There's Something About Mary...

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Jonah Goldberg's opinion on the matter:

There’s Something About Kerry
Using Mary Cheney.



I was traveling when the Mary Cheney thing erupted and I've been trying to keep up ever since. I feel like I have an odd personal insight into this story because I know what it's like for people to make a public issue of a relative. For those of you who don't recall, during the Clinton-Lewinsky stuff my mom was the second-most-hated woman in "enlightened" liberal circles. And for quite a while, I was the only person willing to publicly defend her. For months on end, Clinton's hatchet team and their friends in the media slimed her, mocked me (Esquire gave her a "dubious achievement award" for giving birth to me), and generally sought to make the case for Clinton by demolishing my mom (this, of course, was always the way Clintonites made their case — crush the inconvenient women). There's no need to revisit all of that, but it did leave me with something of an insider's perspective on how families play in politics. After all, the other great Clintonite defense was that the commander-in-chief's baron-and-the-milkmaid act with an intern was a "family" matter.


Anyway, as for Mary Cheney, it seems to me that a lot of the commentary has missed the mark.

First, Mary Cheney wasn't "outed." As Andrew McCarthy, Andrew Sullivan, and others have noted, outing has a specific meaning. It was well known that Mary Cheney is gay, even if it was news to some of the millions watching the debate. It may have been Kerry's intent to publicize her status more widely — and I'll get back to that in a second — but if outing means anything it means taking away from a specific individual the decision to inform friends, family, and colleagues that he is gay. Kerry didn't do that.

Second, almost all of the references to gay-rights pieties or anti-gay bigotries swirling around are beside the point. Sure, Andrew Sullivan is correct to note a certain double standard when the Cheneys in particular and Republicans in general have been fairly silent on far-worse anti-homosexual insults bandied around in conservative circles. Why? Because with family — but most especially with children — all standards are double, or triple, or whatever they need to be. We have a special ownership over our kids, a zone in which all abstract or partisan points must be made with great care or, better, not at all.

Sullivan and others ask, What about Alan Keyes's nastiness toward Mary Cheney? Why didn't the Cheneys speak up about that? Fair enough. Go ahead and ask them. My guess is that the Cheneys probably did make their displeasure known. But what they didn't want to do is call attention to the fact that Keyes is unhinged or give him more attention to insult their daughter.

But all such questions — about the Cheneys' position on gay marriage, on Alan Keyes, on the alleged "homophobia" running through the mainstream of the Republican party — are irrelevant. Maybe the Cheneys have a double standard. Maybe their anger is just a pose. I highly doubt it, but maybe it is.

So what?

What is important and revealing is not what Kerry said about Mary Cheney but what Kerry's comments about Mary Cheney say about him. Andrew Sullivan, Hilary Rosen, and others can complain all they like about double standards and false outrage — none of that changes the fact that what Kerry did was creepy. Think of it this way: If Kerry had said that Dick Cheney's daughter is a "deviant," Andrew Sullivan would be furious at Kerry and he wouldn't care one whit if Dick and Lynne Cheney were upset with Kerry. Because it is Kerry's actions that are at issue, not the Cheneys' reactions.

So what did Kerry do? He tried to score political points by using the status — for want of a better word — of his opponents' family. He claimed to know the mind of someone else's child as a way to hurt the parents. It's the ultimate wedge issue, trying to divide or ridicule a family because of an abstract or partisan political point.

Bill Safire says that it was all premeditated. Bob Novak's reporting seems to indicate it was off-the-cuff. I suspect that it was Kerry off-the-cuff — which is the more damning interpretation if you ask me. If you actually watch the tape of Kerry's comments, you can see he's struggling to say something profound. You can tell that he was on the defensive — as he was on all the values questions — and, I think, you can tell that he was searching for a way to put Bush on the defensive instead. That was clearly John Edwards's intention when he mentioned Mary Cheney in the vice-presidential debate. All of the attention, by the way, to Cheney's graciousness in response to Edwards also misses the point. Cheney's motives for taking the high road were surely political. But Cheney's feelings and motives don't change the objective fact of the Kerry camp's intent.

I cringed when Kerry explained, "We're all God's children, Bob. And I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she's being who she was, she's being who she was born as." Others in the room groaned. But it was obvious to everyone that Kerry was searching to score points, to twist the knife, to use Mary Cheney as a cudgel. The fact that Kerry used Mary's homosexuality was secondary. Gay rights, gay marriage, etc. — all of that is incidental to the fact that Kerry relished the opportunity to use Mary Cheney.

I'm no huge poll watcher, but the polls clearly show that most Americans "got it." Kerry can't resist the gravitational pull of a political opportunity. Indeed, as Brit Hume noted on Fox News Sunday and as I've written before, I think this goes further in explaining Kerry's flip-flops than anything else. He has terrible political instincts. And I don't think anyone can deny that his comments were driven by political instinct and not the "integrity, integrity, integrity" he claims his mother drilled into him.

When trying to explain why it was wrong, people have offered hypotheticals of Kerry mentioning an alcoholic or drug addict in his opponents' family. Kerry's defenders take immediate offense at the suggestion that being gay is like being a drug addict. We can discuss all that another day. But what if George W. Bush had said "divorce is a difficult issue. On one hand we all think society is healthier when marriages are healthier. On the other hand, we understand that good and decent people sometimes have irreconcilable differences. I'm sure if you asked John Kerry's first wife, she would tell you that there are no easy answers..." Or if he had said, "I'm sure if you asked John Kerry's lovely daughters whether it was easy for them to cope with their parents' divorce..." Or what if Bush had said, "America is a land of great opportunity for immigrants. I'm sure John Kerry's second wife Teresa, who was born in Africa, would agree..."

In any of those scenarios, I guarantee you that "getting it" would not have been a problem for the press.


In my opinion Kerry didn't do anything wrong. He didn't call her a bloodthirsty demon but I can see people considering her being mentioned inappropiate or unnecessary.