The Nation : The Children’s Campaign: When Emotionalism Masks Hard Choices

In campaign after campaign this year, the only thing trendier than trashing Washington was the Save the Children Fund’s trademark necktie. Dave McCurdy, the moderate Democratic Senate candidate in Oklahoma, sports one. So does Michael DeWine, the conservative Republican running in Ohio. Bill Clinton says it’s one of his favorites. Once worn only by the terminally PC, the tie--with its multicolored swarm of smiling kids--has spread like some sartorial virus, sprouting from the collars of candidates of every ideological stripe.

Empty symbols are, no doubt, as common in political races as bad food and baseless accusations. And candidates have always labored mightily to display fondness for their children--and their spouses and their pets--as a sign of their decency. In Washington state, the political neophyte trying to unseat House Speaker Thomas S. Foley goes so far as to count the fact that Foley is not a father as one reason he should be ousted.

But this fall, politicians across the country have taken the infantilization of politics a step farther. Candidates are now trying to turn every topic under the sun--from crime to welfare to the economy--into a “children’s issue.”

This tactic serves different ends for each party. Yet, they are up to the same thing: softening the edges of a campaign that has been unrelentingly harsh. With a sullen electorate harboring serious misgivings about Democrats and Republicans alike, the parties are using emotionalism about children to ease voters’ minds--and to obscure both the issues and what they really believe in.

Injecting kids into any political debate comes naturally to Democrats, who have always been more comfortable when it comes to the touchy and the feelly. But when old-style liberalism is constantly being challenged by more hard-headed approaches, couching any number of issues in terms of the well-being of children is about more than affirming the party’s commitment to society’s weakest members. It’s about trying to advance the agendas of a range of traditional but now unfashionable Democratic constituencies--minorities, the poor, environmentalists, big spenders--without ever mentioning them by name.

As the New Republic’s Mickey Kaus has pointed out, the master of this art is Marian Wright Edelman, whose Children’s Defense Fund has gained great influence by pitching poverty policy as a contest between helpless tots and those who would sacrifice their interests. In Massachusetts last month, you could hear Democratic Sen. Edward M. Kennedy pushing a similar line: Taxing the rich was not a matter of class or redistribution, but of fairness to “future generations.”

It’s not just paleoliberal Democrats doing this. Out west, market-minded neoliberals like Gov. Roy Romer (D-Colo.) frame the environmental debate as a contest between “shortsighted” development and “a livable planet for our children.” And from coast to coast, Democrats such as McCurdy have portrayed the difference between the parties on economic policy as one of tax breaks for the rich versus “investing in our children’s future.” Sometimes such rhetoric is almost honest; more often it’s a way of making tough choices sound obvious.

The Republican strategy is more schizophrenic. On issues where the party is united--typically those where a hard-edged message appeals to voter fears--the kids that get talked about are threatening teen-agers. In Texas, the gubernatorial campaign being waged by George W. Bush has, like those of many other Republicans, revolved largely around promises to get tough on law and order. Bush’s trouble is that Gov. Ann Richards has built more jail cells than all her predecessors combined; and, as elsewhere, the crime rate is falling.

No matter. Bush and other Republicans argue that what matters is juvenile crime, and that is rising. Maybe--statistics are unclear. But suppose it’s true. You might think that a candidate forever shouting about youth crime would offer policies designed to deal specifically with it. Wrong. Instead, Republicans pledge to build more prisons.

Lots of voters like the sound of that. But they are not so sure about the areas where many Republicans are drifting to the right. So out comes the child-friendly rhetoric to smooth over harsh surfaces to make the party’s “big tent” even bigger. Heard that the GOP’s “Contract With America” offers tax cuts for the wealthy? Don’t worry: The biggest is a per-child tax credit to “strengthen the family,” so it must be progressive. Uneasy about remarks like that of McCurdy’s religious-right opponent, James M. Inhofe, calling for a “moral revolution”? Fear not: He just wants to make America “a decent place for all God’s children.”

Nowhere have the two parties’ penchants for rhetorical child abuse been so vivid as over another hot campaign topic: welfare. Here, Democrats who are queasy about Clinton’s plan to put a two-year limit on cash assistance argue that welfare is a safety net for poor children, and that cutting off checks threatens to hurt those the program is designed to protect. Republicans counter that they, too, are worried about kids. But no system, they say, could be more damaging to children than the current one.

Both sides are being evasive. Since the 1960s, the debate has raged over whether welfare fosters dependency and encourages single parenthood. Treating welfare as a children’s issue ignores these vital points. But if conservatives are really worried about poor kids, their proposals--especially those of people such as Charles Murray, who want to abolish welfare entirely--seem risky. The suspicion lingers that many Republicans are, in fact, more concerned with how the “undeserving poor” behave than with the well-being of children.

Welfare reform will be among Congress’ main bits of business next year. But lest anyone get their hopes too high that the terms of the debate will be less child-centric (i.e., more honest) outside the fevered realm of the fall campaigns, remember health care. In late July, Hillary Rodham Clinton launched the last push for sweeping reform by reading a letter from 8-year-old Jennifer Dawn Lucas, who had trouble getting insurance because she was born with a hole in her heart. “I don’t want our country to have a hole in its heart anymore,” implored the First Lady, “when it comes to taking care of sick children like Jennifer.”

Within weeks, Hillary Clinton’s crusade for universal coverage was over, and her main allies, led by Sen. Harris Wofford (D-Pa.), had changed tack. Three years earlier, Wofford had propelled health care to the top of the agenda by telling voters that if every criminal has the right to a lawyer, every American should have the right to a doctor. Now he was pushing a plan to provide universal coverage just for “the most vulnerable: our children.”

Who could disagree? There was, however, one small drawback to the “kids first” plan: It would have done next to nothing about the health-care crisis. The real problem, after all, has little to do with children and everything to do with America spending twice as much (as a percentage of gross domestic product) on health care as any other wealthy nation, yet still not covering all its people. Sadly, this fact was consistently drowned out by the flood of tales of “the most vulnerable”--like Jennifer Dawn Lucas.

The truth is that health care--like welfare or crime--is an adult issue. Of course, children are “the country’s future;” of course, most policies we implement today will affect their lives tomorrow. But these policies must indeed be adopted today, and suffusing every debate with emotionalism about children obscures not only the hard choices that need to be made, but what each party thinks about making them. As long as that continues, much of the national debate (such as it is) will be a charade--and a childish one at that.*