Politicians’ children are supposed to be off limits to reporters, per the rules of what we used to call “common decency.” (It was a thing, I’m told.) The agreement holds because it’s a shared standard of upright social practice and interpersonal ethics that helps the world run smoothly. And because everybody’s kids do goofy stuff, no matter how powerful or on-message their parents are.
So anyway, it’s only really when politicians’ children go out of their way to seek the spotlight, engaging hot-button political issues via theatrical protest, that their antics become actual “fair game.” And when they’re not sticking it to the old man a la Patti Davis but carrying on as an outgrowth of their parents’ politics? There may be no fairer game than this.
Such was the case with the coverage of former first daughter Amy Carter, once known for her freckles, treehouse, and ex-convict nanny. In 1986, around the time of what was probably her Thanksgiving break, Carter was arrested with hippie-holdout Abbie Hoffman, whose prominent role in the 1968 Chicago DNC riots helped drag down Democrats’ decorum at the height of the counterculture. They, and 57 less famous anti-establishment causeheads, had sought to block C.I.A. student recruitment in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Her father, Amy told reporters during her arrest, wouldn’t have minded: “He encourages me to speak up for what I believe is right.” She also said undue attention to her family name shouldn’t distract from the causes that she and her crunchy comrades stood for, like Brown University’s divestment from Apartheid-complicit I.B.M.—and that was basically what the New York Times ran with. ”I really don’t like it when there’s a political action involving many students, and there’s a story written about me, and not the action” was the paper’s “quotation of the day” following her Massachusetts arrest.
Although she’s now blessed with the wisdom of no longer being 19, safe from the public eye and raising a family in Atlanta, Amy Carter is basically back in the news: In the form of Virginia senator and vice-presidential candidate Tim Kaine’s 24-year-old son Linwood, aka “Woody.” It’s sort of like discovering a new comet, because in the young Kaine, we have evidence that every 30 years, the opposition party’s activist id takes the form of a politician’s young-adult child and gets arrested for sticking it to the Man.
Woody was booked, but not charged, for second-degree rioting in Minneapolis last week. Details from the report of his arrest, first reported Tuesday by the Twin Cities Pioneer Press (and updated throughout the week), reveal he’d joined a five- or six-man black bloc, an anarchist tactic now in regular use by anti-Trump agitators seeking to conceal their identities. A “March 4 Trump” rally at the Capitol building had drawn hundreds in support of the president, and Kaine and crew came wearing black clothes and facemasks to protest. They reportedly threw fireworks inside the state Capitol and decamped to a nearby park, where police pepper-sprayed, “knee struck,” and apprehended Kaine as he attempted to flee. One of the bloc, believed to have been Kaine, threw a smoke bomb in the Capitol rotunda, where Trump rally-goers and the masked anarchists had initially clashed.
According to a statement from Senator Kaine, whose own activist youth was probably more prayerful but also ideologically out there, “We love that our three children have their own views and concerns about current political issues. They fully understand the responsibility to express those concerns peacefully.”
Plus, an opposition party simply can’t please everyone, “all over the map,” as Senator Kaine said to THE WEEKLY STANDARD a few weeks ago in an entirely different context—particularly not its radical and aesthetically, if not actually, anarchistic fringes. For the Kaines now, as with the Carters then, talking to the whole range of the party base becomes an all-in family affair. Tacit approval, in the absence of public approbation, of a child’s activism takes the place of an endorsement of the party’s more demanding elements.
Amy Carter likewise spoke out against the powers that were in ways her father couldn’t, however closely he may have shared her disapproval of the C.I.A. and desire to crack down on South Africa for its segregationist regime. And now, just like the opposition party whose unfocused angst it acts out, today’s anti-Trump activist bloc is less sure in its aims than its precursors were. But let’s not be too hard on today’s antifa youths: The late-80’s leftist had been honing his, or her, grievances for years by the time Amy Carter and Abbie Hoffman occupied a campus building at the University of Massachusetts (and then a Northampton jail cell). This time around, if the past is any indicator, Woody et al. will have quite a few more years to settle on a fighting cause or two.
