I never really understood the appeal of Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democratic challenger to Mitch McConnell in last year’s Kentucky Senate race. She was supposed to be one of her party’s most promising political talents yet to me she seemed like nothing special.
Until I saw the ads with her grandmothers, that is. I particularly liked the video showing the making of the original Elise and Thelma commercial from her run for Kentucky secretary of state.
Maybe the ads caught me in a sentimental mood when I first watched them last year. My grandmother, the last of my surviving grandparents, had recently died. Grimes is about my age and one of her two grandmothers had passed away following the making of the original spot. For good measure, my grandmother’s surname was Grimes.
Seeing the Kentucky Democrat in unscripted moments with family left a much more positive impression than hearing her robotically recite standard talking points against the Koch brothers or refuse to admit she had voted for Barack Obama. It didn’t make her policy views more palatable but it did humanize her in a way that seeing her on the stump could not.
This all came to mind during the controversy over the Washington Post portraying Ted Cruz’s young children as monkeys being led by an organ grinder, a cartoon that has since been retracted but nevertheless dominated a slow holiday news cycle.
The editorial cartoonist argued that because the children appeared in a Cruz ad making Christmas-themed but ideological arguments, they were fair game even though they are only 5 and 7. Perhaps this cartoonist’s conservative counterpart somewhere would have drawn something similar about Grimes’ grandmas, who were at least adults at the time.
Children should be seen and not heard.
Families are almost uniformly used as “political props” by campaigns. It’s a rare candidate who doesn’t feature relatives in some capacity. When they don’t, you can expect news stories about where the missing spouse or child is on the campaign.
It may be that some people are so ideological that it is that humanization itself they resist when it comes to candidates they dislike. It’s easier to imagine Cruz as an ideological zealot who will, from a liberal perspective, shred the social safety net or snuff out a woman’s right to choose than as a dad reading to children using goofy Christmas character voices.
Some of them may be the same people who compose listicles and memes about how to cope with that annoying family member who dares to have different political views, complete with a list of talking points to persuade them to embrace Obamacare or endorse expanded gun control.
It’s not a tendency limited to liberals, unfortunately. As the country has become more polarized politically, it seems we are all expected to play out part in a simple red versus blue morality tale without complicating personal details. Even our Starbuck’s coffee cups and our religious icons are now weapons in a culture war that knows no end.
Conservatives in particular should understand that the whole point of politics is to carve out a space for the things that really matter in life: faith and family, friends and personal interests. An obsession with government and politics that doesn’t leave room for any of this defeats the purpose.
Political differences are important, of course. Government decides matters of prosperity and scarcity, liberty and security, war and peace, life and death. All of that is why it is so easy to lose sight of the human element.
Fallible human beings are more complex than the editorial cartoon characters we draw, the little monkeys marching to the tune of some politician’s organ.
Not everyone to your left is some kind of America-hating subversive. Not everyone to your right is some bigoted troglodyte.
Maybe there are better ways to spend Christmas dinner than engaged in political warfare.
