Now that millions of words have been devoted to assessing the mixed legacy of Ronald Reagan's presidency, let's take a few hundred to recall one of the attempts by liberals to respond and counter Reagan and his strategies. Since his anti-government philosophy is as alive as Reagan is dead, these responses are also still very much in play.
The most resilient of these responses, one that gained traction late in Reagan's second term, is made up of language and policies that fall under the rubric of "Kids as Politics," to borrow the title of an influential 1987 memo by pollster Stanley B. Greenberg. (I had a yellowing photocopy of this memo in my files for years before deciding just a few weeks ago that I could safely throw it out; fortunately, like everything else, it's now on the web.)
It's hard to imagine now, but twenty years ago the idea that children could serve as a political theme was fresh and could even be controversial. When Bruce Babbitt, then governor of Arizona, devoted his entire 1985 State of the State address to children, he was mocked by his state's major paper for feeding the voters "quiche" and evading the "meat and potatoes" of Arizona politics: dams and development. The newspaper was playing on the popularity at the time of an offensive book called Real Men Don't Eat Quiche. In the early 1980s, when only two women served in the Senate and two as governors, "children's issues" still belonged on the feminine margin of politics.
Greenberg, in his memo two years later, admitted as much. "There is a temptation," he wrote, "to view kids as soft, secondary and timeless... Candidates care about kids but also about motherhood, and few candidates have ever won office on such a platform."
"But 'kids' in the present period are different," Greenberg argued. "When candidates talk about kids, they are talking about the fundamental economic and social terrain on which Democrats must run." Improvement in the living conditions and future prospects for children was not the only or even the primary goal. Rather, kids would help Americans "rediscover government." "Kids bring the Democrats back into the homes of average voters, speaking about economic issues of a fundamental sort. ... Kids and public policy are a natural and credible combination."
Kids could serve this grownup purpose because "kids are an umbrella, under which white working and middle class voters and black and Hispanic voters can find a common home. Kids are a common currency across race and class." In other words, kids would be the key to the universalist vision of government based on programs that reach "a huge cross-class constituency," in the words of sociologist and later Greenberg collaborator Theda Skocpol.
Twenty years after the Babbitt speech, how has kids-as-politics fared? Measured purely by governmental response, it has been a surprising success. In 1999, the Congressional Budget Office added up all the changes in spending through tax credits and entitlement programs for low-income families with children since 1984, the year before Babbitt. To eliminate the effects of population growth and other distractions, the CBO looked at what spending in 1999 would have been under the policies of 1984, and compared it to what was actually spent that year. The difference was $45 billion a year -- $5.6 billion under 1984 rules, and $51.7 billion under the 1999 rules.
This dramatic change in federal investment in children, little noticed at the time, had two major and several minor components. The major components were a gradual but massive expansion of Medicaid to cover poor children, near-poor children, and their parents, rather than just welfare recipients; and expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit, notably in the Tax Reform Act of 1986 and the Clinton budget bill of 1993. The other components included the State Children's Health Insurance Program; increased child-care spending under the welfare reform bill; and the original version of the child tax credit, which offered $500 per child and was not refundable for families without tax liability. This study did not take into account discretionary spending, such as a 500 percent increase in Head Start funding between 1984 and 1999, and it does not include subsequent increases in the child tax credit, which will be $1,000 per child in 2006 and is now partially refundable to low-income families.
Another way to assess the policy achievements of kids-as-politics is to score the 1991 report of the National Commission on Children, chaired by Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV. The bipartisan commission's great success was in forcing social conservatives to acknowledge the need for economic supports for children. But the commission's call for a $1,000 refundable child tax credit, a children's health insurance program, improved child support enforcement, more investment in child care, and increased funding for Head Start were graciously dismissed as unrealistic because of the $52 billion price tag. Nonetheless, almost every one of those recommendations has now been implemented or is on track. (The State Children's Health Insurance Program -- S-CHIP -- falls far short of the universal program for kids and pregnant women the commission proposed, but S-CHIP combined with the Medicaid expansion has given some creative governors the means to finance something close to 100% coverage for kids.)
In 1984, children's programs amounted to little more than a minimalist safety net tied to a welfare system that reached only families well below the poverty line; they now incorporate a full range of programs, which are largely tied to work, reach well up into the working poor, and are almost as untouchable as the retirees' programs, Medicare and Social Security. This is a transformation in social priorities as significant as the Great Society, and it is mostly for the better. Meanwhile, programs for working-age adults without children -- who make up the vast majority of the uninsured, for example -- are virtually non-existent. The conservative agenda often seems to cut carefully around children and children's programs as around paper dolls, leaving them untouched while ripping to shreds the general economic security programs.
This is not to say that these are golden days for American children. The child poverty rate began to rise again in 2000 and has kept going up; by many other measures children are doing worse or not doing as well as the level of investment would lead one to expect. That's simply because the larger economic forces -- the erosion of the value of the minimum wage; the increase in unstable, low-wage, low-benefit jobs; radical income inequality; the collapse of unemployment insurance and other safety net programs; and the time pressures of balancing work and family -- are so much bigger than the meliorative effect of these government programs.
And this is where kids-as-politics has fallen short. It failed to meet the promise of raising "economic issues of a fundamental sort." Rather, it has allowed government to build a system of supports for children that is totally separate from the economic questions and does not even acknowledge the larger economic trends that hurt children. Children are protected almost as economic innocents. They are not responsible for their parents' economic circumstances, but their parents and other adults are held entirely responsible for their own. What Greenberg argued was a strength of kids-as-politics -- that "kids are a common currency across race and class" -- seems now to be a weakness. Because kids are perceived as transcending race and class, they allow politicians of the right to talk about children and appear compassionate while entirely evading the realities of class and economics that undergird the condition of children.
Nor has kids-as-politics succeeded in helping Americans "rediscover government," for the same reasons. "Compassionate conservatism" redefines government as providing for those who cannot provide for themselves, principally children. But government in this view has no role in creating the conditions under which families can thrive, as individuals can build for themselves the base of economic and personal security that will enable them to form and raise healthy families. Thus these carefully segregated children's programs can appear protected, even as government as a whole is denigrated and stripped of resources and capacity. (And it is all an illusion, of course: When federal deficits approach 7% of GDP, [as is projected to happen in 15 years], then unless taxes are raised, either these programs will be cut or politicians will be forced to choose between them and the programs for retirees.)
This may have been simply a tactical failure. Perhaps liberals, as so often happens, got caught up in the programmatic details of their success, and forgot to make the connections that Greenberg was urging them to make to more fundamental economic and political questions. Or perhaps it could be argued that kids-as-politics worked beautifully under Clinton, but like everything else since 2001, was perverted into a form that served the short-term political agenda of the corporate Right.
But I think there was also a shortcoming in the underlying strategy. It assumed too much. It assumed that talking about kids would automatically lead to talking about the economy and government, without showing how that would happen. The lesson, I believe, is that if you want to talk about the economy, inequality, insecurity, and the merits of government, you have to be willing to talk about those very things, and not cloak them under a safe "umbrella" such as "kids."
Recently liberals have become entranced by the idea that we need a new "frame" for our ideas, turning in particular to the suggestions of the Berkeley linguist George Lakoff. As this process goes forward, we should remember that such framing is not new, and kids-as-politics was a pretty good one. Both its enormous successes and its glaring weakness should be well understood.
Mark Schmitt is the director of policy for the U.S. Programs of the Open Society Institute, and a former congressional staffer. His blog is The Decembrist, which can be accessed at http://markschmitt.typepad.com/decembrist.
