Shifting right, or there already?

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Conservative ends, big government means
Clinton’s is not a confrontational "shame on Hollywood and TV programmers" approach as Lieberman and former Education Secretary Bill Bennett used in the 1990s.

But Wednesday’s event sketched the outline of plausible Clinton candidacy: she could run as a Lieberman Democrat. With her charisma and by stressing her social conservatism on some issues, she could generate the "Joe-mentum" which Lieberman himself lacked in his presidential bid last year.

To be sure, Clinton has cast many roll-call votes that make conservatives cringe: for example, she voted against the bill banning the procedure known as partial-birth abortion. She battled with Santorum, a leading proponent of the ban, in a memorable Senate floor debate on that bill exactly two years ago.

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Santorum’s position on media over-exposure for kids was just as newsworthy as Clinton’s stance.

For a leader of a political party that stresses “personal responsibility,” it might seem odd that Santorum sees a need for $90 million in funding to suggest to parents what many of them already believe: that television feeds attention deficit problems, facilitates indolence and obesity, and pummels children with vulgar content.

Just turn TV off?
Can’t parents simply turn off the TV and the computer and shoo the kids outside to play in the backyard, as they did in 1965, when it was TV alone that mesmerized children? Couldn’t they choose to not have a television in the house at all?

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“No question about it, this is up to parents, and parents need to take more responsibility,” Santorum said, “but obviously that message hasn’t been getting through.”

He contended that advertisers and content providers need the research to see the impact of media on kids “and to understand it from a public health perspective.”

Kid's electronic bedrooms

In his own household, Santorum said, he and his wife control with a pass code all television stations their children watch. “Not unless we’re there to say, ‘What are you watching?’ It’s very supervised,” he said.

When asked about parents who ban television from the home, Clinton said, “More power to them. There’s a range of parental choices that can fit into the personal responsibility of parents to protect their children and to monitor their children but it’s not available to a lot of families, when you think about so many families that are working so hard these days or single mothers trying to provide decent income for their children.”

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