John Dean's new book, Conservatives Without Conscience, reminds me of the 1950s TV show "Father Knows Best".
There have been many diaries written here about what the Democratic Party lacks in the way of ideas and slogans. But I've been thinking lately that what the Democratic Party urgently needs is a face. The republicans have their father figure in the persona of George W. Bush, a loveable idiot and the mother figure of Laura, appearing slightly smarter while playing the part of the enabling stepford wife.
The show "Father Knows Best" is a perfect metaphor for the conservative agenda. From the Museum of Broadcast Communications:
Father Knows Best, a family comedy of the 1950s, is perhaps more important for what it has come to represent than for what it actually was. In essence, the series was one of a slew of middle-class family sitcoms in which moms were moms, kids were kids, and fathers knew best. Today, many critics view it, at best, as high camp fun, and, at worst, as part of what critic David Marc once labeled the "Aryan melodramas" of the 1950s and 1960s.
It's star, Robert Young, and it's producer, Eugene B. Rodney, wanted a show that "represented reality". Gentle, moralistic, and highly interventionist, Young's television character corrected and guided errant behavior in a family setting. Young took on the role on the condition that the father, in his words, not be "an idiot. Just make it so he's unaware. He's not running the ship, but he thinks he is...."
Hmmmm.......Sounds vaguely familiar. Doesn't that evoke images of the Faustian bargain struck between Bush and Cheney? Karl Rove, screenwriter, could be taking his cues from Rodney, who changed the original show's title from Father Knows Best? (with a question mark) to the version without the question mark, making the character the sole possessor of knowledge and child rearing acumen. The show was heralded by the popular press as a refreshing change from "dumb dad" shows, with "Dad" resolving dilemmas through a pattern of psychic intimidation, guilt and manipulation. Hate to repeat myself, but hmmm...similarities abound, don't they?
Sadly, later in life, Robert Young succumbed to his own personal demons of alcohol and depression, dispelling the blurred line between the fictional Dad and the all too human actor.
Republicans might desire an authority figure - and all their rhetoric indicates they wish to go back to happier, simpler times - to a world where "father knows best" - but what we all really need now is a loving, nurturing, healing mother. And what we democrats must create is our own mother figure, a firm yet loving Earth Mother, a velvet voiced Athena, to articulate the democratic agenda to America. Someone with enough chutzpah to say, "I brought you in this world and I can take you out!". With grace and aplomb of course.
So, who would make a great face for the Democratic Party? I'm thinking of someone just like Claire Hanks Huxtable, attorney and mother extraordinaire from "The Cosby Show", the woman who gave my children "mommy envy". Named in a poll as "TV mom closest to your own mom in spirit", she was always cool, calm and collected, strong yet loving, beautiful inside and out, full of motherly wisdom. Wisdom, something we are sorely lacking right now.
Will the next Claire Huxtable please stand up? The Democratic Party, the United States of America, and the World, desperately need you right now.