Mouths of Babes and All That

My daughter and I were on the phone, talking politics long distance. Her six-year-old son wandered in to the room where she was, and she said, "Tell Grandma who you're voting for."

He hollered, "Barack Obama!" and giggled.

Well, that was cute, no doubt. I presumed he had heard Mommy talking about this and was parroting her, as so many children do of all ages, but I asked her just the same how he had made his decision -- was he saying it because she says it?

"Oh, no," daughter said, "he saw them both on TV and said that John McCain was scary looking."

A six-year-old doesn't come to this election with the literal prejudices that adults do. This particular six-year-old has never been indoctrinated at home in racial hatred, and he lives in a neighborhood where he plays with black, white, and hispanic children. So as he made his snap judgment, he never weighed whether race mattered or not. And a six-year-old doesn't know what "looking Presidential" means, but when he looked at these two men, he found one frightening and one (presumably) reassuring.

As do I, T. As do I.