When Dad Runs for President
In most families, it's the children who dream of what they might someday become, while the parents devote their every hour to making it happen. In a political family, those roles are reversed. The child of a presidential candidate learns to subjugate herself to the machinery of a campaign. She learns to rally a crowd of supporters, to gently push a county official for a much-needed endorsement or, if she's too young for any of that, simply to smile and wave on cue. She learns to accommodate or even adore the coterie of aides who roam the family home and to trust no one outside that circle with the smallest shred of information.

The candidate's child does all this in pursuit of the ultimate prize, even though he or she darkly suspects that despite all the glory of the White House, there has never been a worse time to be the president's kid. In the age of ''Saturday Night Live,'' 24-hour cable gossip, talk radio and obsessive Web sites, not to mention Jay and Dave and Conan, the mundane rites of adolescence, like braces or a fake ID, can become painful ordeals.

For the candidate, this narrow strait between a child's privacy and his own political necessity can be difficult to navigate. As president, Bill Clinton declared his daughter off limits from public scrutiny, as George W. Bush has done with his own twin girls. And yet one of the most enduring images of Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky saga was the orchestrated shot of the president and his wife connected to each other, literally, by the clasped hands of their daughter. Along with shades of Washington and Lincoln, we seem to demand in our leader some small piece of Mike Brady too. In an era in which all political rhetoric sounds programmed -- ''fight for working families,'' ''protect the homeland'' and so on -- there's something reassuringly human about the idea of a candidate who puzzles over math homework at the dinner table. And as middle-class voters grow anxious over deteriorating schools and job markets, it's comforting to imagine that we might be electing a president who knows what it is to sit upright in bed and worry.

This year's Democratic candidates have made their own choices about where their children belong. Howard Dean, an absolutist by nature, has kept his college-age daughter and teenage son away from the campaign entirely. (He declined requests to have his children photographed for this portfolio, as did Carol Moseley Braun, Al Sharpton and Dennis Kucinich.) Richard Gephardt, on the other hand, named his health-care plan for his 33-year-old son, Matt, who overcame cancer as a toddler, and he talks about the experience at every campaign stop; both Matt and his two sisters have been stumping for Dad. John Edwards is happy to be pictured playing with his three younger children, but he almost never talks to voters or reporters about his elder son, who was killed as a teenager in a car accident.

When Jeff Riedel set out to photograph some of the candidates' children, he expected to find a privileged lot, archetypes of the American elite. Instead, he found sons and daughters who seemed modest and ordinary. The challenge was to free them, even for a few minutes, from the stifling discipline of political life, so that the people in the pictures might resemble their truer selves. What struck him most was the utter lack of rebellion. ''Every single child of the candidates is a full-on supporter of the policies of the father,'' Riedel says, ''which doesn't seem that odd, but in a way it is. I never agreed with my father on politics.''