Day-Care Dueling Brings Bentsen to UCLA Nursery

Bouncing toddlers on his knee and befriending the occasional toy dinosaur, Democratic vice presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen engaged his Republican opposition in a day-care duel Friday with a visit to a children’s center at UCLA.

Bentsen, a silver-haired Brahmin dressed in an immaculate blue-gray suit, perched uneasily amid a throng of children and their parents in a hastily arranged event intended to underscore the Democratic commitment to day care in a week when Vice President George Bush seized the initiative on the issue.

Bush had a baby-bouncing session of his own Friday morning in Tyson’s Corner, Va., to publicize his proposal for tax credits to low-income families to make day care more affordable.

But the Bentsen campaign countered by calling off plans for a factory visit and descending instead upon the UCLA child-care services center, where the Texas senator praised the Bush proposal as “a step in the right direction,” but charged that it was the result of a belated Republican conversion.

‘Pleased to See It’

“They have not been very supportive of these kinds of efforts over the past eight years, but they are coming aboard now and I’m pleased to see it,” Bentsen said.

Bentsen said he believed some elements of the tax-credit proposal were worthy of implementation. But he emphasized the need for a broader federal role reflected by the proposed Act for Better Childcare, legislation that would provide some $2.5 billion a year in direct child-care funding.

Despite the paucity of registered voters in the preschool population, day-care centers have become a frequent political stamping ground in this year’s presidential campaign. Both parties have found that a foremost family issue is the need to find care for children outside of the home.

At the UCLA center, which provides care for 78 children of faculty, staff and students, about 700 families remain on the waiting list. Parents who questioned Bentsen during his visit voiced concern about the fate of families denied a place, and said they will face serious financial problems when they are no longer eligible for the center, which the state subsidizes by an average of $4,600 per child.

“I can’t go out and teach because I can’t afford child care,” complained Cynthia Farar, a single mother who lives with her two children in UCLA student housing and will complete a master’s degree in education next week.

“My whole eight years of education is more or less down the drain,” said Farar, who said she will be forced to accept a better-paying secretarial job.

Funding Scarce

Although Bentsen expressed sympathy, saying he wished programs like the UCLA program could “just continue to expand” across the United States, he acknowledged later that it would be “very difficult” in some states to find such generous public finding.

“The problem, of course, is financing it at a time of budget constraints, and that’s what we’ll have to work out,” the Texas senator said.

More than half of the UCLA center’s $650,000 annual budget comes from the state, which provides direct assistance to low-income parents and a more general subsidy through the office of the university chancellor. Parents pay on a sliding scale according to income, but even those who pay at the highest rate--$440 a month--are covering less than two-thirds of the actual cost of child care, university officials said.

The center’s administrative director, David Menninger, watched warily as three dozen reporters and photographers jostled near a sandbox to watch Bentsen join in the early morning play session, where pastel-colored dinosaurs were the toy of choice.

“I don’t know if I like all of this attention right now,” Menninger said, “but I think the benefits (to day care) are going to be good.”

Opposes Plan

Bush, meanwhile, voiced opposition Friday to the $2.5-billion Democratic child-care plan, saying it would lead to too much involvement by the federal government in the issue.

“I am absolutely convinced the problem is so big and so diverse that the federal government alone cannot have a bricks-and-mortar child-care program that’s going to be effective,” Bush said.

Bush, who has proposed a $1,000-per-child tax credit primarily aimed at low-income working mothers, said: “You have to have choice, parental choice, family choice, and you have to have diversity.”

As he toured the day-care center in a Virginia suburb of Washington, he played catch with children, pushed several toddlers on a tire swing and helped put tropical fish in a fish tank.

“When you put a fish in, don’t ever hold it by the hand,” Bush said. He joked that he was special because “I can talk to fish.”

One child asked him: “Are you really going to get to be President?”

“It’s a secret--don’t tell the others,” the vice president responded.

He said little about the last real question lingering before the Republican National Convention: his choice as his vice-presidential running mate.