Power--At Last : Family: After years of activism, the Children’s Defense Fund is cautiously celebrating its new clout, thanks to its political and personal ties throughout the Clinton Administration.

A blizzard was almost upon the city, but inside the Hilton, it was warm and fuzzy. More than 2,500 children’s advocates were anticipating the opening session of the largest ever Children’s Defense Fund convention, when unexpectedly, President Bill Clinton took the podium. By the time he finished, some of them were openly weeping grateful tears.

What they heard was not the rhetoric of moral support, but official government policies and proposals for their own heartfelt agenda. What they saw was a President of the United States literally embracing--with just the briefest nod to the cameras--CDF’s adored, no-nonsense founder Marian Wright Edelman under the organization’s logo: “Dear Lord, Be Good to Me, the Sea Is So Wide and My Boat Is So Small.”

Susan Van Landingham, a Head Start worker from Martinez, Calif., wiped away tears with unsteady hands. “It was so exciting. I’ve been in the child-care field for 15 years. This was one of the first times I’ve ever felt validated,” she said.

After 20 years, CDF’s ship has come in.

Last fall’s election catapulted former CDF board chair Hillary Rodham Clinton into the White House and the powerful chairmanship of its Health Care Task Force; another former board member, Donna Shalala, ascended to secretary of Health and Human Services; a third former board member, New York lawyer Susan Thomases, became a consultant, first in the campaign, then in the West Wing. A former summer intern, Susan Blumenthal, is a consultant to the Health Care Task Force.

Already, President Clinton has enacted programs proposed by the Children’s Defense Fund, and promised funds for other CDF interests including immunization, Head Start and family preservation. (See accompanying story.)

As U.S. News & World Report editor David Gergen told the conference participants last month: “People now look to you as a voice of leadership. They want to know what you have to say.”

To be sure, there are those who have heard enough already.

Critics see CDF, which is primarily a lobbying and public education organization, as an expensive throwback to unworkable ideas from the ‘60s. They fear precisely what Shalala and Edelman promised the delegates in March, that immunization is a “driving wedge” to further social initiatives--and further spending and government involvement.

The undisputed leader in the children’s movement, The Children’s Defense Fund evolved from the Southern civil-rights movement and anti-poverty programs of the ‘60s. Edelman, a Yale Law School graduate and civil-rights lawyer, formed the tax-exempt charity in 1973 to ensure enforcement of laws protecting poor children and minorities.

For now, children’s advocates, led by the Children’s Defense Fund, are celebrating their new clout--cautiously. Some fear so much support will make their colleagues complacent and overdependent on the federal government. Said Eve Brooks, president of the National Assn. of Child Advocates, “There’s a danger to the extent people breathe a sigh of relief and say, ‘We don’t have to do it. The Clintons are taking care of it. Marian’s got it under control.’ ”

In addition, Brooks observed the job of advocacy can become quite complex with friends in office--and no one has ever been “quite as close to the center of power as we’re seeing with CDF right now.”

One of the group’s first staff lawyers was Hillary Rodham, who participated in a project to find out why 2 million U.S. children were not in school. The activists knocked on doors in selected census tracts across the country and concluded many public schools were excluding children who either were not Anglos, did not speak English, were too poor to pay for books or needed medical help. The group’s subsequent detailed report (now a standard CDF strategy) led to a federal law guaranteeing education for disabled children as well as lawsuits challenging some schools’ practices.

But soon after, according to CDF staff counsel James D. Weill, “The courts got so bad on poor people’s issues, that we basically gave up litigating.” Moreover, he said, it became clear that “airtight arguments and compelling numbers didn’t do it.”

During the Reagan years, $10 billion was cut from children’s programs, just at the time when the problems of single-parent and dual-income families were becoming more apparent. Children’s advocates “pulled together, huddling in the cold,” Weill said. They regrouped, taught themselves budget analysis, adjusted their strategies, and began to look at the long haul.

Over time, Edelman and Hillary Rodham Clinton formed a deep friendship. “They both paid their dues by taking on the fights in silence, in the dark, that others would not take on,” said Paul Smith, a CDF researcher for 19 years. While Edelman lobbied to keep programs funded, Hillary Clinton sat on the Legal Services Board, a quasi-governmental agency, arguing to preserve its programs to train neighborhood lawyers and file class-action suits on behalf of poor people. “What that produced was a real understanding, a bond between the two of them because, in essence, each fought hard, alone and unheralded against major opposition,” Smith said.

Hillary Clinton was chair of the CDF board from 1986 until 1992, when she resigned to campaign, and was replaced by Shalala who had been on the board since 1980.

Now with a staff of 120, CDF focuses on “core issues,”--health care, early education, child-care and family supports. Organized into seven departments, such as policy and programs, communications, and government affairs, CDF has lobbied for a centralized child-care system, orchestrated teen pregnancy media campaigns (using an abstinence message), and organized projects such as Child Watch, which takes community leaders into homeless shelters, decaying housing projects and boarder baby wards. The point, they say, is to “personalize child suffering.”

Although it is not a membership organization, CDF sponsors annual conferences, like the one in March, for teachers, health-care and social workers, child-care providers and others. Supported by foundations, corporate grants and individuals, its budget is nearing $11 million.

Children’s advocates do not work in complete harmony. “The Children’s Defense Fund has become glamorous,” said Brooks, whose National Assn. of Child Advocates includes advocacy groups in 35 states. And tensions exist between the state activists and the Washington-based CDF, which also has formed a handful of state chapters, Brooks said.

“Lobbying in a dirty, old Statehouse may not be that impressive, but it may mean the difference of $20 million for more in state subsidies for WIC (the Women, Infants and Children’s nutritional program), or move the Medicaid program to cover all children who are poor. Those kinds of pieces just don’t happen because of good national leadership.”

Moreover, Edelman, who has a reputed magic touch with foundations, “doesn’t want to fund-raise for the whole child-advocacy movement,” Brooks said. “She wants to have control of what’s done under the name of CDF.”

To most people, the Children’s Defense Fund is synonymous with Marian Wright Edelman, 53, the daughter of a Baptist preacher and the first black woman admitted to practice law in Mississippi.

The author of an inspirational book of homilies, “The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours,” Edelman exudes moral authority. At the conference, she didn’t hesitate in her speeches to scold the country’s leaders, freely using words like shameful, scandal and immoral to describe how America has neglected its children at the same time amassing unprecedented wealth.

“She just doesn’t scare,” Smith said. “It is not simply that she doesn’t want power herself. She denies you the authority of any power you think you have over her.”

In meetings, opponents say Edelman feels no need to compromise. Josephine Velazquez, a board member of Children’s Home Society in Miami, argued with Edelman over refundable tax credits to non-working families when they both served on the National Commission on Children. “Marian would say we have to keep (welfare) in place. She didn’t want anything taken out. (She said) you need a safety net in case something happens. So instead of being reform, it became an add-on to what we already have.”

In a recent article in The New Republic, Edelman was criticized for the CDF’s “children’s approach to politics.”

“Not only are Head Start, WIC and immunization cast as children’s issues, so are welfare, day-care, housing and employment,” the article by Mickey Kaus stated. “The result is an artificial construction of the universe of relevant interests and values.”

Conservative critic Bob Pambianco, an editor with the Capital Research Center in Washington, contends the Children’s Defense Fund’s solutions are “mired in the ‘60s Great Society, War on Poverty mind-set. . . . Rather than trying something new, they throw more money at a system that isn’t working. Their stated agenda reflects the ‘60s activism from which they were born.”

Members of the CDF staff try to distance themselves from the image of ‘60s holdovers, but it’s sometimes hard to deny. For the advertised 20th anniversary CDF “bash,” they partied with soda, ice cream and folk songs. “It’s just like being back at the rallies,” said the bearded guitar player. While Edelman shushed the audience, he sang an intense Dylan-like composition of his own: “A child is crying, he’s hungry and cold, his young face looks old, it’s the face of America dying.”

For the child-advocacy movement, persuading people that children are in trouble has been relatively easy. Jerry Stermer, 50, an advocate from Illinois said, “I can bring myself to tears.” But actually implementing real programs will be a challenge. Still smarting from the Johnson years when money that was poured into social programs didn’t necessarily produce high-quality programs, advocates know the public is wary.

Said CDF’s Weill: “The challenge is, it damn well better be done right. Whatever’s next, we have to make sure it’s high quality, effective, run honestly and really works for children.”

Advocates know they may not get everything. Said Brooks, “The Administration may not be able to do everything to make up for the neglect of previous years. Children are not the only Americans and monies are going to be a problem. What if suddenly you can’t move dollars from defense spending to domestic? If we can’t do that, a lot of what Clinton wants (in the area of children) we can’t get.”

According to Weill, critics have made too much of the close ties with the White House, either magnifying the closeness or the differences. “We’re not parting company at this point,” he said. The Children’s Defense Fund understands that “the vast majority of a loaf is better than none. There are no full loaves coming out of the bakery,” he said.

Those who remember how Edelman scolded the Carter Administration for its lackluster support for Head Start or Democratic allies waffling on federalized child-care are sure she would criticize the Clintons if it came to that. But many believe this time it will be done in private.

Sitting on a couch in a penthouse suite of the Washington Hilton, with a commanding view of the snow-covered Capitol below her, Edelman spoke guardedly about her changed relationships.

“The point is, people have different roles. After 5 (p.m.) is one thing, you stay friends. Between 9 and 5, our roles are different. “

As far as her friendship with Hillary Rodham Clinton, she said, “There are shared values, shared understanding of things that work, things that need to be improved. We are both quite aware of the difference in our roles.

“People who have been friends as many years as we have will continue to be friends forever.”

It’s hard for her friends to imagine Edelman ever leaving the Children’s Defense Fund, although her name was mentioned for numerous cabinet posts and more recently for Supreme Court justice. In the past, she has said she would decline because “she is doing what the Lord put her on Earth to do, be a voice for children,” said CDF spokeswoman Stella Ogata.

If she ever did leave, “It would certainly mean a mini-collapse of the Children’s Defense Fund,” Weill said.

But according to Smith: “Marian won’t settle for power. She wants change.”

Since the election, some have noticed a shift in the way Edelman is positioning herself.

“More than simply being an issue advocate working for pointed policy change, she is becoming a moral leader,” Brooks said.

Liberals as well as conservatives now are admitting that policy alone isn’t going to change behaviors.

Edelman’s ultimate goal is to change the culture. “As long as it’s about things, as long as it’s about violence, as long as people get their sense of power from something external, it’s hard to place a value on human life.

“We certainly have the capacity and resources to eliminate child and family poverty in America.” Now, she said, “It’s a matter of values.”

Children’s Defense Fund Wish ListWhat Is Needed:

* $6.1 billion for Head Start programs by 1995.

* $3 billion to phase in basic health insurance coverage for every uninsured child and pregnant woman.

* $500 million to provide childhood vaccines to all children.

* $23 billion-$41 billion for a universal, refundable children’s tax credit; expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit for poor families.

* Full authorization of the Child Care and Development Block Grant.

* $370 million for family support programs in every state.

* Open-ended, assured funding for family preservation, to help keep children from unnecessary foster care.

* A national child support assurance system.

* The reform of Aid to Families with Dependent Children by increasing financial incentives for recipients to work, and removing rules that discourage two-parent families from participating.

* The restoration of the minimum wage to at least $4.65 an hour.

* Gun control legislation.

* Family leave legislation.

What President Clinton Has Done:

* Enacted Family Medical and Leave Act.

* Had his Administration announce a $1.1 billion program to provide free vaccinations for all U.S. children.

* Proposed a budget that includes $20 billion to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit for the poor; $9.3 billion for Head Start; $2.6 billion for the Women, Infants and Children nutritional program; $850 million for parenting and family support, $470 million for the Child Care and Development Block Grant.

* Asked the Department of Health and Human Services to draft a child welfare program giving high priority to family preservation.

* Pledged to strengthen child support enforcement and may soon use the IRS to collect seriously delinquent support payments from “deadbeat” parents.

Source: Children’s Defense Fund “An Opinion Maker’s Guide to Children in Election Year 1992” and other publications.