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Political TMI: Can We Talk Issues, Please?

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By MICHAEL POWELL, The New York Times

Published: September 30, 2007

Updated: 09/28/2007 08:33 pm

Barack Obama gets morning breath. Elizabeth Edwards felt her rib pop during some good loving with her husband, John.

Rudy Giuliani, by testimony of no less than his third wife, is a high-testosterone guy.

Must we go there?

Too Much Information is a concept rarely honored in modern presidential politics. In a YouTube, cell phone-photo, post-it-on-the-Web world, no secret is safe, no taboo assumed, no limit observed. If a candidate, a grumpy spouse or a resentful second cousin once removed is foolish enough to talk about it - whatever 'it' happens to be - that banality is guaranteed to be broadcast and discussed on a thousand blogs.

So Obama's penchant for leaving dirty socks around the room is revealed by his wife, a teenager in New Hampshire asks John McCain whether he's too decrepit to be president and reporters dissect Hillary Rodham Clinton's hint of cleavage. The professional-image types shudder at the questions. But the answers set their heads to throbbing.

'This sort of diary tell-all has gotten so out of control,' said Susan K. Abrams of Political Icon, an image development firm that works with candidates. 'These details are not that fabulously interesting.'

She offers a carefully crafted piece of advice for these middle-aged and older candidates and their spouses, which boils down to: Stifle yourself. Talk policy, talk good works, talk kids and hopes and dreams. Just don't talk sex, and go easy on the drugs and rock 'n' roll.

The Walls Tumble Down

The membrane separating the personal, political and inane is porous. When even so wonkish a fellow as Al Gore feels compelled to give a big smooch to his wife at the Democratic Convention in 2000, the walls are tumbling down.
Michelle Obama may be a lead scout on TMI. She has already told us her husband leaves dirty socks around the house and is 'snore-y and stinky' in the morning, and that her daughters talk to her about menstrual periods.

Walk farther down the TMI trail and find Judith Giuliani, who posed sitting in her husband's lap and kissing him for Harper's Bazaar.

'Rudy's a very, very romantic guy. We love watching 'Sleepless in Seattle,'' she told the magazine. 'Can you imagine my big testosterone-factor husband doing that?'

Then there is John Edwards and his Esquire interview in July. It's hard to say he intended full disclosure. Perhaps he just couldn't say 'no' without appearing prudish.

The reporter begins by saying: 'I hope this isn't too personal.' That's when Edwards's inner siren should have started. How, the writer asks, did you break her rib with a hug?

'Maybe it is a little personal,' Edwards says.

Maybe I don't want to know, the reporter asks.

'It was a perfectly reasonable question,' he responds.

How American politics came to this pass has two answers. The short version starts with Jimmy Carter, who told Playboy he had lusted after women in his heart. It ends with Bill Clinton and the Starr report.

The more complicated answer goes to our celebrity culture, which, as cultural historian Lynn Dumenil of Occidental College notes, took root in Hollywood in the 1920s. Fast-forward eight decades, and celebrity politics can threaten to subsume the political culture.

The Boring Details

The challenge for any candidate or spouse is how to gain entry to this culture. The current gambit of choice is a variation on the language of Oprah, seeking a deeply 'personal' and 'honest' conversation with millions at once.

'They tell us a lot of things we'd like not to know and to forget as soon as possible,' said Nan Enstad, a cultural historian at the University of Wisconsin. 'I see a longing for a sincere politics, but candidates haven't created the language to express it.'

That's the problem, isn't it? Those from the same generation as the candidates may relate to the wife battling cancer. But surely not all are terribly intrigued by the prosaic details of domestic life.

As for the youth vote? Theirs is a full-disclosure generation, no doubt. A 20-year-old might happily use MySpace to list her last four sexual partners, . but that doesn't mean she wants to hear people her parents' age yap about their sex lives.

'No one wants to hear or see their father and mother telling it all,' Abrams said. 'I just don't believe it's effective.'

It's not clear how a candidate might guard the last shreds of dignity. Maybe a 63-year-old candidate with a widening middle, a balding pate and a not-so-great temper stumbled toward one answer in New Hampshire the other day, if only because he had no other choice.

A young mother asked Giuliani about his three marriages and frosty- relationship with his two children. He fixed her with that stare.

'I love my family very very much and will do anything for them,' he said. 'The best thing I can say is, kind of, 'Leave my family alone, just like I'll leave your family alone.''

Don't go there - what a candidate concept.

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