Baby-Boomer Think Tank Silenced : Lobbying: Friends and foes agree that the group made ‘generational equity’ an issue before its doors closed. Some hope the group can be revived.

Sen. Dave Durenberger (R-Minn.) had high hopes for a think tank he founded in 1984, Americans for Generational Equity, to sound an alarm about the bleak future he saw facing his children’s generation.

The baby boomer lobby group stirred a national debate on such issues as Social Security and housing while enraging advocates of the elderly with contentions that older Americans were getting an unfair share of federal largess.

But mounting ethics problems that threaten Durenberger’s career claimed his brainchild and silenced its voice at a time that many people think AGE was just growing up.

AGE’s blue-ribbon board of directors closed the organization’s doors and fired its staff last month after the group ran out of money, facing $40,000 in unpaid bills.

An ongoing ethics investigation of Durenberger and charges by the group’s former director that the Minnesota Republican used AGE for political purposes made fund raising virtually impossible, board members say.

“I hate to see it just evaporate,” lamented board member Richard D. Lamm, the former Colorado governor who harbors hopes of resurrecting the group.

AGE never had more than a few hundred members, and in its heyday was run by a staff of four on the cluttered ground floor of a Capitol Hill townhouse. But for good or ill, supporters and detractors alike say AGE brought public attention to “generational equity.”

Lamm, who once said terminally ill people “had a duty to die and get out of the way,” says AGE’s writings and conferences raised valid allegations that government policies enriched the elderly to the eventual detriment of children and working-age Americans.

“Fair is fair. . . . Money that’s desperately needed for children in St. Paul (Minn.) is being transferred to millionaires in St. Petersburg (Fla.),” Lamm said.

But AGE’s detractors, whose ranks include the powerful American Assn. of Retired Persons and Families USA, an advocacy organization for the elderly and their families, accused the group of fomenting generational warfare with “granny-bashing” rhetoric.

“The message that came loud and clear is we’ve got to cut the benefit programs for seniors. I think that’s why people responded to them so negatively,”’ said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA.

“They sought to divide people up on generational grounds. Most people really think in family terms and they don’t think of grandma and grandpa as being evil and young people as being saints.”

Durenberger and the group’s acting chairman, Rep. Timothy J. Penny (D-Minn.) say that was not the intention.

Durenberger, who declined to be interviewed, formed AGE at a time when Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) was warning that more and more children were growing up poor while the elderly enjoyed the lowest poverty rate of any age group.

“We have entered an era in which the date of one’s birth has become the prime determinant of one’s prospects for realizing the American dream,” Durenberger said in a 1987 interview.

Besides Lamm, AGE’s board included Stanford University President Donald Kennedy and Carla Anderson Hills, now the U.S. trade representative. Under the direction of former Durenberger aide Paul Hewitt, AGE issued articles, speeches and reports that raised explosive questions about rising Social Security benefits and other issues.

One AGE pamphlet went so far as to suggest the nation was “raising a generation of young Americans who will live in financial slavery.” Hewitt says AGE was calling attention to legitimate questions.

But the group’s rhetoric soon became an embarrassment to Durenberger, who was running for reelection in 1988, and to some other board members.

Durenberger fired Hewitt that spring, just as his difficult campaign against Hubert H. (Skip) Humphrey III was gearing up. Hewitt’s antagonistic style had alienated the elderly and made an enemy of the AARP, Durenberger said recently.

The subsequent change in tone moved Boston Globe columnist Bob Kuttner to write late last year that the generational-equity issue had “come, so to speak, of age.”

“They certainly appeared to be less strident and shrill and immature in their approach,” said Families USA’s Pollack.

But the senator’s difficulties with Hewitt and AGE were far from over.

The Senate Ethics Committee last year began investigating Durenberger’s financial conduct, including charges that he used a book contract to launder speaking fees, and that drove away the contributors who underwrote AGE’s $400,000-a-year budget, Penny said.

And in January, the trade magazine Podiatry Today published Hewitt’s allegations that Durenberger muzzled the group’s staff and tried to divert money to a Minnesota AGE chapter to assist his reelection campaign.

“Nobody wants to support an organization that doesn’t have anything to say. It has had nothing to say in the last year,” Hewitt said.

Durenberger, who turned the chairmanship of the group over to fellow Minnesotan Penny last December, denounced Hewitt as a “liar,” and other board members say the allegations that AGE was used for political gain were ridiculous and unfounded.

But the damage was done.

“With all the controversy involving the senator, which led to a diminished fund-raising capacity, you add to that the allegations made against the senator that were directly tied to his AGE leadership, and it made fund raising virtually impossible,” Penny said.

The $8,000 in donations received after he shut down the operation will go toward paying off bills left over from recent conferences.

In the meantime, Lamm has asked the board for time to find someone willing to run the organization with little or no pay so AGE can at least continue sponsoring conferences on generational issues.

“Somebody’s got to be the voice of realism,” Lamm said. “That’s what AGE was. That’s not granny bashing.”