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Do candidates' family lives matter to voters? Not much.

Divorces, rebellious siblings, even children out of wedlock have not kept a politician from becoming president.

By Ariel Sabar | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the August 21, 2007 edition

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Washington - As fathers and husbands, Mitt Romney and Rudolph Giuliani could hardly cut more different public profiles.

Mr. Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, is still married to his wife of 38 years. His telegenic sons, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren are fixtures on the presidential campaign trail and, in public at least, a Leave-it-to-Beaver tableau of family bliss.

Mr. Giuliani, meanwhile, weathered an ugly public divorce from his second wife while involved with a double-divorcée who would become his third wife. Not only is the former New York mayor estranged from his children, but his daughter's page on the social networking website Facebook, recently discovered by reporters, exposed her as a supporter of Democratic rival Barack Obama.

But when Americans enter the voting booth to choose a president next year, how much will a candidate's family life matter? If history is any guide, say experts, not much.

"It doesn't seem to impact the ballot box," says Doug Wead, author of "All the President's Children," about first families.

Bill Clinton remained popular even after Monica Lewinsky and Paula Corbin Jones became household names. Ronald Reagan, still a hero to social conservatives, was the only divorced man elected president and had a daughter who assailed his politics and posed for Playboy.

"Billy Carter, Roger Clinton, Betty Ford – there's a long history of embarrassing siblings, wives, children," says Robert Watson, a political scientist at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fla., who writes about first families. "Candidates ought to be thankful that the public really doesn't care."

Decline of old-fashioned values

In Pew Research Center polls this year, only 9 percent of Americans said a divorce would make them less likely to vote for a presidential candidate. The percentage who said they had "old-fashioned values about family and marriage" dropped over the past two decades from 87 percent to 76 percent.

But the willingness of American voters to overlook family scandal in an otherwise attractive candidate is not just a symptom of looser social mores.

Andrew Jackson defeated a sitting president in 1828 despite a vicious smear campaign against his wife, Rachel Donelson Jackson, who it turned out was not divorced from her first husband at the time of her marriage to Mr. Jackson.

"Grover Cleveland had a child out of wedlock, admitted he was the father, and yet Americans elected him twice as president," says Mr. Wead, referring to the late 19th-century president. "That's how tolerant the American people can be."

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