be a topic of our politics."
Now, you can dismiss the first few lines of the statement as political boiler plate if you like—a candidate is hardly likely to publicly encourage the press to make an issue of his opponent’s children—but the last line is what makes the statement exceptional. For Obama to bring up that his own mother had him as a teenager was above and beyond the call of duty.
Electoral politics is a contact sport and it is historically inaccurate to claim that there was some golden age where ‘just the ‘issues’ were debated and in a civil manner. But this campaign has seen some real low-lights. Most notably, the attempt to paint Obama as a closet Islamist and the claim that Sarah Palin’s fifth child is actually her daughter’s. (I am still shocked by how some people who I have always thought of as essentially well-intentioned were prepared to spread the Palin rumour and are unrepentant now that it has turned out to be false).
Both these conspiracy theories say more about the people who spread them than the candidates involved. But my worry is just how quickly and with how little proof these stories moved into the mainstream. In the world of the web there is a temptation to say that everything is fit to print but there must be some standards and the idea that every scurrilous rumour doing the rounds is worth reporting or commenting on is unworthy of us whether we are journalists or bloggers.
Augustus
September 2nd, 2008 9:58pm Report this commentI agree with Senator Obama's statement completely. But, in the case of the Palin fifth child rumour, whereas it is scurrilous to spread the rumour in the first place, and to comment on it in a demeaning and cheap manner, once such a rumour is out, and before it has been debunked, to comment on it only by conjecture as to how it would effect the ticket is only natural.
Incidently, it was the rumour itself, I believe, which led to the pregnancy announcement, which led to the Obama comment to back off. Therefore a bonus for Obama after all.
Craig Strachan
September 2nd, 2008 10:03pm Report this commentYes, contrast Obama's class on this with Palin's lack of it (to say the very least)in repeatedly laughing on air as a cancer survivor was described as "cancer" and "bitch" by a shockjock.
Joe Camel
September 2nd, 2008 10:58pm Report this commentYes, “my mother had me when she was 18”: not only bringing up the fact itself, but also expressing the fact in the most direct, Anglo-Saxon way possible. In those eight words Obama showed he is a man of character.
I thought at first that he was being smart too, making it absolutely clear that the “Trig is really her grandchild” fabrication was not official Democratic Party agitprop authorized at the highest level. Now I’m not so sure that his statement was politically motivated. Perhaps there was no political need for him to distance himself from the fabrication, after all, simply because so few people –Obama himself, certainly, but not many others, it seems – see it as something to be ashamed of.
TGF UKIP
September 2nd, 2008 11:33pm Report this comment"And people's children are especially off-limits." This is surely not the same Obama then, whose children have been paraded endlessly before TV cameras these past months.
I would have thought cynical hacks like yourself, James, could have spotted hypocrisy a mile off.
Michael Brady
September 3rd, 2008 10:37am Report this commentCraig, are you referring to the heavily edited clip on youtube.
Yup I guess you are, clutching at straws that is.
Verity
September 3rd, 2008 3:55pm Report this commentJames, the way you argued your case is spot on.
I do, though, think you should be very alert to sly, manipulative people like Obama.
Certainly, people's children should be off-limits and that should go without saying.
But you will note that the oily one slyly extended this to "families".
Huh?
Who has the most to gain from such a blanket exclusion zone?
Well, Obama's got a racist harridan hanging round his neck. Apparently, her dissertation for her doctorate at Princeton was so racially incendiary that rhw university has taken the step of sequestering an academic work for the first time in its 250 years history. It will only release it after the election.
(What a uiversity of the international standing of Princeton is doing protecting someone from the consequences of their own writing is another issue entirely ...)
Then we have Joe Biden with a son and a brother under federal indictment.
Obama's sly aggrandisement of the off-limits from children - which is absolutely right - to "families" was not done by mistake. Cui bono?
The McCain people are well aware of all this and I am certain will not be abiding by Obama's personal guidelines.
Hereford
September 3rd, 2008 5:38pm Report this commentDo you really believe that Obama is reflecting his speech internally in his team James?
Making public statements with one voice and taking diametrically opposing action behind the scenes is as old as the throwaway line, "who will rid me of this troublesome priest?"
THX1138
September 3rd, 2008 10:12pm Report this commentVerity-"Certainly, people's children should be off-limits and that should go without saying."
I agree but perhaps someone should tell McCain.
Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because Janet Reno is her father". McCain in 1998.
I believe Chelsea was an anxious 16 old when McCain came out with that gem.
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