Dubya’s Disorderly Daughters

I guess if Bush is going to use his daughters in his relection campaign, we could comment on how shallow and arrogant they are; like father, like daughters? ---BBB

Sunday Herald - 04 July 2004
Dubya's Disorderly Daughters

The US presidential election in November may well be decided by what voters think of the character of each candidate … and their family. That fact may not help George W Bush at the polls, reckons Lawrence Donegan in California

IN 1998, when Governor George W Bush of Texas was weighing up whether to run for the White House he received a memo from long-time aide Doug Weed that addressed one of his biggest concerns about his ambition to become President: the impact it might have on his teenage twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara. Despite Bush's fears, Weed enthused that it would be a "great adventure", adding they could "come out of the campaign with poise and knowledge of life beyond their years".

Fun-loving Jenna and Barbara Bush's time as First Daughters has indeed been a great adventure, though perhaps not in the way Weed had envisaged.

The miscreant presidential offspring is a long and dishonourable tradition in American politics stretching all the way back to Alice Roosevelt, daughter of Teddy, a self-confessed "wild child" of whom her father once said: "I can either run the country or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both."

Teddy Roosevelt's paternal dilemma is echoed in today's White House. The result has been unflattering headlines, such "Jenna and Tonic" (on the occasion of Jenna's first under-age drinking citation), and late night chatshow jokes, like Jay Leno's re-christening the president's rowdier daughter Jenna "Anheuser" Bush (a reference to Anheuser-Busch, brewers of famous US beers including Budweiser) in the aftermath of her second under-age drinking escapade.

Recently there has been a marked increase in the press coverage of the First Daughters. Last month Jenna and Barbara Bush graduated from university - Jenna from the University of Texas, where she had been studying English literature; and Barbara from Yale, her father's alma mater, where she earned a degree in humanities. The occasion was marked by a family dinner at the Moonshine restaurant in downtown Austin, Texas, and a spate of newspaper stories about the girls' future plans.

As usual, not all of the attention was welcome. Yet, even as sections of the press were told to back off, the Bush family was privately helping with two flattering magazine profiles of the twins - in People magazine and in Time - which pronounced them "hot". Soon there will be a photo-spread in Vogue and a profile in Vanity Fair, two of the most sought-after magazine slots for any marketing campaign intent on making an impression with the American public.

This kind of double standard is hardly new. Politicians, particularly so-called "family values" politicians like George W Bush, have always sought to exploit their families for political ends. With an election on the horizon, the presence of two "hot" young daughters by the President's side is unlikely to harm his image - at least not with the male, sports bar-frequenting constituency.

First Lady Laura Bush has even suggested that Barbara and Jenna might be persuaded to speak publicly in support of their father, in stark contrast to the 2000 election, when the twins were conspicuously absent from the campaign trail. Mainly because they couldn't stand his politics, according to one oft-repeated rumour. (A New York gossip column claimed last year that when Barbara was asked if she was a Republican voter she "rolled her eyes and made a funny face, saying, ?'I wouldn't really label myself that'." Jenna had reportedly had her own political disagreements with dad, most notably on his support for the death penalty.)

It is a truism to say that the 2004 US presidential election will be close. The result could turn on a tiny number of voters in a single state, or on a miniscule change in the voters' perceptions of George W Bush and John Kerry. In a tight race, the family lives of the candidates matter, and nowhere is this more appreciated than on the outer fringes of Republican Party circles.

It is here, among the zealous right-wing weblogs and gossip-peddling websites, that John Kerry's wife, Theresa Heinz, recently became the target of countless smears and slurs about the state of her marriage and her financial affairs - an unedifying campaign that led to her partial withdrawal from the political front line and the unprecedented publication of her tax returns.

Next in line for vilification were Alexandra and Vanessa, Kerry's two daughters by his first marriage. As well as being engaged in their father's political career, the Kerrys have their own high-flying jobs - Vanessa as a trainee doctor, Alexandra as a film-maker and actress - and blameless personal lives. However, it didn't take long before these innocuous biographies were distilled into political poison.

In the case of Vanessa, her offence was to appear in ads for her father and to be outspoken on a number of political issues - as if a 27-year-old woman had no right to be interested in politics. Alexandra Kerry's treatment has been even more outrageous. Her crime was choosing to work in the "liberal" Hollywood film industry - an offence she compounded by turning up at this year's Cannes film festival in a dress that turned out to be translucent under camera flashlights. The right-wing smear gleefully seized on the resulting photographs as evidence that the elder Kerry daughter was some kind of pornographic slut.

Set against this nasty and negative portrayal of Kerry's daughters, the White House's attempt to reinvent the Bush twins as the perfect embodiment of wholesome American values makes perfect political sense. If only this portrayal were rooted in more than the wishful thinking of the President's campaign managers.

Last year, to little fanfare and few sales, Washington Post journalist Ann Gerhart published a biography of the First Lady. The Perfect Wife: The Life And Choices Of Laura Bush was innocuous in almost every way but for a devastating chapter which dealt with the lives and recent times of Barbara and Jenna Bush.

"They are girls born rich, blessed with intelligence, good looks, trust funds, loving parents, boundless opportunities, freedom from many of life's daily challenges," Gerhart wrote. "Yet they persist in seeing themselves as victims of daddy's job … they have not appeared to engage in any of the pressing issues their generation will inherit, nor shown empathy for the struggles facing their mother and their father, the president of the United States."

Gerhart drew the comparison with Chelsea Clinton, who had used her father's time in the White House to immerse herself in politics, asking for tickets to State of the Unions speeches and joining her mother on tours of Africa and India. She cultivated the support and protection of her secret service minders, who repaid the respect she showed them by keeping her teenage shenanigans out of the newspapers. In contrast, the Bush twins were more interested in tickets for fashion shows and taking free trips - to the South of France to party with Sean "P Diddy" Coombs, and to Hollywood to hang out with actor Ashton Kucher.

Unlike Chelsea Clinton, the Bush girls treated their minders as hired help, rather than government agents who were prepared to take a bullet for them. In 2001, after Jenna Bush had failed to persuade a barman to illegally serve her alcohol she turned on a secret service agent who was there and told him: "You know, if anything happened to me, my dad would have your ass." Barbara, too, ran foul of her secret service agents on numerous occasions, mostly infamously when she slipped out of their protective ring to attend a World Wrestling Federation event in New York. On September 11, 2001, as the secret service scrambled to round up President Bush's relatives it took them hours to track down the twins. Given this fractious relationship it is hardly surprising that over the past three-and-a-half years a few examples of the twin's boorish behaviour have somehow leaked into the American media.

Far more elusive has been details of their parents' reaction to such escapades, or indeed if any presidential punishment was handed out. For her part, Laura Bush has responded, in public at least, with bland declarations of love. "I think, like every parent, if your children are happy, then parents are happy. And if they're unhappy, then there's nothing more difficult for parents."

Her husband was slightly more revealing. "I love them a lot. I am impatient with them," he told Ladies' Home Journal. "I have got to allow them to become the bright young ladies they're becoming at their own pace, and not at mine."

Spoken like a doting father - though it would be too much to expect that the more rapacious elements within the re-elect Bush campaign will apply the same leniency and understanding to the family of John Kerry.