“There will be young children in the White House for the first time since the Kennedy generation,” so said NBC’s Brian Williams at 11 p.m. on election night after projecting the state of California for Senator Barack Obama, thereby earning him enough electoral votes to capture the presidency.
My children are the same ages as Malia and Sasha Obama, 10 and 7. Michelle Obama has struggled with the same working mom issues as I have (although I don’t have a mega-watt, power job like hers). Michelle and Barack Obama were married two weeks before The Spouse and I were wed. With all those similarities, it will be fascinating for me to watch the Obamas navigate parenthood and their work while the whole world is watching.
For my kids, it’s also going to be interesting to see their experiences mirrored by children in the White House, especially for The Girl, who feels a kinship with Malia because they’re both Hannah Montana and Jonas Brothers fans.
Phew! Anyone else feel as though you’ve been through a marathon? Two years of watching every debate in both parties, of reading online and in newspapers and magazines about the campaign, of watching YouTube videos, of following every detail of the race can take a lot out of a person. And I wasn’t even a candidate, the spouse of a candidate, working for the campaign or covering it as an embedded reporter. Those folks must feel as though they’ve been run over by a truck right about now.
At 11 p.m. last night, after the networks officially called the entire presidential election for Illinois Senator Barack Obama, I ran upstairs and woke up my kids to tell them the news. They weren’t completely awake, though, and didn’t remember that I’d woken them up when I spoke with them this morning. However, after learning of the results, along with the fact that 10-year-old Malia Obama and 7-year-old Sasha Obama were promised a puppy by their dad, I saw that puppy-gleam in their eyes too. (Sorry kids, you’re not getting a puppy. Your parents didn’t just complete a presidential campaign.)
Kudos are due to Arizona Senator John McCain, who was eloquent and gracious in making his concession speech. I felt badly for him while watching him, a former POW, tearing up as he acknowledged the historic nature of Obama’s win. He’s an honorable man who was saddled with a bad campaign that made bad choices. Had he won and a woman ascended to the vice presidency for the first time in our nation’s history, I would like to think that people would’ve been moved to see a woman succeed.
And Obama’s acceptance speech, in my humble opinion, will be one children will later read about in history books:
Voting: I took the kids with me to vote in our small town in the western suburbs of Boston this morning at around 10. (There’s no school today.)
We saw no lines as we entered the school gym and were greeted by a sweet Girl Scout. We waited patiently as she explained in a whisper-soft voice, where we needed to go first — to check in by our street address. With my ballot in hand, the kids jockeyed for a good position in which to get a look at it as we crammed ourselves into the polling booth. They couldn’t believe how many people were running for president. They thought it was just John McCain and Barack Obama.
“The Green-Rainbow Party?” my daughter asked incredulously.
“Yep,” I said, as I read aloud all the different presidential/vice presidential candidates and their corresponding parties and the children shook their heads.
They were a bit dismayed when I wouldn’t let them fill in the bubbles with the black pen provided — there was no chance I was going to risk them filling in the wrong circle and ruin my opportunity to vote in this election — but I did let them help me feed the paper ballot into the machine when we were done. The dullness of putting a ballot into a machine made me miss the time when I voted in my first election in my hometown where they have actual levers to pull and a curtain that would dramatically open and record my choices when I was done. It’s anti-climatic to fill in a bubble with a pen.
MSNBC All Day: I’ve had MSNBC on TV all day. I’m a sucker for their “Election Center” in Rockefeller Center and am a big crazy fan of the crew from Morning Joe.
Random Observations:
I thought Barack and Michelle Obama took a really long time filling out their ballots in Chicago. They must have had a huge number of Illinois ballot questions or many contested races. (Massachusetts had three ballot questions.) Their 10-year-old daughter Malia, in her hoodie, looked thoroughly bored and yawned several times.
The first thing that came to my mind when I saw Sarah and Todd Palin leave the polls in Wasilla? Shamefully, it was that, as I looked at the vice presidential candidate, I wondered if she’d already given all the expensive campaign-funded duds away to charity.
Calling the Winner Early: I was disturbed by a piece I saw in today’s New York Timesabout when the broadcast and cable news networks will project a winner tonight. I’m a big believer — even in the age of the Internet, Twitter and Facebook — of officially holding back on projecting a winner in the presidential race when people are still in the process of voting.
If a candidate concedes, then that person is affecting the voter turnout in places where the votes haven’t yet been cast and it’s not the media’s doing.
But if a candidate hasn’t yet conceded, the decent, patriotic thing to do is to wait until polls have closed before calling a state’s results. If the networks call the entire election before the folks on the west coast have finished voting, that move would essentially tell people who haven’t yet voted that their votes are irrelevant.
A very kind BBC reporter sought me out last week to discuss the idea of a “mom vote” and how it might play out in tomorrow’s election. After our lively discussion at a Brookline coffee shop, she put together a report about women and the U.S. presidential race. he link to the BBC radio interview is here.
Also, did you happen to read that Boston Globe piece this weekend about one’s political leanings being related to your DNA? I’m just not buyin’ it.
By the way . . . am I the only one with election fever? I’m at once excited about tomorrow night — which will make history one way or another – while I’m also suffering from election fatigue. Makes no sense.
A blogger on the web site Babble wants birthday party goody bags killed. Dead. Finished. Finito. They’re usually filled with cheap toys, too much candy and promote the gimmes, she said:
“When we’re handed these tokens of participation at the end of the soiree, I am filled with a mixture of angst and anxiety. I immediately start to try to scheme on how to get the colorfully decorated bag out of my daughters’ curious and greedy little hands. A task which I wish could be avoided altogether.”
I’d be all for eliminating goody bags — I didn’t need a goody bag when I was kid to enjoy a party — if all the other parents would agree to cease and desist. I wouldn’t want to go solo on something like this. Every year, I feel great pressure when it comes to putting together the birthday party goody bags. I always try to be very reasonable about what I put in them, but usually, a few days before a party, I start worrying that I’ve been too cheap and that my frugalness will hurt my kids socially. My guilt typically propels me to go to the store to pick up a large bag of processed sugar that’s been molded into Laffy Taffy or Nerds and stuff handfuls of the empty calories into the bags to make them look fuller, bad mother am I.
Item #2: Martha Stewart’s Snarky Kid
Martha Stewart’s kid is all grown up now, swears profusely, and has taken to mocking her mother. On TV. For a paycheck. No lie.
New York Magazinerecently ran a long feature piece on the mother-daughter duo focusing on the fact that Alexis Stewart and her sidekick, Jennifer Koppelman Hutt, will be doing a TV show for the Fine Living Network consisting entirely of ridiculing old episodes of Martha Stewart Living, pop-up video style. Alexis and Jennifer, who have a satellite radio show called Whatever, with Alexis and Jennifer, will also be the hosts of the new program called Whatever, Martha, a show endorsed by mama herself.
To give the green light to this puppy, Martha must have skin that’s 10-feet thick.
This has been the wildest presidential campaign I’ve ever seen. And when I’ve asked those who’ve witnessed more campaigns than I what they think, they agree. Without exception. This year, not only will history be made in one way or another on November 4, the election season has been unpredictable and exciting, no matter for which candidate you’re rooting.
So I’ve decided that, with all the media’s focus on the “mom” vote (as if there is one, monolithic “mom” vote, which, of course there isn’t), I decided that my Suburban Mom blog would take on politics (in a bipartisan fashion of course) and start a new, regular feature entitled, the Suburban Mom’s Political Fix. Check back on the Suburban Mom blog for the latest take on the election from your resident suburban mom with caffeine addiction issues.
I donned my TV critic’s cap and dished with one of the two Manic Mommies about the new fall television season, the national political conventions, the Olympics, Mad Men, 90210, The Office and what I think about the title of the new CBS show, The Mentalist.
You can get directions on how to download/listen to the Manic Mommies podcast here. (It’s a radio show on the internet, for the uninitiated.) Or you can just go to iTunes and download it for free — gotta love the free! – to listen to our sparklingly witty conversation.
I love the way cartoonist Jan Eliot’s mind works. In her Stone Soupcomics, she’s able to put into pictures what I labor to do with words. So, a few months ago, when Eliot e-mailed me to ask me if I’d write a blurb for her new collection of cartoons, This Might NOT Be Pretty, I felt honored.
“Jan Eliot has been spying on my family,” reads the blurb I wrote that’s on the back cover of Eliot’s newly-released book, the seventh in the Stone Soup series. “There’s no other explanation why Stone Soup so accurately captures the absurdly realistic yet painfully funny antics that go on in my house. Stone Soup is a window into the gloriously flawed American family.”
The book’s great for when you need to know that you’re not the only one who, as you’re raising your children, finds yourself in patently preposterous situations.
Item #2: ‘Desperate Housewives’ Trailer
Season five of Desperate Housewives, a once razor-sharp satire of modern life in the ‘burbs, is on the horizon. (Premieres September 28.) This season the show shifts five years into the future where everything has supposedly changed for the Wisteria Lane residents, most markedly for Eva Longoria’s character Gabby Solis, now a non-glamorous mother of two, while some of Felicity Huffman’s character’s kids are now teens and on a first name basis with the friendly folks at the local juvenile detention center.
Huffman has said that the half-decade time jump has invigorated Desperate Housewives’ writers and that the characters’ slate of stories has been wiped clean. I certainly hope so. The show has lost its mojo in recent years and just hasn’t been as good as it was in season one and early on in season two. I hope it can redeem itself. And soon. I’m rooting for Huffman.
Item #3: Tonight’s Historic Moment
Regardless of your political affiliation or for whom you plan to cast your vote for president in November, there is no question that tonight’s speech by Illinois Senator Barack Obama formally accepting his party’s nomination for president is a historic one for our country, particularly coming on the 45th anniversary of the Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. That’s the iconic speech our children are shown in their classrooms every January, the one they hear when they learn about the condition of race relations in the 1960s when King spoke and why the Civil Rights Act was eventually passed.
Fast-forward four decades later, and you can now explain to your own kiddos with pride how far our country has come from that moment to this one. This is a moment they’ll want to remember.
Local mom and author Meredith O'Brien gives you a peek behind the picket fences of modern day parenting. With humor and candor, it's her take on real parenting in the real world.
“There will be young children in the White House for the first time since the Kennedy generation,” so said NBC’s Brian Williams at 11 p.m. on election night after projecting the state of California for Senator Barack Obama, thereby earning him enough electoral votes to capture the presidency.
Local mom and author Meredith O'Brien gives you a peek behind the picket fences of modern day parenting. With humor and candor, it's her take on real parenting in the real world.
