Schroeder’s New Primary Concern : Ex-Presidential Candidate Leads Crusade Boosting Family Issues Through Five States

Presidential candidates talk about a lot of boring stuff, “Missiles and throw-weights,” said Rep. Patricia Schroeder, making her best “ugh” face for a press conference here this week.

What about day care? What about family medical leave, the Democratic congresswoman from Denver wanted to know. It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to talk about it.

So Schroeder swept through five primary states with a Hollywood producer (who told Arkansas teen mothers about Michael J. Fox’s love life) and a famous pediatrician (who delighted a South Carolina crowd by imitating baby faces and uterine wall noises.)

Producer Gary David Goldberg of “Family Ties,” pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton and Diana Meehan, director of USC’s Institute for the Study of Women and Men, joined Schroeder in a journey they have dubbed “The Great American Family Tour.” Brazelton, who is known among young parents for his books and television shows about parenting, capsulized the group’s roving message when he told a Little Rock press conference, “All these wimped-out politicians who are running for President are not listening to what is going on with families.”

Added Goldberg, “If any of these candidates were a TV show they’d be canceled by now.”

Schroeder never hesitated to tell gatherings of several hundred people that her congressional colleagues are men with “Rambo” fixations, afraid to crusade for family issues because “they’ll be accused of having lace on their underwear.” The presidential candidates are not any better, responding to questions about family “by talking about how wonderful their own families are,” she said.

For voters in Portsmouth, N.H., St. Petersburg, Fla., Atlanta, and Little Rock, Ark., the presentations were amusing, moving and most of all, unusual.

But for Schroeder, who abandoned her own presidential candidacy for lack of money, the unusual is commonplace. She is, after all, the member of Congress who wore a bunny suit in China, who set the American Legion swooning when she appeared on the February cover of Ms. magazine with an American flag draped around her shoulders like a fox stole. She is the presidential candidate who cried on her husband’s shoulder when she withdrew from the race, who carried Pampers in her purse on the day she was sworn into Congress 16 years ago.

Schroeder knew her crowds would be bigger, her press coverage greater if she added Goldberg and Brazelton to the tour. After the forum in Little Rock the person whose picture appeared on the front page of the Arkansas Gazette was Goldberg’s, with the headline “New Show to Focus on Family” referring readers to a story inside on a new television production, “Day by Day.” Goldberg wrote the script based on the days in 1971 when he and his wife ran “The Organic Day Care Center” in their Berkeley home. The center’s model, Goldberg told the crowds, was “Rain or Shine We Take Your Kid on a Trip Every Day.” Another story in the Gazette dealt with the tour’s issues and featured a large picture of Brazelton with a baby. At each stop, Brazelton was cornered by participants with questions about potty training and requests for autographs.

Goldberg told the audiences, “I’m on this tour because this is not a women’s issue, this is a man’s issue.” Goldberg also related the story of how he negotiated in his contract with Paramount studios to have a day-care center on site. He had been bringing his new daughter, Cailin, to work in a playpen in his office, and he realized she needed playmates. He didn’t want to come to work and leave her at home, he said.

“I want to tell other employers that in hardball economic terms, this will benefit your bottom line,” Goldberg said, “in cutting down absenteeism and stress-related illnesses and problems.”

Brazelton may have been the biggest drawing card of the tour. During the question-and-answer session at one of the forums, a woman choked back tears asking Brazelton if her going to work would harm her baby.

A woman in Atlanta asked Brazelton why he was trying to help these women who were looking for day care just so they could make money and buy themselves a Mercedes. Brazelton does feel that for women who have a choice, staying home with the baby “is the greatest gift you can give.” But for the many women who must work, Brazelton wants to see the government do something to help with affordable quality day care.

Meehan proved to be an effective speaker as well. During a presentation to 25 teen mothers at a vocational school in Arkansas, it became clear that the speeches the group had been using throughout the tour were going over the heads of the teen-agers. Meehan jumped in and asked the mothers if they had a message they would like relayed to people in power. She explained that, if a TV network receives a letter, the network feels it represents the view of 10,000 people. She encouraged them to write to the networks and ask that their concerns about day care be brought up in interviews with the presidential candidates.

Goldberg got the mothers talking by saying he was “empowered to tell you anything you want to know about the ‘Family Ties’ cast.” Hands shot up: Are Alex and Mallory boyfriend and girlfriend in real life? Is Alex the same way in real life as he is on the show? Schroeder, however, seemed unable to connect with the teens as she tried to explain bills before Congress. An employee from the school fretted in the back of the room, “Why doesn’t the congresswoman interact with them more?”

The Adult Forum

Schroeder went over better in the adult forum. Pat Tunno, secretary of the Atlanta Women’s Network, felt that it was “possible” Schroeder was making the tour to position herself for the vice presidency. “If so,” Tunno said, “more power to her. She ought to have the motivation of keeping herself in the public eye.”

In an interview, Schroeder said she is not trying to use this tour to position herself for the vice presidency, the 1992 presidency or a Cabinet position--even though the vice presidency is the only one of those jobs that does not interest her.

Despite numerous reports in 1984 that she was deeply disappointed that nominee Walter Mondale passed her over in favor of Rep. Geraldine Ferraro for his running mate, Schroeder claims that she never wanted the job. Yes, her husband, Jim Schroeder, wrote a letter to Mondale listing the reasons why his wife should be chosen. But Schroeder said she never knew about the letter.

“I could have shot him,” she said, as an airplane bounced along from Atlanta to Little Rock. As Schroeder answered a reporter’s questions, she simultaneously fielded requests from 4 1/2-year-old Cailin Goldberg to play with her toy horse.

“My chances of being asked (to run for vice president) are about one in a zillion because of my reputation,” she said. “But you’re not going to change the spots on a 47-year-old leopard. I might be interested if the vice presidency could be something more than funerals, fund-raisers and cheerleading.

“I’m obviously not doing this (the tour) with some set thing in mind, which is why Washington never understands me.”

Schroeder has $400,000 in campaign donations socked away for a run for the presidency in 1992 if there is not a Democratic incumbent in the White House. And she admits that although she is not likely to be chosen, she would like to be secretary of defense in the next Administration, “because that’s where the money is.”

Throughout her family tour, Schroeder told crowds that money needed for families, such as a $3.5-billion day-care bill currently before Congress, could be lifted from the bloated defense budget. Specifically, she would like the U.S. to force Japan, Canada and the European allies to carry more of the burden for their own defense.

A Pro-Rara Share

“We should not have gone into the Persian Gulf without having an arrangement with our allies that they would pay a pro-rata share,” she said in the interview. To crowds, she encouraged grass-roots lobbying of members of Congress and presidential candidates to put family issues first. At the gatherings, kits were handed out that gave names, addresses and phone numbers of the presidential candidates of both parties. There were also simple directions explaining how to contact a member of Congress to encourage him or her to vote for the family issues before the Congress, primarily the $3.5-billion Act for Better Child Care Services bill, and the Family and Medical Leave Act, which would require employers to provide workers with 10 weeks of unpaid leave to care for a newborn, a newly adopted child, a seriously ill child or parent, and 15 weeks of medical leave when they are ill themselves, with their job guaranteed on their return.

The accusation that led to this colorful journey--that the candidates are not putting family issues “front and center”--was denied by Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis.

The candidates are all for family, Schroeder said, but they are not specific in what they mean by that, “and they don’t put it in their stump speech. We want it in their stump speech,” she said.

Dukakis aide Tom Reed said that family issues “are part of his stump speech. He talks about it fairly frequently. He’s pledged to make affordable day care available to every family by the end of this century.”

Schroeder remains unconvinced and unworried about ruffling the feathers of her fellow Democrats, who already pledged to make family issues their party’s rallying point at an issues conference in West Virginia a few weeks ago.

At a luncheon of about 200 Atlanta women professionals and community activists, Schroeder explained that the tour is an effort “to recapture the symbols the right wing took away from us. They took away the flag, they took away the family and they tried to portray us as heartless. We were those awful women who leaped barricades, didn’t shave our legs and armpits and uttered obscenities. This is the way they painted us and we really let them do it.”

She explained to the luncheon guests what it is like to be a woman in a man’s Congress. To try to point out to former House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill that his introductions of her were sexist, she once introduced him to a crowd the same way he had been introducing her.

“We’ve always wondered how he mixed career and marriage but he does a terrific job,” Schroeder recalled for the crowd. “Of course the most important thing in Tip’s life has been his four children, which I bet if you said, ‘Real quick, give me their names and birth dates,’ he would go absolutely bonkers.”

This is the type of little barb that delights an audience but doesn’t do much for Schroeder’s relationships with her fellow politicians. Washington insiders say it’s part of the reason Ferraro was chosen over Schroeder for the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 1984. Ferraro had forged strong ties with Democratic leadership while Schroeder seemed to have dedicated herself to tweaking their noses.

Her comment about O’Neill, she said, was not out of line.

“I don’t think he’d even think that’s a negative,” Schroeder said later when asked about it. “He will also tell you that Millie (O’Neill’s wife) raised them all (children) and didn’t move to Washington until they were in their 30s. It’s not a shot at him as much as at our society.”

This, Schroeder said, is really at the root of the whole problem. She told the luncheon in Atlanta, “All these other countries talk about family issues while here we talk about them as women’s issues or even lesser issues. And I think it’s because politicians are probably the last group in America who have (predominantly) traditional marriages.”

The big stumbling block to passing family legislation packages is not the money, Schroeder asserts. “It’s pennies,” she said. “The root of it is they still don’t think it’s necessary. They think if you’re going to have a family you shouldn’t have it until you can take care of it in the traditional manner.”

As Schroeder crisscrossed the South only a few strangers in the airports recognized her. She could walk along holding Cailin’s hand and buy her an ice cream cone without crowds gathering around. At an airport gate waiting area in Atlanta, Brazelton joined Cailin in performing somersaults on the floor while others in the group looked on, attracting no attention at all from others in the airport. It was a far cry from the run of the mill presidential campaign.

“Pat is not the consummate insider,” said Schroeder’s press secretary, Andrea Camp. When Camp asked Schroeder for three months maternity leave last year, Schroeder initially reacted like a lot of other employers would, with a gasp of concern. But Camp got the three months and Schroeder later told her, “I couldn’t have left Scott when he was a baby.”

Schroeder, Camp said, “may never be Speaker. She may never be President.”

But she will not go unnoticed.