ANALYSIS by
Tom Curry
MSNBC
Jan. 18 — Bill Bradley knows that an emotional
symbol can help launch a political crusade.
Noting that the case of 6-year-old Cuban émigré
Elian Gonzalez “has riveted the nation’s
attention,” the Democratic presidential
contender called on Americans to use some of
the determination generated by Elian’s plight to
eliminate child poverty in America.
“IF ELIAN GONZALEZ can be an inspiration to do
that, then I think it will have a much longer-term effect than
just simply one tragic incident,” Bradley said in Monday
night’s Democratic debate in Des Moines, Iowa.
But Bradley and others who want to start a new
crusade to abolish poverty in America have no Elian
Gonzalez, no personal rallying point.
American politics in recent years demands what
Hollywood knows as “a story line,” a personal catastrophe,
a suffering victim or a bereaved next-of-kin to pique the
public interest and bring tears to one’s eyes.
To be sure, thousands of suffering children can be
found in America: some who are abused by their parents or
ill-treated by the foster care system.
Millions are born to single parents who are struggling to
make ends meet. The Census Bureau says that children who
live with a single mother have a poverty rate of 55 percent,
more than five times the rate for children in married-couple
families.
ENGAGING THE EMOTIONS
But Elian Gonzales has succeeded in doing what
children living in poverty often can’t seem to do: He has
engaged the sympathies of editorial writers and TV and
radio talk show producers.
You know when such a case has hit home when the
central figure suddenly is referred to by his or her first name.
“Elian” has passed this threshold.
Something similar happened with “Megan’s law,” the
1996 federal statute that requires state authorities to notify
communities when convicted sex offenders come to live in
their town. The bill was named after Megan Kanka, a
7-year-old girl who had been killed by a convicted sex
offender who had moved to her neighborhood in Hamilton
Township, N.J.
FDR DIDN’T NEED SYMBOLS
It was not always this way. In 1937 President Franklin
Roosevelt issued a ringing call to action on the unfinished
agenda of the New Deal. “Here is one-third of a nation
ill-nourished, ill-clad, ill-housed,” Roosevelt declared. “Here
are thousands upon thousands of children who should be at
school, working at mines and mills.”
FDR didn’t mention any particular child. He didn’t say,
“tonight, in Camden, New Jersey, Peggy Smith is walking
home after a 12-hour shift at the factory. Peggy is only 10
years old.”
The conditions Roosevelt described in 1937 were
familiar enough to enough voters — they didn’t require
extra added emotion to be believable.
And by the etiquette of FDR’s day, using a child as an
emotional prop for a speech would have been considered
maudlin and in poor taste.
Similarly, when President Lyndon Johnson launched the
war on poverty in an address to a joint session of Congress
on Jan. 8, 1964, he didn’t use any anecdotes about a little
boy going without food in Appalachia or a little girl suffering
in an urban slum.
He declared, “This administration today, here and now,
declares unconditional war on poverty in America. I urge
this Congress and all Americans to join with me in that
effort. It will not be a short or easy struggle, no single
weapon or strategy will suffice, but we shall not rest until
that war is won. The richest nation on earth can afford to
win it.”
A social evil exists and the powers of the federal
government should be used boldly to uproot that evil — that
was FDR’s political creed, it was Johnson’s and it is
Bradley’s today.
ROOSEVELT AS BRADLEY’S MODEL
Here is how Bradley put it when he unveiled his
anti-poverty proposal last October: “The task of
presidential leadership is to challenge ourselves to do things
we weren’t sure we could do. Things that we know we
want to do, things that deep down we know we need to do,
but that we are not sure how to do.”
He consciously evoked FDR as his model: “We set the
goal, and then we figure out how to get there. ... I think this
is what Franklin Roosevelt had in mind when he looked out
at America and saw that one-third of our nation was ill-clad,
ill-fed, and ill-housed.”
Bradley said that Roosevelt “wasn’t sure exactly how
to do it, he didn’t know exactly how to put food on those
tables, but he knew that we had to do it, and the first step
was saying so.”
So Bradley, the ideological heir of FDR and Johnson,
proposes to launch a crusade to eradicate poverty among
children.
His proposals, which range from increasing collection
of child support payments from fathers to new federal
spending on day care centers would cost, he estimates, $10
billion a year.
It might seem that the political tides are running against
such a proposal. The election of a Republican Congress in
1994 came about partly because of increasing voter
skepticism about federal spending programs that did not
seem to solve social ills.
BRADLEY DISSENTS ON WELFARE
In 1996, by overwhelming margins Congress passed an
overhaul of the welfare system that in effect told the single
mother, “after being on welfare for five years, you must go
to work, even if you’re unskilled and all you can get is a
low-wage job with little prospect of advancement.”
Bradley voted against that bill, calling it “a poor
person’s nightmare” that would lead to “chaos” as state
governments tried to manage assistance programs for poor
people.
But perhaps there is broader support for a Bradley-led
war on poverty than one might suspect.
The National Opinion Research Center at the
University of Chicago conducted in-person interviews with
more than 2,800 Americans last August and found that
nearly 63 percent thought that too little government money
was being spent on assistance to the poor; only 11 percent
thought too much was being spent.
Next Monday night, Bradley will get his first reading on
how Americans are responding to his old-style Democratic
call to action as Iowa voters take part in their state
caucuses.