Mitt Meets Mike

It would have been a surprise if last night's "60 Minutes" profile of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his family hadn't generated some criticism directed towards CBS News. But I must admit I did not anticipate the outrage in some quarters that greeted interviewer Mike Wallace's decision to question Romney about whether he'd had pre-marital sex. We are living in a post-Starr Report era, after all.

And yet:

"Must everything be about sex – or at least have a sexual component – these days?" asked Carol Platt Liebau at the conservative Townhall.com. "Remarkably, in the course of an interview for '60 Minutes,' Mike Wallace actually had the nerve to ask presidential candidate and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney whether he and his wife had engaged in premarital sex."

The American Daily, also conservative, called the question "so utterly rude it isn’t even funny."

Romney, of course, is a Mormon, a religion with strict rules against pre-marital sex. I can understand the objections to Wallace's question to some degree – one's sex life shouldn't automatically become fair play just because one is running for president.

At the same time, there was a journalistic justification for asking the question: Romney's answer, in theory anyway, could go to how serious of a Mormon he really is. And Romney's Mormonism is an issue for many voters.

In the interest of fairness, here's the counter-argument from Liebau: "It’s ludicrous to assert that Mormonism’s strict prohibition on premarital sex brought the question 'in bounds,' given that Romney is the first Mormon to run for President. The Catholic Church likewise frowns on premarital sex. Is anyone planning to ask the Giulianis the same question? Of course not."

(Incidentally, Romney's response to Wallace's query was this: "No, I'm sorry. We don’t get into those things. The answer is no.")

While we're on the topic of objections to the interview, let's go to Dean Barnett, another conservative, who objected to Wallace talking to Romney's sons about their decision not to enter the military. He writes:

Is this really a road we want to travel down, where the candidates’ family members will get the same scrutiny as the candidates themselves? It’s true that in our modern politics the principals put forth their loved ones as surrogates and as the people best able to testify how great the office-seeker is. But still, because the family members aren’t on the ballot, a classic Mike Wallace cross examinations seemed out of line. It would have been fine if he asked Mitt why none of the sons served; it wasn’t so fine ambushing the sons who probably didn’t know their backgrounds would be interview fodder.

I don't know if "ambushing" is entirely fair – the sons knew they were going on "60 Minutes," and presumably had some sense that they might get asked questions more serious than "why is your dad so great?" But I do think that the question of to what degree family members should be examined by the press corps is a legitimate one. I've always been troubled by media scrutiny of the Bush daughters, for example, who lived fairly standard college-student lives and were portrayed negatively in the press for doing so.

Presidential candidates' family members exist in a weird place: Since the candidate usually wants to use his family as an asset, they become public figures in the campaign, which seems to justify some scrutiny from the press. At the same time, they are not running themselves, and have to some extent been thrust into the spotlight. In the case of Romney's sons – who, it's important to note, are grown men, not children – I think that by deciding to step in front of the cameras, they announced their willingness to become figures in the campaign. Thus asking about serving in the military, I'd argue, is justifiable. Questions to the sons about pre-marital sex, however, not so much.