David Paul Kuhn - Politico
Despite the first black major party candidate for president, the discussion of race during this election has been remarkably muted — but Saturday’s Associated Press-Yahoo study estimating that 2.5 percent of Democratic voters will not support Democrat Barack Obama because of his race may thrust issues of color and identity back into the campaign spotlight.
A look back at the many polls and surveys on race relations conducted during this election cycle shows a more complicated picture in which race appears to have cut into Obama's support with some voters even as it has increased support with others — and he continues to have overwhelming support among black voters.
An ABC News analysis of public polling and racial attitudes in June found that three in 10 whites expressed feelings of prejudice or racial insensitivity and that those who did favored Republican John McCain by a 26-point margin. The same study, though, also found that among the two in 10 whites “at the high end of racial sensitivity,” Obama led by 19 points.
“In our own work we have found that yes, there is a group of whites ill-disposed to a black candidate and ill-disposed to vote for him,” said Gary Langer, who heads the ABC News polling unit. “We also found there is a group of whites well-disposed to a black candidate and more likely to support him. And in the end, we did not see any net effect.”
The AP-Yahoo study came to different conclusions, describing white Democratic racism as having the potential to significantly undermine Obama’s political prospects. Of the one-third of the white Democrats it surveyed who referenced a negative adjective such as “violent” or “boastful” when describing blacks, just 58 percent said that they planned to back Obama.
Excluding Obama’s fleeting downturn after the Republican convention, though, the Gallup poll’s authoritative weekly survey summaries have generally measured the Democrat with the backing of about 34 to 38 percent of white men, about the standard level of support for a Democratic candidate since 1980. Among white women, his support has ranged from being split with McCain to being slightly behind — also fairly normative for a Democratic candidate.
“If Obama’s support among whites is essentially the same as Al Gore’s support among whites, and better than Walter Mondale’s and Michael Dukakis’ success among whites, then it's hard to ascribe his deficit among whites to his race,” Langer said.
For Obama, more public attention on the subject of race may not be a welcome turn of events.
The Democrat has seen his campaign rebound this past week as Wall Street has imploded, with the Gallup tracking poll showing him ahead of McCain 50 to 44 percent — matching the height of his support this year. Up until the convention, polls had consistently shown voters preferring Obama on the question of which candidate would be better suited to improve the economy, and most observers continue to see the economy as favorable turf for the Democrat.
The widely respected annual Pew Religion and Public Life Survey reported in August, for example, that 57 percent of voters believe McCain has “conservative” or “very conservative” values, while 48 percent believe Obama has “liberal” or “very liberal” moral values.
On Pew’s moral or cultural values scale, Obama was not as far to the political left as Bill Clinton, and McCain was not as far to the political right as George W. Bush. But Pew noted that voters remain more socially conservative than liberal, positioning the public's “moral values” nearer to McCain than Obama.
The Obama campaign has generally attempted to avoid cultural debates on wedge issues, including race. In his book “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama notes how the framework of those debates in national elections has long favored Republicans.
A July New York Times/CBS News poll found that despite Obama’s historic campaign, almost six in 10 blacks said race relations were generally bad, while 34 percent of whites said the same.
During the Democratic primaries, Obama’s own call for a conversation on race was delivered in a speech only after the emergence of racially charged remarks from his longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Since the widely applauded remarks, the Democrat’s campaign has been mostly silent on the subject.
One seasoned Democratic strategist noted, on the condition that his name be withheld, that Obama’s campaign may have concluded that discussing race can only further limit his wider public appeal. Throughout the Democratic primaries, the Obama campaign has been keen on the candidate avoiding the label of “the black candidate.”
Although Saturday’s AP-Yahoo study indicates racism remains a substantial factor shaping the outcome of the presidential race, it will likely face scrutiny in the coming days.
The Democrats surveyed were about 10 percentage points less supportive of Obama than is normally found among Democrats in other polls. The poll also did not ask about widely agreed-on non-racial weaknesses for Obama, from his inexperience to the fact that no northern Democrat has been elected president since 1960.
And although the much buzzed-about AP dispatch was almost entirely focused on race, the study itself found that “race is not the biggest factor driving Democrats and independents away from Obama,” reporting that “doubts about his competency loom even larger.”
Measuring how the latent beliefs on culture, race and gender affect voters has challenged pollsters for decades, because many voters are unwilling to frankly express their views on these subjects — and the AP poll will surely be cited by those who see racism as damaging to Obama’s prospects.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
We're Teaching Books That Don't Stack Up
By Nancy Schnog – Washington Post
Sunday, August 24, 2008; B01
Browsing in Barnes & Noble one recent afternoon, I found myself drawn to the "Summer Reading" table, where neatly stacked piles of books by Charles Dickens and John Steinbeck and Zora Neale Hurston sat waiting for the teenagers who were supposed to read them by the first day of school. Gazing at the gleaming covers, I had to wonder how many students were in fact turning the pages with any real desire to get to the next one.
It's the time of year when I'm reminded of my twisted fate as a high-school English teacher. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, more teens and young adults are dropping literary reading than any other age group in America. "The percentage of 17-year olds," it reports, "who read nothing at all for pleasure has doubled" in the past 20 years. I teach juniors and seniors -- yes, 17-year-olds.
If ever there were a teaching conundrum, today's high-school English teachers are smack in the middle of it. It's our job to take digital natives -- teens saturated with images in video games and on YouTube -- and get them to strike up a relationship with pictureless chains of black print and focus on the decidedly internal rewards of classical literature. More and more, this mission feels like blind idealism.
But as school starts up again, it's time to acknowledge that the lure of visual media isn't the only thing pushing our kids away from the page and toward the screen. We've shied away from discussing a most unfortunate culprit in the saga of diminishing teen reading: the high-school English classroom. As much as I hate to admit it, all too often it's English teachers like me -- as able and well-intentioned as we may be -- who close down teen interest in reading.
"Butchering." That's what one of my former students, a young man who loves creative writing but rarely gets to do any at school, called English class. He was referring to the endless picking apart of linguistic details that loses teens in a haze of "So what?" The reading quizzes that turn, say, "Hamlet" into a Q&A on facts, symbols and themes. The thesis-driven essay assignments that require students to write about a novel they can't muster any passion for ("The Scarlet Letter" is high on teens' list of most dreaded). I'll never forget what one parent, bemoaning his daughter's aversion to great books after she took AP English Literature, wrote to me: "What I've seen teachers do is take living, breathing works of art and transform them into dessicated lab specimens fit for dissection."
As someone who teaches in private schools, I find this especially painful to acknowledge. I haven't been constrained in my teaching methods by Standards of Learning or No Child Left Behind testing. But even where teachers are free to design their own "best practices," I've been amazed at the chasm between their sense of purpose in their curricular choices and teens' sense that what they choose for them is irrelevant. Ironically, kids' turn-off to books can originate in teachers' hopes of turning them on.
How do I know? Because kids tell me. Every June, when I asked my students at a previous school to write about a favorite book of the year, they mostly gushed over two: J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." For years, "Catcher" served as a successful icebreaker for my juniors, exciting debate while eliding the gender divide. Whether they admired Holden Caulfield's quirkiness or disparaged him as a jerk, both my male and female students were eager to argue about him.
So imagine my dismay when "Catcher" was demoted to the eighth or ninth grade. Apparently it wasn't sophisticated enough for 11th-graders, its language too facile, the plot insufficiently complex. That many 17-year-olds identify powerfully with Salinger's 17-year-old protagonist was a fact cast by the wayside.
But here's what a former student wrote in an essay about this book that knocked her socks off: "To my twelve-year-old self, the book didn't seem to move anywhere. I didn't understand why Holden couldn't just try a little harder at school. By tenth grade, I had been drunk for the first time. I knew rebellion against my parents, the difficulties of teenage romance, the fakeness of social interaction. As a reader in the eleventh grade, I grew close to Holden; he was a friend who understood me." In adults' determination to create sophisticated teen readers, we sever them from potential fictional soulmates.
It's hard to forget my son's summer-reading assignment the year before he entered ninth grade: Julia Alvarez's "How the García Girls Lost Their Accents." Try as he did, he never got beyond the first of 15 vignettes about four culturally displaced sisters who search for identity through therapists and mental illness, men and sex, drugs and alcohol. I could hardly blame him. We ask 14-year-old boys to read novels about the travails of anguished women and want them to develop a love of reading?
Far too often, teachers' canonical choices split from teenagers' tastes, intellectual needs and maturity levels. "Why do we assume that every 15-year-old who passes through sophomore English is an English major in the making?" asks a teacher friend. "It's simply not the case. And the kids go elsewhere, just as fast as they can -- anywhere but another book."
I watched this play out last year when the junior reading list at my school, consisting mainly of major American authors, was fortified with readings in Shakespeare, Ibsen and the British Romantic poets. When I handed my students two weeks of readings by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge after a month-long study of American transcendentalists, it became clear that they had overdosed on verse packed with nature description and emotional reflection. "When will we read something with a plot?" asked one agitated boy, obviously yearning for afternoon lacrosse to begin.
One of my recent juniors was particularly eloquent on the subject. After having sat in my classroom for a year forcefully projecting his boredom, he started an e-mail dialogue with me over the summer. "The reason for studying fiction escapes me," he wrote. "Why waste time thinking about fabricated situations when there are plenty of real situations that need solutions? Cloning, ozone depletion, and alternate fuels are a few of the countless problems that need to be addressed by the next generation, my generation."
Okay, you may think, this is a kid geared to excel in history and science, not literature. But read his closing words: "Granted fiction has a place in this world, but it is not in the classroom. It is beside the night lamp next to your bed, the car ride to the beach, the soft glow of a fireplace. Fiction is about spending beautiful days indoors because you can't wait to get to the next page. Because I like science fiction, my Shakespeare, my Fitzgerald, my Dickinson are Haldeman, Asimov, Herbert. They dare me to think and question my beliefs."
So there you have it: A smart teen and motivated reader goes to high-school English class and discovers that the classics have nothing to offer him. "The reason I did not participate in class," he admitted, "was that I found the reading a chore."
Parents of high-school students are probably familiar with the product of this classroom: the alienated writer who turns up sulking at the dinner table. When students have to produce an essay on a book they care nothing for, it becomes a nightmare for both the student (think "all-nighter") and the teacher, who'll spend precious weekend hours reading papers devoid of content. The upshot of this empty drill: teens increasingly resistant to great books.
If I were a student today, surfing the gazillions of Web libraries or model-essay banks for insight into an assigned school classic, I'm sure I'd be asking myself, "What on Earth could there be left to say?" Last year, when I thought that I was stepping out of the mainstream by requiring my students to write a review of "Dead Poets Society," I was shocked to find, with just one click, that the 1989 Robin Williams movie had already been analyzed by hundreds of online literary pundits. Asking our students for yet another written commentary has a certain absurd ring to it, no?
The lesson couldn't be clearer. Until we do a better job of introducing contemporary culture into our reading lists, matching books to readers and getting our students to buy in to the whole process, literature teachers will continue to fuel the reading crisis.
I'm not suggesting that every 11th-grade English teacher adopt "Catcher," drop Shakespeare or ride the multicultural bandwagon. But if we really want to recruit teen readers, we're going to have to be strenuous advocates for fresh and innovative reading incentives. If that means an end to business as usual -- abolishing dry-bones literature tests, cutting back on fact-based quizzes, adding works of science fiction or popular nonfiction to the reading list -- so be it. We can continue to alienate teen readers, or we can hear them, acknowledge their tastes, engage directly with their resistance to serious reading and move gradually, with sensitivity to what's age-appropriate, toward the realm of great literature.
So if your kids haven't yet started their summer reading, or are having trouble getting through it, perhaps now you know why. It may be what they've learned at school.
Sunday, August 24, 2008; B01
Browsing in Barnes & Noble one recent afternoon, I found myself drawn to the "Summer Reading" table, where neatly stacked piles of books by Charles Dickens and John Steinbeck and Zora Neale Hurston sat waiting for the teenagers who were supposed to read them by the first day of school. Gazing at the gleaming covers, I had to wonder how many students were in fact turning the pages with any real desire to get to the next one.
It's the time of year when I'm reminded of my twisted fate as a high-school English teacher. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, more teens and young adults are dropping literary reading than any other age group in America. "The percentage of 17-year olds," it reports, "who read nothing at all for pleasure has doubled" in the past 20 years. I teach juniors and seniors -- yes, 17-year-olds.
If ever there were a teaching conundrum, today's high-school English teachers are smack in the middle of it. It's our job to take digital natives -- teens saturated with images in video games and on YouTube -- and get them to strike up a relationship with pictureless chains of black print and focus on the decidedly internal rewards of classical literature. More and more, this mission feels like blind idealism.
But as school starts up again, it's time to acknowledge that the lure of visual media isn't the only thing pushing our kids away from the page and toward the screen. We've shied away from discussing a most unfortunate culprit in the saga of diminishing teen reading: the high-school English classroom. As much as I hate to admit it, all too often it's English teachers like me -- as able and well-intentioned as we may be -- who close down teen interest in reading.
"Butchering." That's what one of my former students, a young man who loves creative writing but rarely gets to do any at school, called English class. He was referring to the endless picking apart of linguistic details that loses teens in a haze of "So what?" The reading quizzes that turn, say, "Hamlet" into a Q&A on facts, symbols and themes. The thesis-driven essay assignments that require students to write about a novel they can't muster any passion for ("The Scarlet Letter" is high on teens' list of most dreaded). I'll never forget what one parent, bemoaning his daughter's aversion to great books after she took AP English Literature, wrote to me: "What I've seen teachers do is take living, breathing works of art and transform them into dessicated lab specimens fit for dissection."
As someone who teaches in private schools, I find this especially painful to acknowledge. I haven't been constrained in my teaching methods by Standards of Learning or No Child Left Behind testing. But even where teachers are free to design their own "best practices," I've been amazed at the chasm between their sense of purpose in their curricular choices and teens' sense that what they choose for them is irrelevant. Ironically, kids' turn-off to books can originate in teachers' hopes of turning them on.
How do I know? Because kids tell me. Every June, when I asked my students at a previous school to write about a favorite book of the year, they mostly gushed over two: J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." For years, "Catcher" served as a successful icebreaker for my juniors, exciting debate while eliding the gender divide. Whether they admired Holden Caulfield's quirkiness or disparaged him as a jerk, both my male and female students were eager to argue about him.
So imagine my dismay when "Catcher" was demoted to the eighth or ninth grade. Apparently it wasn't sophisticated enough for 11th-graders, its language too facile, the plot insufficiently complex. That many 17-year-olds identify powerfully with Salinger's 17-year-old protagonist was a fact cast by the wayside.
But here's what a former student wrote in an essay about this book that knocked her socks off: "To my twelve-year-old self, the book didn't seem to move anywhere. I didn't understand why Holden couldn't just try a little harder at school. By tenth grade, I had been drunk for the first time. I knew rebellion against my parents, the difficulties of teenage romance, the fakeness of social interaction. As a reader in the eleventh grade, I grew close to Holden; he was a friend who understood me." In adults' determination to create sophisticated teen readers, we sever them from potential fictional soulmates.
It's hard to forget my son's summer-reading assignment the year before he entered ninth grade: Julia Alvarez's "How the García Girls Lost Their Accents." Try as he did, he never got beyond the first of 15 vignettes about four culturally displaced sisters who search for identity through therapists and mental illness, men and sex, drugs and alcohol. I could hardly blame him. We ask 14-year-old boys to read novels about the travails of anguished women and want them to develop a love of reading?
Far too often, teachers' canonical choices split from teenagers' tastes, intellectual needs and maturity levels. "Why do we assume that every 15-year-old who passes through sophomore English is an English major in the making?" asks a teacher friend. "It's simply not the case. And the kids go elsewhere, just as fast as they can -- anywhere but another book."
I watched this play out last year when the junior reading list at my school, consisting mainly of major American authors, was fortified with readings in Shakespeare, Ibsen and the British Romantic poets. When I handed my students two weeks of readings by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge after a month-long study of American transcendentalists, it became clear that they had overdosed on verse packed with nature description and emotional reflection. "When will we read something with a plot?" asked one agitated boy, obviously yearning for afternoon lacrosse to begin.
One of my recent juniors was particularly eloquent on the subject. After having sat in my classroom for a year forcefully projecting his boredom, he started an e-mail dialogue with me over the summer. "The reason for studying fiction escapes me," he wrote. "Why waste time thinking about fabricated situations when there are plenty of real situations that need solutions? Cloning, ozone depletion, and alternate fuels are a few of the countless problems that need to be addressed by the next generation, my generation."
Okay, you may think, this is a kid geared to excel in history and science, not literature. But read his closing words: "Granted fiction has a place in this world, but it is not in the classroom. It is beside the night lamp next to your bed, the car ride to the beach, the soft glow of a fireplace. Fiction is about spending beautiful days indoors because you can't wait to get to the next page. Because I like science fiction, my Shakespeare, my Fitzgerald, my Dickinson are Haldeman, Asimov, Herbert. They dare me to think and question my beliefs."
So there you have it: A smart teen and motivated reader goes to high-school English class and discovers that the classics have nothing to offer him. "The reason I did not participate in class," he admitted, "was that I found the reading a chore."
Parents of high-school students are probably familiar with the product of this classroom: the alienated writer who turns up sulking at the dinner table. When students have to produce an essay on a book they care nothing for, it becomes a nightmare for both the student (think "all-nighter") and the teacher, who'll spend precious weekend hours reading papers devoid of content. The upshot of this empty drill: teens increasingly resistant to great books.
If I were a student today, surfing the gazillions of Web libraries or model-essay banks for insight into an assigned school classic, I'm sure I'd be asking myself, "What on Earth could there be left to say?" Last year, when I thought that I was stepping out of the mainstream by requiring my students to write a review of "Dead Poets Society," I was shocked to find, with just one click, that the 1989 Robin Williams movie had already been analyzed by hundreds of online literary pundits. Asking our students for yet another written commentary has a certain absurd ring to it, no?
The lesson couldn't be clearer. Until we do a better job of introducing contemporary culture into our reading lists, matching books to readers and getting our students to buy in to the whole process, literature teachers will continue to fuel the reading crisis.
I'm not suggesting that every 11th-grade English teacher adopt "Catcher," drop Shakespeare or ride the multicultural bandwagon. But if we really want to recruit teen readers, we're going to have to be strenuous advocates for fresh and innovative reading incentives. If that means an end to business as usual -- abolishing dry-bones literature tests, cutting back on fact-based quizzes, adding works of science fiction or popular nonfiction to the reading list -- so be it. We can continue to alienate teen readers, or we can hear them, acknowledge their tastes, engage directly with their resistance to serious reading and move gradually, with sensitivity to what's age-appropriate, toward the realm of great literature.
So if your kids haven't yet started their summer reading, or are having trouble getting through it, perhaps now you know why. It may be what they've learned at school.
Public Display - The Picture-Perfect American Family? It Doesn't Exist.
By Andrew J. Cherlin – Washington Post
Sunday, September 7, 2008; B01
With the debut of the Palins before a nationwide audience, a presidential campaign that was supposed to be about the economy, Iraq or even race has unexpectedly become -- for a little while, at least -- a conversation about family. But even before the surprising news of 17-year-old Bristol Palin's pregnancy, the Obamas, Bidens and McCains had spent an inordinate amount of precious convention time introducing us to their loved ones: videos, scripted shout-outs, smiling tableaus as the confetti came down. Both parties clearly thought that it was crucial for the candidates to show how deeply they value their family lives.
But if the candidates wished to convince viewers that their families were just like ours, they were undone by a 21st-century reality: There is no typical family anymore -- at least not in terms of who lives in the household and how they are related. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin noted as much on Wednesday. While introducing her clan to a cheering crowd of the Republican faithful, the GOP vice presidential nominee said: "From the inside, no family ever seems typical. That's how it is with us."
In fact, the diversity of American households was the unspoken lesson of both conventions, as four strikingly different kinds of families came into view. First, the Obamas. The Democratic nominee's half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, spoke to the Denver crowd, highlighting his biracial family background, dominated by an often single mother and a largely absent father. Obama's wife Michelle also took a powerful turn at the podium, focusing on her husband's biography but also playing up her own high-powered career and modest roots. The Bidens were introduced to a national audience that week as well, a stepfamily formed after the tragic death of the senator's first wife. With the McCains, we see another stepfamily, formed this time after the senator's divorce. Their family also includes Bridget, a daughter adopted from Bangladesh. And the Palins bring to the stage two working parents with five children, including a pregnant teenager and an infant with Down syndrome.
Divorce itself is not new to the presidential politics -- Ronald Reagan and John F. Kerry both campaigned with second wives by their sides -- but never has such an extraordinary range of family histories been center stage.
A half-century ago, when the two-parent, breadwinner-homemaker, first-marriage family was at its peak, all of the candidates would have conformed to the same mold. In the 1950s, iconic TV shows -- the ones that you can still find while channel-surfing -- celebrated the Cleavers and their ilk. Ward went to work and earned enough so that his single paycheck could keep June, Wally and the Beaver happily provided for at home. Sentiment against divorce in public life was so strong that New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller's presidential aspirations were stymied in 1964 because he had recently divorced and remarried.
But the Cleavers are only available in reruns now, and the prominence of the breadwinner-homemaker family rapidly declined in the last third of the 20th century. Married women moved into the workforce, divorce rates rose, and more children were born outside of marriage.
That traditional family unit has been replaced by a wide variety of living arrangements. Today, only 58 percent of children live with two married, biological parents. Many others live with stepparents or with single parents. Even having a pregnant teen in the home is not that unusual: About one out of six 15-year-old girls will give birth before reaching age 20, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
The candidates seemed to realize that none of their families is typical in the old sense. None of them tried to look like the '50s family. Instead, they focused on being "typical" in a different, 21st-century sense: They worked hard to show us how emotionally close they are.
Over the past few decades, the emotional rewards of family life have become more important to Americans, as compared to the rewards of bringing home a paycheck or raising children. In a 2001 national survey conducted by the National Marriage Project, more than 80 percent of women in their 20s agreed with the statement that it's more important "to have a husband who can communicate about his deepest feelings than to have a husband who makes a good living."
Personal satisfaction, the feeling that your family is helping you grow and develop as a person, communication, openness: These are the kinds of criteria people use in evaluating their family lives. Practical concerns still matter, but if that's all that holds your family together these days, people may view it askance. Given the demographic diversity of American families, emotional closeness, not who the Census takers find in your home, has become the new gold standard.
And so all four aspiring first and second families, despite their differences, appealed to the voters in much the same way. Each wanted to show how much support and warmth they provide to one other. What matters here is not whether your current wife is your first or second but whether you draw emotional strength from her. So Obama refers to his wife as "my rock" and McCain says of his wife, Cindy, "she's more my inspiration than I am hers." What matters is not whether your teenage daughter is pregnant but whether you provide loving support to her. So Palin and her husband issued a statement assuring the nation, "As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support." What matters is being a loving, devoted father, even after the tragedy of losing one's spouse. So Biden's son Beau introduced his father to the Democrats in Denver as "my friend, my father, my hero."
This is not to say that the modern family is a free-for-all, choose-your-own-Thanksgiving-guest-list adventure for everyone. Social conservatives, for instance, still hold the family to stricter moral standards. In 1998, sociologist Penny Edgell asked all of the pastors in four upstate New York communities whether they agreed with the statement, "There have been all kinds of families throughout history, and God approves of many different kinds of families." Eighty-eight percent of pastors from the more liberal Protestant denominations agreed; none of the pastors from conservative denominations did. Social conservatives tend to disapprove of divorce except in cases of infidelity or desertion. They teach their children to abstain from sex until after marriage. But the religious right's reaction to the news of Bristol Palin's pregnancy shows they are willing to embrace a family that deviates from their ideals if the parents are willing to support each other and their children through difficult times. As former Baptist preacher, Arkansas governor and GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said last week, "People of faith aren't people of perfection."
What is important today, in other words, is not who you live with -- and how you're legally bound to them -- but rather how you feel about them.
This is a barrier-breaking election in so many ways. But apart from the race and gender hurdles being trampled, the 2008 campaign has also shown that Americans, whether from red or blue states, have embraced a broad definition of what constitutes a family. Some traditionalists may lament the decline of the first-marriage, single-earner households. But diversity, in this case, has clear virtues. Would we really want to go back to an era when a divorce disqualified a person from running for president? Come November, it is unlikely to bother many voters that McCain is on his second marriage or that Michelle Obama had a demanding career or that Palin's daughter is facing what used to be called a shotgun wedding.
Of course, Americans' tolerance for family diversity still has limits; many voters, for instance, find it difficult to accept gay and lesbian unions. In 2004, Mary Cheney, the lesbian daughter of Vice President Cheney, sat in the audience with her partner as her father delivered his acceptance speech at the Republican convention. But the couple did not join the rest of the Cheney family on stage afterward and did not sit with the vice president when President Bush delivered his speech the following evening.
If the trend toward embracing greater diversity continues, however, convention stages a generation from now could easily look quite different from this year's. We could all be watching as a gay or lesbian candidate shouts out to his or her "rock" or "inspiration": a same-sex partner, smiling from the VIP box.
Andrew J. Cherlin is a professor of sociology and public policy at Johns Hopkins University
Sunday, September 7, 2008; B01
With the debut of the Palins before a nationwide audience, a presidential campaign that was supposed to be about the economy, Iraq or even race has unexpectedly become -- for a little while, at least -- a conversation about family. But even before the surprising news of 17-year-old Bristol Palin's pregnancy, the Obamas, Bidens and McCains had spent an inordinate amount of precious convention time introducing us to their loved ones: videos, scripted shout-outs, smiling tableaus as the confetti came down. Both parties clearly thought that it was crucial for the candidates to show how deeply they value their family lives.
But if the candidates wished to convince viewers that their families were just like ours, they were undone by a 21st-century reality: There is no typical family anymore -- at least not in terms of who lives in the household and how they are related. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin noted as much on Wednesday. While introducing her clan to a cheering crowd of the Republican faithful, the GOP vice presidential nominee said: "From the inside, no family ever seems typical. That's how it is with us."
In fact, the diversity of American households was the unspoken lesson of both conventions, as four strikingly different kinds of families came into view. First, the Obamas. The Democratic nominee's half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, spoke to the Denver crowd, highlighting his biracial family background, dominated by an often single mother and a largely absent father. Obama's wife Michelle also took a powerful turn at the podium, focusing on her husband's biography but also playing up her own high-powered career and modest roots. The Bidens were introduced to a national audience that week as well, a stepfamily formed after the tragic death of the senator's first wife. With the McCains, we see another stepfamily, formed this time after the senator's divorce. Their family also includes Bridget, a daughter adopted from Bangladesh. And the Palins bring to the stage two working parents with five children, including a pregnant teenager and an infant with Down syndrome.
Divorce itself is not new to the presidential politics -- Ronald Reagan and John F. Kerry both campaigned with second wives by their sides -- but never has such an extraordinary range of family histories been center stage.
A half-century ago, when the two-parent, breadwinner-homemaker, first-marriage family was at its peak, all of the candidates would have conformed to the same mold. In the 1950s, iconic TV shows -- the ones that you can still find while channel-surfing -- celebrated the Cleavers and their ilk. Ward went to work and earned enough so that his single paycheck could keep June, Wally and the Beaver happily provided for at home. Sentiment against divorce in public life was so strong that New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller's presidential aspirations were stymied in 1964 because he had recently divorced and remarried.
But the Cleavers are only available in reruns now, and the prominence of the breadwinner-homemaker family rapidly declined in the last third of the 20th century. Married women moved into the workforce, divorce rates rose, and more children were born outside of marriage.
That traditional family unit has been replaced by a wide variety of living arrangements. Today, only 58 percent of children live with two married, biological parents. Many others live with stepparents or with single parents. Even having a pregnant teen in the home is not that unusual: About one out of six 15-year-old girls will give birth before reaching age 20, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
The candidates seemed to realize that none of their families is typical in the old sense. None of them tried to look like the '50s family. Instead, they focused on being "typical" in a different, 21st-century sense: They worked hard to show us how emotionally close they are.
Over the past few decades, the emotional rewards of family life have become more important to Americans, as compared to the rewards of bringing home a paycheck or raising children. In a 2001 national survey conducted by the National Marriage Project, more than 80 percent of women in their 20s agreed with the statement that it's more important "to have a husband who can communicate about his deepest feelings than to have a husband who makes a good living."
Personal satisfaction, the feeling that your family is helping you grow and develop as a person, communication, openness: These are the kinds of criteria people use in evaluating their family lives. Practical concerns still matter, but if that's all that holds your family together these days, people may view it askance. Given the demographic diversity of American families, emotional closeness, not who the Census takers find in your home, has become the new gold standard.
And so all four aspiring first and second families, despite their differences, appealed to the voters in much the same way. Each wanted to show how much support and warmth they provide to one other. What matters here is not whether your current wife is your first or second but whether you draw emotional strength from her. So Obama refers to his wife as "my rock" and McCain says of his wife, Cindy, "she's more my inspiration than I am hers." What matters is not whether your teenage daughter is pregnant but whether you provide loving support to her. So Palin and her husband issued a statement assuring the nation, "As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support." What matters is being a loving, devoted father, even after the tragedy of losing one's spouse. So Biden's son Beau introduced his father to the Democrats in Denver as "my friend, my father, my hero."
This is not to say that the modern family is a free-for-all, choose-your-own-Thanksgiving-guest-list adventure for everyone. Social conservatives, for instance, still hold the family to stricter moral standards. In 1998, sociologist Penny Edgell asked all of the pastors in four upstate New York communities whether they agreed with the statement, "There have been all kinds of families throughout history, and God approves of many different kinds of families." Eighty-eight percent of pastors from the more liberal Protestant denominations agreed; none of the pastors from conservative denominations did. Social conservatives tend to disapprove of divorce except in cases of infidelity or desertion. They teach their children to abstain from sex until after marriage. But the religious right's reaction to the news of Bristol Palin's pregnancy shows they are willing to embrace a family that deviates from their ideals if the parents are willing to support each other and their children through difficult times. As former Baptist preacher, Arkansas governor and GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said last week, "People of faith aren't people of perfection."
What is important today, in other words, is not who you live with -- and how you're legally bound to them -- but rather how you feel about them.
This is a barrier-breaking election in so many ways. But apart from the race and gender hurdles being trampled, the 2008 campaign has also shown that Americans, whether from red or blue states, have embraced a broad definition of what constitutes a family. Some traditionalists may lament the decline of the first-marriage, single-earner households. But diversity, in this case, has clear virtues. Would we really want to go back to an era when a divorce disqualified a person from running for president? Come November, it is unlikely to bother many voters that McCain is on his second marriage or that Michelle Obama had a demanding career or that Palin's daughter is facing what used to be called a shotgun wedding.
Of course, Americans' tolerance for family diversity still has limits; many voters, for instance, find it difficult to accept gay and lesbian unions. In 2004, Mary Cheney, the lesbian daughter of Vice President Cheney, sat in the audience with her partner as her father delivered his acceptance speech at the Republican convention. But the couple did not join the rest of the Cheney family on stage afterward and did not sit with the vice president when President Bush delivered his speech the following evening.
If the trend toward embracing greater diversity continues, however, convention stages a generation from now could easily look quite different from this year's. We could all be watching as a gay or lesbian candidate shouts out to his or her "rock" or "inspiration": a same-sex partner, smiling from the VIP box.
Andrew J. Cherlin is a professor of sociology and public policy at Johns Hopkins University
Recommended Books and Movies - Sept 21
Recommended Books
Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State
God, Race and American Politics
Why We Hate Us
The End of Food
Recommended Movies
Religulious – October 3
Changeling – October 31
Quantum of Solace (James Bond) – Nov 14
The Day the Earth Stood Still – Nov 12
Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State
God, Race and American Politics
Why We Hate Us
The End of Food
Recommended Movies
Religulious – October 3
Changeling – October 31
Quantum of Solace (James Bond) – Nov 14
The Day the Earth Stood Still – Nov 12
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