Democrats to Spotlight Pro-Family Agenda

Tonight’s program for the Democratic National Convention pulls back the curtain on a cornerstone of President Clinton’s strategy to win reelection this fall.

From the keynote speech by Indiana Gov. Evan Bayh to addresses from Vice President Al Gore’s wife, Tipper, and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, convention planners say that Democrats will spotlight the administration’s efforts to bolster families with children--a group that has been the central arch of the GOP coalition in presidential elections since the late 1960s.

Over the last year, Clinton has laid siege to these voters--and in the process launched an ambitious drive to reconfigure the politics of family. For decades, social conservatives have defined “pro-family” policy through two priorities: cutting government and taxes and restoring “traditional values” on such issues as abortion, gay rights and school prayer.

But since mid-1995, Clinton has systematically worked to build a competing pro-family agenda that uses government to provide parents with a seemingly bottomless array of “tools”--from a V-chip to screen out offensive television programming to the regulations he proposed last week to restrict tobacco advertising and marketing aimed at teenagers.

Some of Clinton’s family-friendly initiatives--like the distribution of anti-truancy manuals or cell phones for Neighborhood Watch groups--have been so slight as to verge on self-parody. But even many conservatives agree that, taken together, Clinton’s family agenda constitutes the most intellectually coherent effort yet by Democrats to reclaim the “pro-family” label from the right.

“Clearly the Clinton effort . . . is the most serious effort to date by the Democrats to compete for this territory,” said Gary Bauer, president of the Family Research Council, a leading social conservative organization.

And public opinion surveys indicate a payoff for the president. A new Gallup Poll showed that the public now identifies the GOP as the “party of family values” by only the slightest of margins, 45% to 41%.

Clinton’s progress at compiling a family agenda that relies on activist government establishes a fundamental contrast with Dole--who is attempting to beat back the Democratic incursion by arguing that the best way to help harried parents is to reduce government, particularly by cutting taxes.

The election could turn on the results of this argument--with singles now reliably Democratic, Dole cannot hope to win if he does not carry married voters, who make up about two-thirds of the electorate. A recent poll found Clinton leading Dole by 22% among singles and battling Dole to a dead heat among married voters--who have given at least a plurality to every GOP presidential nominee since 1968.

“I’m not sure the Republicans have understood until just recently that there was now a competition underway for these kinds of voters,” said Bauer. “But if, in fact, on election day, Clinton can close the gap among married voters, he will have won the election.”

Clinton long has tried to overcome Republican advantages on values-related issues. But he turned greater attention toward the nation’s 53 million married couples--particularly the 25 million with children under 18--last year, as he struggled to recover from the 1994 GOP landslide.

Among Clinton’s advisors, Mark Penn, the campaign pollster, played the key conceptual role of the Clinton focus on families, while Dick Morris, the shadowy strategist for the president’s reelection drive, has been central in refining the concept into specific policy initiatives.

From a political perspective, the agenda rests on two central insights. One lies in the definition of the nation’s key swing voters. While Clinton’s 1992 advisors largely viewed high-school-educated, working-class white voters as the pivotal group who decides elections, Penn argued that married people with children are the most important constituency the president must attract to expand his support from the 43% vote he received four years ago.

Second, Clinton’s new strategists concluded that they could appeal to these families not through the conservative social issues that Republicans stressed but with targeted government programs meant to address concerns more immediate to their daily lives.

“These are the basic questions parents with kids are asking,” said Penn. “The Republicans are back 15 years, and they aren’t talking about the actual concerns of suburban families today.”

From modest beginnings, Clinton’s family agenda has spiraled in half a dozen different directions. Almost without exception, his proposals have allowed him to engage daily concerns of parents--without spending much money or establishing specific new programs.

Down one path has been a series of initiatives meant to help parents better balance family and work--a subject that aides said Clinton will hit hard in his acceptance speech Thursday night. In 1993, Clinton signed the family and medical leave act that requires employers to provide workers with unpaid leave to care for a new child. In late June, he proposed expanding the law to allow parents to take leave to attend to family obligations like school conferences, and to give workers greater freedom to convert overtime pay into compensatory time.

Down a second path, Clinton has offered a sequence of ideas aimed at parents concerned about the impact of popular culture on their children--among them the V-chip, the new limits on tobacco ads and his successful lobbying of television executives to increase the amount of children’s educational programming.

A third group of proposals concerns crime, particularly the administration’s gun-control initiatives. On Monday, Clinton proposed barring those convicted of domestic abuse from purchasing handguns. Yet another group of initiatives concerns the nexus between education and crime. Under this heading have come his efforts to promote school uniforms, local curfews for teenagers and a pilot program for tracking gun sales to children.

Even Clinton’s budget priorities have bent toward this current: his major tax proposals (credits for middle-class families with young children, deductions and credits for college tuition) target the concerns of parents.

Even some sympathetic observers, such as David Blankenhorn, president of the centrist Institute for American Values, said there is a “thinness” to some of these proposals that reduces them to little more than gestures of empathy.

But Blankenhorn gives Clinton points for responding to “kitchen-table issues” worrying most parents and “taking a realistic and pragmatic view” of what government can do to help.

Dole aides offered a less equivocal verdict. Disparaging Clinton’s initiatives as a swarm of “itty-bitty little pinpricks,” Dole advisors are trying to woo back married voters around two main themes. One is to frame Dole’s domestic agenda--particularly his calls for a 15% cut in income tax rates, a $500-per-child tax credit and school vouchers--as a means of restoring to parents resources and authority now arrogated by government.

Strikingly, when he announced his tax-cut plan in early August, Dole argued that allowing parents to keep more of their own money would give families more freedom to decide whether both parents need to work.

Second, Dole is courting married voters with a powerful critique of modern American culture. Anchoring that argument are Dole’s criticisms of Hollywood movies, his denunciation of “permissive and destructive behavior” in modern life that he has linked to the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and--most important--his sustained attack on Clinton for his record on fighting drugs.

On Monday, Dole unveiled a new ad that lashes Clinton for the doubling of teenage drug use that has occurred under his presidency. “We have a president who exhorts parents to get their kids in bed by 11,” says John Buckley, the Dole campaign’s communications director, “but hasn’t exhorted kids not to use drugs.”

For these contrasting visions of family-friendly policy, the pivotal audience could be married women--particularly those who work. In the past, Democrats have dominated with single women, while Republicans have run best with homemakers. By emphasizing all the issues that speak to the anxieties of parents balancing home and work, Clinton has been running unusually well with married mothers who work outside the home--a group likely to be firmly in sight when Tipper Gore and Hillary Rodham Clinton step to the podium tonight.