ABSTRACT
At the year 2000 Republican convention in Philadelphia, Laura Bush called for mothers to read to their children at an early age. This reduction of a public function to the private sphere was certainly not absent on the Democratic platform that year. The Gore campaign and the Democratic Party similarly evoked family tenderness and love to sell their political agenda. Two of the Gore children spoke about how much they loved their parents, one even telling of how her father taught her to build an igloo without explaining how they got enough snow to build one in Tennessee. Tipper Gore showed a heartwarming video about her life and love with Al, boasting of how they have been in love with each other for thirty years, ever since they first set eyes on each other. Clearly, this was an attempt to offset the Clinton legacy of dubious morality and infidelity. However, it also serves the same purpose as Laura Bush’s speech in selling hard politics in the name of love. Not subject to partisan differences, the sanctimonious and caring family is supposed to replace the need for a welfare state or a social net, and serves to justify, in political rhetoric, structural adjustment programs both in the United States and abroad. What makes Laura Bush’s speech alarming (though not unique and certainly not partyexclusive) is how she uses a story about education as central to “compassionate conservativism,” or rather, her “politics of care,” through which she constructs a neoliberal philosophy. Likening teaching to mothering, Laura Bush explicitly linked family values, increased attention to early childhood (but not to welfare), to the curtailment of the federalist state, the growth of the military, and the need to remove federal regulations on capital flows, in other words, to the need to defend aggressively the expansion of markets for U.S. goods in the interests of providing and protecting an ideal, blissful and untouchable privacy.1 The Republican innovation was to privatize the public sphere by privatizing the classroom, as the soon-to-be first lady spoke in front of a Dubya joining her through video teleconferencing from a midwestern elementary school. By transforming the role of the teacher into a mothering relation, by reducing the public role of socializing citizens to sentimental or familial pictures of private love, this moral, even emotional vision of teaching as nurturing serves to show education as a private rather than a public responsibility.
