Children Need More Than Talk

The two candidates for governor have spent a surprising amount of time talking about how to improve the lives of California’s poorer children.

Surprising because the last two decades have accustomed us to political leaders who want to scale down or dismantle government social and educational programs. Ronald Reagan set the tone. Howard Jarvis wrote it into the Constitution with Proposition 13. Even Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, more liberal than Jarvis but sharing his contempt for government, joined the assault with his call to lower expectations. And Republican George Deukmejian, once a problem-solving pragmatist, has become a grumpy, nay-saying governor.

Democrat Dianne Feinstein and Republican Sen. Pete Wilson are different sorts of politicians. They’re ex-mayors, problem-solvers accustomed to providing basic human services. They really believe government can help.

You can see that when they discuss children’s health and schooling. They’re both aware of the problems--inadequate prenatal and pediatric care, poorly educated youngsters, physical and mental illness, crime, drugs and alcoholism.

Feinstein says start young. Almost every day, she talks about her plans for early childhood education, which requires strong government involvement. Wilson also speaks of children. In downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday, he told Town Hall--an organization of business people, lawyers, accountants and other bottom-liners--that he’d raise the quality of California’s work force by improving children’s health and schooling. His goal: “Kids healthy enough to learn.”

What neither candidate is talking about is how they’re going to pay for it. For improving the lot of poor children would be complicated and expensive.

Take the matter of health. Last week I visited Los Angeles County’s Hubert H. Humphrey Comprehensive Health Center at Slauson Avenue and Main Street. The crowded, but well-kept two-story center provides medical care to thousands of black and Latino residents of South L.A.’s poorest neighborhoods.

“Our health problems are really social problems,” said Dr. Delores Gordon Alleyne, the medical director.

Alleyne’s been around. As a student, she was the second black at the University of Louisville Medical School. She interned at County-USC Medical Center, taught at the University of Washington and was at a Los Angeles County juvenile hall before coming to the Humphrey center. She and her husband, a UCLA law professor, have four children, the youngest a 19-year-old college student.

“I think a lot of our children are hungry,” she said. “And a lot of our families have no visible means of support.”

The children at the clinic suffer from ailments common in poverty and overcrowded living conditions--tuberculosis, parasites, lice, hepatitis, anemia, dysentery. The current measles epidemic has swept through the packed slum apartments and old houses of South L.A.

And the children are afflicted with the emotional stress of living among drug dealers and feuding gangs. Alleyne said the Humphrey center sponsored a poster contest for fourth graders in two nearby schools. “We asked them to draw something about the neighborhood and doctors,” she said. “They were all about people shooting at people.” In the world drawn by the children, the neighborhood’s most prominent feature is a police helicopter hovering overhead. A doctor is someone who arrives in an ambulance. Health means keeping out of the way of bullets.

And, as Alleyne said, physical and mental health is just one part of a vast picture of social and economic ills afflicting poor families.

How’s the new governor going to deal with all that? Unfortunately, we won’t know until after the election.

Both candidates labor mightily to avoid mentioning a state tax increase. Feinstein dodged it during a press conference at the Century Plaza Wednesday. The purpose of meeting reporters was to slam Wilson for missing votes in the Senate while he was campaigning in California. But toward the end, the subject of finances came up.

She favored a federal tax increase, raising taxes for the wealthy as proposed by congressional Democrats. But when it came to the state treasury, she lapsed into bureaucratese, talking vaguely of managing the money better.

Wilson’s no better. Also an aficionado of jargon, he wants what he likes to call long-term reform of the budgeting process.

Wilson and Feinstein have pinpointed the problem of poor children. They’ve discussed it with a compassion missing from past campaigns. But there’s a great distance between life around the Humphrey center in South L.A. and the promises of a political campaign. What they haven’t spelled out is the route to a solution.