Choices, Choices

All right, it wasn't a very good idea to select a controversial tabloid television show as the venue to exhibit his charming family and truly sweet and unpretentious children to the public. He most certainly must have - as he said "got caught up in the festivities" of the day; the glorious Fourth celebrations and just coincidentally one of the children's birthdays - forgotten his resolve to shelter them from the public eye.

No the venue was wrong, awkward and completely inappropriate. It's one for jaded sophisticates, for access to celebrities and their doting fans, for electronic gossip about the dark side of society and its excess of shabby divorce proceedings and benighted drug addictions. Even if he wasn't thinking clearly in the fog of relaxed friendliness, one might suppose his advisers might have been a trifle more cautionary.

That having been said - and most certainly the appearance of such innocence on such a blighted stage was regrettable - the unaffected performance of his children must have been a delight to their parents. It can't but have been that to those who watched and listened. Their refreshingly open and bright commentary was a true breath of fresh air in the stale atmosphere of political manoeuvring.

The conclusion to which must most surely be a comfort to Obama-watchers, and those uncertain about his capabilities. If we're to measure his potential as a leader of a nation by his success in helping his wife to raise two brightly intelligent, unself-conscious children, unperturbed by the public limelight, then it's to his credit. If it were only as simple as that.

Access Hollywood may have been an inappropriate and unsavoury stage for the introduction of these little girls, daughters Malia and Sasha, ten and seven respectively, but their presentation can only have done his candidacy a world of good. More than balancing his and his wife's lack of due diligence - a momentary lapse.

We're amused to learn from the girls that they were bemusedly critical of their father's obtuseness in greeting their little friends; they won't be voting material for many years into the future. And Sasha, revealing that her father "likes bubble gum" and talks too much, "blah, blah, blah", can only go into the annals of political performance by default as brilliant.

As accidental constructs go, this one was a clear winner.