Ted Cruz's use of his children in his Christmas campaign ad, allowing them to attack his political enemy, is especially egregious and he can't claim victim status when he was the one who put them in the line of fire. The thing is, though, that while you can argue the cartoon goes right to the precipice of acceptable taste, Ann Telnaes's reasoning is correct. "When a politician uses his children as political props, as Ted Cruz recently did in his Christmas parody video in which his eldest daughter read (with her father’s dramatic flourish) a passage of an edited Christmas classic, then I figure they are fair game,"said Telnaes in response to the predictable backlash. Still, that outraged backlash grew into a cacophony and the Post has now pulled the cartoon, with editorial page editor Fred Hiatt saying that he hadn't seen the cartoon before it was published. It implied that little Caroline and Catherine were dancing monkeys to Cruz, not to Telnaes or The Washington Post. Granted, portraying them as monkeys was asking for trouble, but make no mistake: the cartoon, by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes, was aimed not at Cruz's daughters but at Cruz himself.
He claimed the high ground, sarcastically calling the cartoon "classy" and expressing disappointment that his opponents would be so morally bankrupt as to attack his children. So when The Washington Post ran an editorial cartoon this morning that featured Cruz dressed as an organ grinder Santa with two dancing monkeys attached to him on leashes, he and his supporters lashed out immediately.
This is why the no-children rule works both ways and it's considered as déclassé to exploit your kids as part of your campaign as it is to attack a candidate's kids on the trail or in the media.īut Ted Cruz did exploit his kids - and he did it knowing full-well that if anyone called him out for it he could take umbrage on behalf of his unimpeachable daughters' hurt feelings. There's just something tawdry about the sight of a child running down Dad's talking points, if for no other reason than the fact that it's so cynical to use kids as human shields in politics given that the competition can't hit back at them without looking terrible. While it can be argued that every politician uses his or her family to some extent, if only to prove his or her life is "normal" or "traditional," it's rare that a candidate genuinely trots out his kids and gives them speaking parts in campaign ads and it's even rarer that those kids participate in direct attacks on the competition.