Oh, sorry dad, got something better to do...

In every election parties have a 'family value' ad that portrays their candidate as a family man/woman. In the last election, we saw Stephen Harper playing with his young children. And now, we are seeing him in an ad called 'Family is Everything' telling us about how he plays card games and go to the movies with his son despite his now teenage son's increasing reluctance. This is very nice, very 50's, very warm and fuzzy. Harper even looks the part, a little awkward, a little amateur-actor-ish. This sort of things must be useful or they wouldn't be bring it out every election. I am not sure though this has much relevance in an election. It is about value, they, particularly the parties on the right, would say. What kind of value it it? If we take the ads as the honest truth, we learn that the candidate love his family and want to do right by them. That is very nice indeed. But what does it have to do with being a prime minister or a president? It is safe to assume that all the candidates, and indeed most people with family, do love their family and want to do right by them. It would indeed be an insult to suggest otherwise without convincing evident. If we were Confucian and believe in a paternal political system, then this 'good-father-ness' is important. I would to think that we don't think about our elected officeholders as or want them to be, our fathers. We want them to work for us, not to feed us, to entertain us or to discipline us. If he is the best father on earth but useless as a politician, I have no use for him in office. If he is a good politician but is found wanting as a father, his paternal shortcomings are none of my business. To evaluate a Prime Minister, I have but one question, what is he/she going to do to/for our country as a whole. What kind of family he/she has, or even if he/she has a family, is not something I care about. But then we have trained to value the warm and fuzzy over the complexity of reasoning. Now that we have Harper's family ad, Dion's and Layton's can't be far behind, and we can just sit and watch some very lovely and comfortable wool being pulled over our eyes.