Love Bombing
The Associated Press thinks loving your children is controversial.

By NR’s John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru
March 15, 2001 4:35 p.m.

y job," said President Bush in North Dakota last week, "is to say to the moms and dads of America, 'Your most

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important job is to love your children with all your heart and all your soul.'"

Actually that's not true; Bush's job is something else entirely. But politicians are prone to saying such things. We wouldn't bother passing the remark along, except that Nancy Benac of the Associated Press found the statement controversial enough to warrant a whole news story.

She apparently couldn't find anybody in North Dakota who would take issue with the president saying parents should love their children, so she made a phone call to Manhattan, and got a fellow named Jeffrey Goldfarb on the line. He is a sociologist at the New School University; now that's precision targeting. "As a very dedicated parent, I find it totally inappropriate for the president to be telling me about what my relationship is supposed to be with my children," he said. So there.

But that's not all! Benac contacted Alan Wolfe at Boston College. He found Bush's message "strange." And William Benoit, a communication professor at the University of Missouri, found Bush's love-your-children remarks downright devious in the wake of the recent California high-school shooting. "This is a way to make it look like [Bush] is doing his job when he's not doing anything about the issue," he said.

The AP should get credit for enterprise. Finding three people to criticize the president for saying parents should love their children can't have been easy.

We Hear…
. . . that the AFL-CIO's opposition isn't the only thing getting Democrats to reconsider campaign-finance "reform." Apparently southern Democrats are increasingly concerned that the bill would give labor too much power inside the party — and they don't want the unions to pull them so far to the left that they can't win elections.