When Sarah Palin first accepted the vice presidential nomination in 2008, I thought I should be excited that a fellow mother of a child with Down syndrome might sit in the White House. But my response to her candidacy was mixed at best. Long before she became a polarizing figure on the national scene, I wondered out loud to my husband if she was being a responsible mother, traveling the nation with Trigg in tow. Our daughter Penny, who also has Down syndrome, was 2 at the time. Having a child with a disability had prompted me to slow down my career, and it was hard not to assume Palin should do the same. I couldn’t imagine Trigg receiving the care he needed during a presidential campaign. My husband responded by asking if I was being sexist.
But four years later, I had the same response to the candidacy of Rick Santorum, who is showing strong results in the GOP primaries. Santorum not only has young children at home, but his youngest daughter, Bella, has Trisomy 18, a rare chromosomal disorder that causes developmental delays. Bella was hospitalized for pneumonia while her dad was on the campaign trail, prompting him to cancel speaking engagements in order to rush to her side. Bella pulled through, but her needs will continue to demand more of Santorum’s family than most 3-year-olds. Should this man be running for President?
In the midst of my critique of Santorum and Palin, I came across an interview with President Obama in Time magazine. Obama mentioned that he and Michelle don’t go to many Washington parties, because they’re committed to eating dinner with their daughters. And again, I joined the chorus of commenters who criticized Obama for this statement of devotion to his family. I thought, “I’m sorry, but you don’t have the luxury of eating dinner with your daughters every night. You gave that up when you became President.”
I’ve changed my mind. Sure, having a President with young children and/or children with special needs brings different, greater personal responsibilities. All but Bill Clinton, of the Presidents in recent memory, have been fathers to kids who were out of the nest, so to speak. But I’ve come to believe that having a President with young, and in Santorum’s case, particularly vulnerable, children, offers an opportunity for conversation about some of the most important social issues of our day. Limitations always bring with them possibilities.
President Obama may well have spent some social capital in avoiding the D.C. social scene. Yet he has also offered our nation a portrait of a stable family with a father who prioritizes dinner with his daughters over career advancement. Sociologists agree that the steady rise in single-parent families across the nation harms children. African American children are most likely to grow up in a single-parent home (according to government data, 72 percent of all black U.S. children live with only one parent), and therefore the most likely to suffer the effects of the stress and instability of having only one parent to provide financial, educational, and emotional support.
If Santorum were to win the GOP nomination and then become President, he too would enter the White House with the particular limitations of having seven children, including a daughter with special needs. And yet his candidacy in and of itself has renewed a national conversation about prenatal testing and the place of individuals with disabilities in our society. As Joe Klein, a political moderate, writes for Time,
I am haunted by the smiling photos I’ve seen of Isabella with her father and mother, brothers and sisters. No doubt she struggles through many of her days-she nearly died a few weeks ago-but she has also been granted three years of unconditional love and the ability to smile and bring joy. Her tenuous survival has given her family a deeper sense of how precious even the frailest of lives are.
All right, I can hear you saying, the Santorum family’s course may be admirable, but shouldn’t we have the right to make our own choices? Yes, I suppose. But I also worry that we’ve become too averse to personal inconvenience as a society-that we’re less rigorous parents than we should be, that we’ve farmed out our responsibilities, especially for the disabled, to the state-and I’m grateful to Santorum for forcing on me the discomfort of having to think about the moral implications of his daughter’s smile.
Despite my initial misgivings, I’m now grateful for the way both Obama and Santorum have modeled family lives that include sacrifice alongside the simple joys and heartaches of being a dad. Our culture measures personal worth by productivity and accomplishments, and although both of these men have produced and accomplished much, they have also demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice professional gain for the sake of their families. Even the leader of the free world lives within limitations, and the limitations these politicians face in light of their families are limitations based upon love.
