For Our Kids’ Sake

“Absolutely not,” the first lady is saying. “Absolutely not.” Hillary Rodham Clinton has finished up yet another series of questions about her roles in Whitewater and Travelgate when “CBS This Morning’s” Harry Smith, at “23 minutes after the hour,” finally turns to the topic of her new book.

“Let’s talk about those disadvantaged children for a couple of seconds,” Smith says.

Yes, what about those poor kids?

At the same time Clinton is neck-deep in the public battle of her life over her conduct as an Arkansas lawyer and as Washington’s first wife, she is trying to break through with a message--in fact, a morality speech--on the way our sadly deficient society treats its children. In “It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Children Teach Us” (Simon & Schuster), she offers 318 pages of sometimes warm and sometimes stern advice for how America can do better.

“I will go on answering questions about other matters,” Clinton had told CBS’ Smith with resignation, “but I can only hope that the Whitewater questions don’t totally overwhelm what I think we ought to be talking about concerning our children.”

Clearly, their well-being is emerging as the latest podium from which Clinton has chosen to lecture as first lady.

“I think this is a bully pulpit,” she said in a recent interview with The Times, “and it’s something I want to make better use of with respect to children.”

Her credibility as an advocate for children is long established. She spent an extra year at Yale Law School studying child development; she headed her husband’s efforts in Arkansas to reform education; she was chairwoman of the Children’s Defense Fund; she wrote scholarly articles on children’s rights.

“When Bill ran for president,” she said, “I said I wanted to be a voice for children. I saw that role as being part of the reason that I took on and worked so hard on health care. . . .”

So it is not surprising that with her health care initiative failed, her role effecting administration policy controversial and her husband’s reelection in play, she is moving into a safe zone such as children’s issues.

When asked what is one concrete thing she would like to accomplish for children before leaving the White House, the first lady seemed to acknowledge her limitations with a deep breath.

“It’s so hard,” she said, pausing briefly. “I think if I felt when we walked out of this house that every adult in America, whether or not they were parents, understood what it took for children to develop into healthy, resilient, self-disciplined adults and were determined to do that, I would feel very good about what we had accomplished.”

And how does a wife of a man with the material wealth of the nation within reach do that?

“I think . . . you do it in a variety of ways,” she said. “This book is one way that I’ve chosen to try to communicate with people about issues that my husband and I and others have been talking about ever since he became president.”

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If book sales are any measure of whether their message is getting out, the first lady has cause to be cheerful. Last Sunday--a little more than a week after arriving in Los Angeles bookstores--”It Takes a Village” was No. 6 on The Times bestseller list; this Sunday, it will debut at No. 8 on The New York Times list. Clinton has already spent a week on the road promoting the book in press interviews that often turned into grillings on Whitewater and Travelgate. She’ll be back on the book trail Feb. 7, arriving in Los Angeles late in the day to attend an invitation-only event at the Beverly Hilton sponsored by Price/Costco and Childrens Hospital of Los Angeles.

Reviews of the book have been mixed. The New Republic magazine was predictably harsh: “Why would an intelligent and thoughtful lawyer like Hillary Rodham Clinton produce such a platitudinous book in the middle of the most important debate over social policy in the past 50 years?” asks writer Jeffrey Rosen.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer and San Francisco Chronicle were considerably kinder. The Chronicle article concluded that “It Takes a Village” is “an entertaining book of unseen power . . . the impact of Hillary Clinton’s genuine belief in a children-loving society remains in mind long after book’s end.”

The premise of the book is that no one--not even the most loving parent--can raise a child alone. Rather, it takes the support of a wide circle, including family, friends, neighbors, church, business and government. Each chapter explores a different issue, such as child care, health care, education and spirituality, that families face. Clinton cites groups and individuals from the national “village” who offer solutions.

Sometimes, the book reads like a column in a parenting magazine, with detailed advice, for example, on discipline or pregnancy. Other times, it sounds like a government pamphlet or policy wonk’s guide: “Cases of physical and sexual abuse should be referred immediately to police.”

And often it seems as if the author has ripped a page out of a personal diary. In a chapter about safety titled “Security Takes More Than a Blanket,” she writes: “I must have been about 8 years old when my mother’s mother took me and brother Hugh to see ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ . . . On our way there, my grandmother kept warning us that little children sometimes got kidnapped by strangers from city movie houses.”

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While Clinton works hard to make it clear that the “village” is not synonymous only with government, in the last chapter her political, rather than child-centered, purposes come out. With a slight change in tone, she delivers a global defense of government activism against Republican forces of evil.

“Government has to do its part to reverse the crisis affecting our children, and to do so it cannot retreat from its historic obligations to the poor and vulnerable,” she writes. “Yes, we must work to balance the national budget, but we cannot afford, in the long run--or for much longer in the short run--to balance it on the backs of children.”

Ultimately, even Clinton’s critics have acknowledged that her book is a noble attempt at substance--and certainly a step up from the writings of other women in her position.

“Remember the last book by a first lady who had not yet left the White House?” wrote the Cleveland Plain Dealer reviewer. “That’s right: It was ‘Millie’s Book,’ which consisted of 141 pages of Barbara Bush speaking in the voice of her dog, amplified by cute pictures of puppies.”