Government Overload

Day 3 of our first year of lessons just happened to be day 2 of the Democratic National Convention. Just to get this out of the way, I wouldn’t say I’m an Obama supporter, but I would say I’m not a Romney supporter. So I was watching a video of President Clinton’s DNC speech on my laptop at the dining room table.

Watching Youtube in my house, by the way, is like emptying a jar of honey a few inches from an ant hill. Even if they have no idea what the video is about; even if the subject is way beyond their understanding, they come running. Only recently did they figure out how to tell the difference, from audio alone, between things I’m watching deliberately, and ads.

This video of President Clinton’s speech was about 50 minutes long. It took us a whole hour to watch the half of the thing (about 26 minutes of video). This is not taking into account breaks for lunch and nap time. I think I spent about as much time pausing and explaining what he was saying as we spent actually watching the video.

There’s only so much I can explain to a five-year-old whose deepest knowledge of the government up to this point was that we have a president. But President Clinton is a good, plain speaker who makes it possible for my kids to understand what he is saying well enough that they can form questions about the material. So, that was a good start.

We talked about elections and reelections, vice presidents and succession if the president dies, and why we don’t just keep one president forever. They asked about taxes and domestic policies and what the health care problem is. There was, finally, a discussion about party politics, in the sense that we have several, but have historically always elected from one of two. I didn’t try to hard to explain the difference between Democrats and Republicans in the grand scheme, only that Obama is a Democrat and his policies are... and Romney is a Republican and his policies are...

They asked, much to my distaste, what the “big mess” was that Obama was trying to fix. We talked about the debt and unemployment, even though it made me uncomfortable because it was hard to sound neutral.

This is not a good election year for me to pretend neutrality, I must say.

There were other, less political questions: Have any girls been president? Could you (referring to me) be president? What would happen to us (referring to themselves) if you were president?