Dick Cheney held firm. Undoubtedly, Cheney was loath to offend Christian conservatives like Bauer. But there s more to it than that. Cheney, one feels certain, rejects the modern tendency to personalize every question of policy, and finds something repulsive in the practice of exploiting family members for political gain. What a contrast to the confessional, self-revelatory fashion in which politics has been practiced in the Age of Clinton.
Examples are legion.
There s Bill Clinton s repeated invocations of his alcoholic stepdaddy and coke-addicted brother. And, of course, Vice-President Gore yields to no one in brazen exploitation of private family concerns. Even when he s not hawking old family tragedies, Al Gore s making his private life our business in myriad other ways, as with the famous throat-culture kiss he and Tipper shared at the Democratic Convention. In the debate and on the talk shows, his answers are crisp, logical, dispassionate, authoritative, and unapologetic. He eschews the politics of personal revelation and refuses to play the Clintonian role of blubbery empath.