Democratic Family Values

As we saw in Sunday’s debate, the media is itching to get the candidates to fight each other. I wouldn’t mind seeing more in the way of arguments between them if it was over matters of substance. Artificial controversy as we’re seeing about a comment from Michelle Obama isn’t very helpful.

The Chicago Sun-Times quotes Michelle Obama as talking about family values and saying, “if you can’t run your own house, you can’t run the White House.” They offer a brief analysis that, “She didn’t elaborate, but it could be interpreted as a swipe at the Clintons.” This got picked up everywhere from CNN to the Drudge Report.

The context makes all the difference here, as is clear after the actual transcript of what Obama said was released:

That one of the most important things that we need to know about the next President of the United States is, is he somebody that shares our values? Is he somebody that respects family? Is a good and decent person? So our view was that, if you can’t run your own house, you certainly can’t run the White House. So, so we’ve adjusted our schedules to make sure that our girls are first, so while he’s traveling around, I do day trips. That means I get up in the morning, I get the girls ready, I get them off, I go and do trips, I’m home before bedtime. So the girls know that I was gone somewhere, but they don’t care. They just know that I was at home to tuck them in at night, and it keeps them grounded, and, and children, the children in our country have to know that they come first. And our girls do and that’s why we’re doing this. We’re in this race for not just our children, but all of our children.

Family values were also raised yesterday in a report on the Obama Girl videos:

Obama says his 6-year-old daughter Sasha has noticed news coverage of the video.

“Sasha asked Mommy about it,” Obama said Monday. “She said, ‘Daddy already has a wife’ or something like that.”

Sen. Obama, D-Ill., said he knows the video was meant to be lighthearted, but he wasn’t smiling when asked about it in an interview with The Associated Press.

“I guess it’s too much to ask, but you do wish people would think about what impact their actions have on kids and families,” Obama said.

“This is part of the process of politics that can be difficult, (that) is making sure that your kids and your wife and your family are insulated from both things like this and what I suspect will be at some point some negative campaigning,” Obama said.

2 Comments

  1. 1
    AllenScott says:

    @OxyConservative start here, it has many links moron…LOL http://bit.ly/aaS9Vj "Democratic Family Values"

  2. 2
    Snap says:

    @OxyConservative start here, it has many links moron…LOL http://bit.ly/aaS9Vj "Democratic Family Values"

2 Trackbacks

Leave a comment