Are they hypocrites? Voices at both ends of the political spectrum think so. James Carville, a Clinton adviser, excuses Gramm and Wilson because they didn’t leave children when they walked. But he’s already test-marketing sound bites to answer Republicans who might revisit old infidelity allegations against Clinton. “It’s the president’s daughter who is growing up in a two-parent house,” Carville says. The Wanderer, a conservative Catholic newspaper, charges that Dole’s pro-family message seems hollow.
But the truth is that politicians get a pass from most voters on divorce. Despite growing evidence of its devastating effects (long-term emotional problems for children, a steep decline in living standards for many women), divorce remains conspicuously absent from the presidential family-values debate. One reason is that it’s too close to too many homes: divorce rates more than doubled between 1960 and 1982. One of every two marriages now fails. This has made a once daunting campaign obstacle (“Can a Divorced Man Be Elected President?” Look magazine asked about Adlai Stevenson in 1952) a nonissue, except on the fringes-or if a candidate with a past gets holier-than-thou.
That’s why Republicans try to follow Ronald Reagan’s example. His second wife became First Lady in 1980, and Reagan rarely lectured the middle class on its family values. The Reaganesque solution is to take on social ills that most of the mainstream still regards as comfortably distant (and nonwhite), like out-of-wedlock births. One leading conservative who raised divorce in the past is backing away as the election nears. William Bennett, who told the Christian Coalition in 1994 that divorce was an enormous threat to children-far greater, Bennett said, than even the gay-rights movement–declined last week to discuss broken homes, saying he preferred to focus on rap music.
Don’t look for Clinton to decry high divorce rates. Womens’ groups key to the Democratic Party’s base backed passage of no-fault divorce laws in the 1900s and ’70s. They also regard divorce as one important avenue of escape from abusive relationships. And Clinton has his own problems. Biographer David Maraniss describes a 1981 scene where the future president sings an odd lullaby to 1-year-old Chelsea: “I want a div-or-or-or-orce.” Even a lot of marriages that stay together aren’t exactly Rockwellian.
