Real-life people are often the hardest to play, people that you recreate who have actually lived, because you have to live up to people's knowledge of those characters.
He's suffering from Politicians' Logic. Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do it.
Families, particularly, tend to be the ones that you take the most for granted. They seem to slip under the radar, all those important things - it almost becomes second nature to do so.