ABSTRACT
Long before the war on terror began exacerbating tensions between the left and the right, Americans had reached consensus on one family issue. During the eighties and nineties, whether the speaker was a liberal Democrat or a conservative Republican, one theme emerged as a sure formula for uniting audiences in loud applause, not dividing them in controversy. On the left and on the right, the new phrase to conjure with became “child support.” As Time reported, “the deadbeat dad” was accorded a place of singular dishonor as a “selfish fugitive condemned by liberals and conservatives alike.” 1 For this reason, California attorney Leora Gershenzon regarded “child support [as] the best rhetoric in the world,” a rhetoric unifying political figures “from [President] Clinton to [California’s former conservative Republican Governor Pete] Wilson to your local DA…all say[ing] child support is a good thing.” 2 And despite the new left-right tensions engendered by disagreements over the war against terrorism, this strange consensus about the beneficence of child support remains robust in the 21st century.
