NEWS ANALYSIS : Democrats Find the Right’s Stuff: Family Values

Here’s a sign of the times: Former Education Secretary William J. Bennett, whose moralizing “Book of Virtues” has been lodged near the top of the bestseller list for months, now has on his desk requests from about 100 Republican candidates to come and speak on their behalf in the fall election.

Here’s another: In Tennessee, moderate Democratic Sen. Jim Sasser opened his reelection campaign recently with a television ad that announced he’s “working to strengthen moral values: (with) prayer in school and welfare reform that emphasizes work.”

In Michigan, Republican Senate hopeful Spencer Abraham is running ads that portray him as a “young father, raising his twin daughters with the traditional values he learned growing up in mid-Michigan” and declare, “In a time of moral crisis, he’s ready to fight for our families.” In Georgia, Democratic Gov. Zell Miller says government programs must reflect and reinforce the “same values I learned at my mother’s knee.”

From coast to coast, moral decline is rocketing to the top of the agenda for campaign 1994. In a growing number of races for state and federal office, candidates are lining up to lament the trends in American family life--and linking problems from crime to the decay of the cities to a perceived breakdown in the transmission of values from one generation to the next.

“Values and the breakdown of family is really emerging as an issue,” says Carter Eskew, a Democratic media consultant. “It has been ascending for a while, but it is higher than it has ever been.”

This focus on family sometimes teeters on the edge of smarminess: It has already become common for male candidates this year (prominent among them Republican Senate hopeful Oliver L. North in Virginia) to air television ads in which their wives earnestly testify to their husbands’ commitment and engagement as fathers.

But to a substantial extent, this dialogue about values is bubbling up from a widespread public anxiety. In a Times Poll last week, for instance, a majority of all those surveyed said American families are more threatened by “a moral climate that hurts community standards” than by economic strains.

This bipartisan sermonizing about the nation’s moral course represents a remarkable political reversal from 1992, when then-Vice President Dan Quayle was widely ridiculed on the left for accusing the television program “Murphy Brown” of glamorizing out-of-wedlock birth. This year, many Democrats are as quick as Republicans to condemn what they identify as damaging trends in American culture--and to insist that policies on crime, welfare and the payment of child support demand individual responsibility.

“In 1992, we went through a polarizing and largely unserious discussion of these issues,” says David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values, a centrist think tank in New York City. “But it now appears that was a blip, and there is now a very solid agreement . . . that we face a very serious problem as a nation.”

For at least the past quarter century, the political debate over values has revolved around an almost ritualistic jousting between left and right on the conservative social agenda of banning abortion and authorizing prayer in schools. Those issues--and their successor in spirit, gay rights--remain on the card in some races, particularly those involving candidates close to the religious conservative movement.

But especially in statewide elections, these dominant (and often symbolic) issues of the 1970s and 1980s are being supplanted by discussion of how values and moral standards influence more tangible, everyday concerns--especially crime, educational performance and welfare dependency.

That grounding to daily life defines this year’s emerging politics of values. Many factors are encouraging greater political debate about virtue and morals. Among them are relative satisfaction with the economy, which opens the space for other issues, and a growing interest in values among baby boomers raising children of their own, says Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. These issues have also moved into the spotlight because of President Clinton’s focus on “personal responsibility” and deterring out-of-wedlock births.

But the driving factor may be the growing connection in the public mind between family breakdown and crime, the most visceral issue in the midterm campaign.

“If you ask people how to fix the crime problem, you will get at least a plurality saying that it is the breakup of family and single-parent family” that has to be dealt with, said Republican pollster Bruce Blakeman. “You will get more people saying that you can solve the problem by parents taking control of their kids than by locking (criminals) up.”

In campaigns around the country, it has become virtually a stipulated point that crime, especially juvenile crime, is rooted in the growing number of children growing up in disrupted or dysfunctional families, especially those born out of wedlock. (About three in 10 children are born out of wedlock, with the figure rising to two in three in the black community.)

Turning on its head the traditional liberal demand for more focus on “root causes” of crime, many conservatives argue that welfare programs exacerbate the problem by subsidizing births to single mothers. Jeb Bush, the son of former President George Bush who is seeking the GOP gubernatorial nomination in Florida, states the emerging Republican creed flatly: “Welfare does not prevent crime; welfare causes crime.”

Democrats don’t go that far. As in the massive federal crime bill nearing final approval in Congress, many Democrats are emulating Clinton’s call for social policy to balance responsibility with opportunity.

In Colorado, for instance, Democratic Gov. Roy Romer, who is facing a difficult reelection fight, is pushing home visitation and parenting classes that try to help young parents raise their children and prevent additional pregnancies. Georgia Gov. Miller is sponsoring a guaranteed college scholarship program for any student who maintains a B average through high school.

But for the most part, on both welfare and crime policies, Democrats no less than Republicans are emphasizing what Romer calls the “iron fist”--tough measures intended to discourage out-of-wedlock births, require work and punish those who break the law. It is, in fact, a source of frustration to Republicans in many races that they have not been able to open more distance with Democrats on these issues, which they have traditionally owned.

Exceptions remain: The death penalty is sharply separating the parties in gubernatorial races in Florida, Illinois, California and New York. In Texas, Republican gubernatorial nominee George W. Bush, also a son of the former President, is pushing a “family cap” proposal to deny additional benefits to women who have more than two children while on welfare and a comprehensive juvenile justice reform package that reduces to 14 the age at which violent juveniles can be tried as adults. His rival, Democratic incumbent Ann Richards, hasn’t endorsed either idea, which could become an issue as the campaign progresses.

But it’s difficult to find much difference between the television ads of typical Senate candidates such as Democrat Joel Hyatt in Ohio and Republican Mitt Romney in Massachusetts, both of whom highlight their demand that welfare recipients work for their checks. In Georgia, Miller has lobbied into law a family cap on welfare and a reduction in the age at which juveniles can be tried as adults to 13.

Looking over this agenda, some worry about implicit economic and racial bias. For all the hand-wringing about children growing up with only one parent, it’s difficult to find any candidates talking about the high rate of divorce--which tends to be a middle-class problem. Likewise, few candidates are discussing the economic strains on working-class and middle-class families that compel both parents to work outside the home, leaving less time for their children.

In this new moralism, says Blankenhorn, “there is a huge danger” that politicians will focus their moral judgment only on groups outside the social mainstream. But, he says, there is also the possibility that both parties will now “compete for solutions to a problem they both acknowledge and understand in the same way.”

Indeed, the campaign dialogue over morals has so far been marked primarily by broad agreement between the candidates raising these issues, even on the limits of government’s role in combatting the trends that concern them.

Earlier this year, for instance, Rep. Michael Huffington (R-Santa Barbara) launched his campaign against Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California with an ad devoted entirely to touting Bennett’s book. Huffington urged everyone to read the book and declared it “a great reminder that solving problems in our country depends on strong individuals and strong families, not on government.”

In all this, candidates risk a cynical shrug from voters who have concluded that politicians and virtue go together like whiskey and Seconal. But many believe candidates face a greater risk by seeming indifferent to the cultural longing evident in the extraordinary response to Bennett’s book of fables and cautionary tales.

Peter Wehner, an aide to Bennett at the conservative think tank Empower America, says: “I think what we’re experiencing is analogous to an exploding star: Issues explode with the public and it takes a couple of light-years for people in the political world to see it.”

Bennett’s ‘Book of Virtues’ Becomes Unlikely Bestseller

“The Book of Virtues” is one of the most unlikely bestsellers in years. Edited by William J. Bennett, who was education secretary during the Reagan Administration, the book is a sort of modern “McGuffey’s Reader,” “intended to aid in the time-honored task of the moral education of the young,” as Bennett writes in the introduction.

For more than 800 pages, Bennett (with help from assistants) presents dozens of poems, fables, speeches and stories from an eclectic assemblage of authors leaning heavily toward the classics. Included are works from the Bible, Shakespeare, Aesop and Tolstoy--as well as Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr. and, in a singular gesture of populist empathy, Babe Ruth.

The selections are intended to illustrate 10 distinct “virtues,” from self-discipline and compassion to loyalty and faith. The book itself is apolitical--in the introduction Bennett insists that “people of character and moral literacy” can be liberal or conservative--but Bennett himself is ordinarily a slashing critic of liberalism and modern cultural trends. He is considering a dark-horse race for the Republican presidential nomination in 1996.