COLUMN LEFT/ RUTH ROSEN : Bush Panders to Myth of the ‘50s Family : His ’92 strategy demonizes welfare moms, who are victims, not villains, of the GOP legacy.

Don’t be surprised if the family becomes the focus of presidential politics this year. At least the Republicans know a symbol when they see one. In his State of the Union address, and then again during the Southern primaries, George Bush tried out his major campaign theme: the restoration of “family values.” But to Bush, helping the family consists of demonizing welfare mothers, denouncing welfare cheats and child-support dodgers and trying to abolish abortion.

No one can say that he doesn’t strike a responsive chord. The hunger for family stability deepens with every passing divorce, every abused child. The recession has only frayed the already fragile bonds of family life. The Children’s Defense Fund reports that the incomes of young families with children have dropped 32% in 17 years. The child poverty rate is now a staggering 40%. With the majority of America’s women in the labor force, families can no longer count on the unpaid care supplied by mothers, wives and daughters. Families urgently need help--job security, paid family leave, health care, affordable housing and freedom from crime.

But these are the needs that Republicans ignore. They appeal for votes with paeans to the family while they do nothing to support the real people who make up America’s families. Richard Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Child Care Act in 1971 and George Bush axed the Family Leave Bill of 1991. While American businesses laid off millions of workers and shipped their factories overseas, Republicans disingenuously targeted feminists, gays and lesbians--and now, the welfare mother--as the real enemies of family life.

One reason Republicans have been so successful in appropriating “family values” is that they understand how deeply Americans still pine for the soft-focus families of the 1950s. Pandering to a mixture of longing and indignation, Bush--like Ronald Reagan before him--will try to make Americans believe that the ‘50s are just around the corner.

Forget the ‘50s cartoon image of a world when men were breadwinners and women were housewives. Today, less than 10% of families look anything like the “Leave It to Beaver” crowd. In the 1990s, few men can support a wife and children on a single wage. One-half of marriages end in divorce, 53% of children have two working parents and 11 million children under 6 have mothers in the work force. An astonishing 3.5 million children are latchkey kids.

Once in a while, the desperation hidden behind these numbers takes on a human face. Parents feel caught between the demands of endangered jobs and the needs of children and elderly parents. It is a prescription for disaster. Some adult children have resorted to “granny dumping,” a phrase that recently entered national consciousness when strangers found an 82-year-old Alzheimer’s patient in his wheelchair in Idaho, clutching a bag of diapers, a note pinned to his chest. One survey estimates that adult children abandoned 70,000 elderly parents last year alone.

Children suffer, too, from adult neglect and abuse. The disintegration of inner-city families--lost to crack, violence or jail--has produced a generation of children who have become America’s new orphans. In 1980, 4.5% of America’s children belonged to these “zero-parent families.” Today, nearly twice as high a percentage live in a household headed by a non-parent.

The Republicans’ mythic family has served them well. But now the Democrats have an opportunity to unravel this Republican fable. Twelve years of not-so-benign neglect has left an appalling legacy that amounts to home-wrecking. Democrats must not let the welfare mother become the Willie Horton of the 1992 election. She is not the villain, but the victim of the Republican legacy.

Democrats must counter Republicans’ clever campaign to preserve the myth of the ‘50s family with serious proposals to protect real families. That means thwarting Bush’s efforts to demonize welfare mothers and reminding voters that increased homelessness and higher welfare costs derive from Republican economics. It means countering Bush’s rose-tinted image of family life with the harsh facts of granny dumping, latchkey kids, zero-parent families, two-income families and childhood poverty. It means offering an alternative to abstinence by promoting sex education, contraception and reproductive choice. It means that Democrats should take their endless policy lists and reframe them to create a national family policy.

Give away the defense of the family to the Republicans and the Democrats might as well concede the election right now.