Convention Perspective: Family still mostly off-limits

By Peter Canellos, Boston Globe Washington Bureau Chief

ST. PAUL -- Back in December, when Michelle Obama was campaigning in Iowa, persuading caucus-goers to choose her husband, the Obama campaign had a name for her: The Closer -- as in, the person who comes in at the last minute and seals the deal.

Two months later, after she was roundly criticized for saying she was proud of her country "for the first time in my adult life," the Obama campaign had another name for Michelle: Off-limits.

This week, as various controversies swirled around Sarah Palin, Barack Obama reminded everyone that he had long ago declared that candidates' families should be off-limits for political comment, an apparent reference to his outraged reaction last winter when the Tennessee Republican party put together a video of unflattering photos and comments by Michelle.

Still, Republicans including former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson loudly complained that Palin's family is now under attack, and Palin herself suggested that "the Washington establishment," "the media," and "the other party" were all arrayed against her.

The context for this outrage was the revelation by Palin and her husband that their unmarried 17-year-old daughter Bristol is five months pregnant. The disclosure came after some left-wing bloggers suggested that Sarah Palin's own baby, delivered in April, may really have been Bristol's.

The charges were outrageous but so far below the radar screen of what Palin calls "the media" that it hadn't even reached the supermarket tabloids until the campaign itself issued a statement confirming her daughter's pregnancy.

Nonetheless, one sad reality confronting the Palins, the Obamas, and other political families is that in the age of the Internet, there is no effective filter that can totally block such stories. And yet, within the mainstream media, there is a tradition of keeping the foibles of candidates' families out of the picture, so long as the family members themselves aren't campaigning or being invoked for political purposes.

Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush went to great lengths to keep their daughters out of the spotlight, and except for a flurry of attention when comedians mocked an adolescent Chelsea Clinton, and when Bush's daughters were cited for underaged drinking, the media of all types stayed away.

More recently, former Vermont Governor Howard Dean faced Palin-like scrutiny when he became the Democratic front-runner in presidential polls in early 2004. Dean did, indeed, get hammered by his rivals and faced a gantlet of media revelations, but his family escaped completely.

His wife Judith Steinberg Dean made the decision to stay off the campaign trail, in part to continue her medical practice in private. And when the Deans' teenaged son got in trouble with the law, and Dean had to leave his campaign briefly to cope with it, the story attracted negligible attention.

The same standard that applied to the Deans should reasonably apply to the Palins, as well. But Palin has not drawn the veil over her private life that Dean did, creating what will obviously be an ongoing dilemma for the media and political rivals alike.

She has built her political persona on her status as an average "hockey mom," and references to her extended family occupied more of her acceptance speech than any issue or policy.

She emphasized how her son Track and her nephew Kasey will be serving in Iraq, and how she will be joining legions of military moms in praying for their wellbeing.

She spoke of her son Trig, born with special needs, and made an emotional promise to be an advocate for all families whose children have special needs.

She spoke of her kids' disappointment when she fired the governor's cook and her work on the PTAs of their schools.

She even mentioned her sister Heather, who is opening a service station with her husband, as an example of small-town business initiative.

But she left unclear whether she believes that Heather, who did a round of media interviews after the speech, would be "off limits" if she, say, committed a politically unpalatable gaffe or ran afoul of the law.

It's a reasonable question. But if nothing else, Palin should have known that the surest way to preserve her sister's privacy would have been to resist the temptation to use her and her husband's entrepreneurship to make a political point.