by David L. Kirp
Aside from baby-kissing photo ops, candidates typically ignore children's needs, and that's been true in the 2008 presidential race. The only Republican candidate with a track record to speak of is Mitt Romney, and it's not an encouraging one – as Massachusetts governor, he vetoed preschool legislation. The Democrats don't look much better. Although Bill Richardson and John Edwards backed preschool initiatives in the past, only Hillary Clinton has promoted early education as a federal priority. Otherwise the silence has been deafening.
That's misguided policy thinking and bad politics as well.
More begets more, skill begets skill, Nobel Prize winning economist James Heckman points out – the foundation for a child's life is formed during the earliest years. A Science-Based Framework for Early Childhood Policy, a new report from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard, uses neuroscience and genetics research to reach the same conclusion. Yet kids get less public support than any other age group.
The standard rationale is that, because young children don't vote and don't consume, they don't matter. But there's considerable evidence that this is shortsighted – a kids-first candidate can win votes, while one who's tagged as indifferent to children's concerns will suffer.
Polls and focus groups consistently find that politicians should make children's issues a priority. Kids' well-being is a gut-level concern, most immediately for parents and grandparents but for the general public as well. America should be a good steward, focus groups report, for this generation doesn't want to be the first in the nation's history to leave its children worse off.
Recent polls in two early primary states, South Carolina and Iowa, show why it's smart politics to speak out for children. In conservative South Carolina, 94 percent of likely voters want presidential candidates to lay out a detailed agenda for meeting children's needs. Majorities and near-majorities of Democrats (51%) and independents (46%) say they'd change their minds and support a different candidate based on children's issues, and so would a significant share of Republicans (38%). An Iowa poll finds an overwhelming majority of both Democrats (94%) and Republicans (82%) saying that issues of child well-being like child health care, child abuse prevention and education strongly influence how they'll vote.
Politicians can win by making kids' issues their priority. Consider the remarkable career of Jim Hunt, North Carolina's governor for sixteen years. Hunt was adept at transforming his passion for children into an effective strategy, turning a political triumph into an enduring change in how government does business. "Every child will arrive in school healthy and prepared for success," he pledged. "This was my top priority for the entire time I was in office. We are on a mission for little children." Hunt's Smart Start program has become a national model. Seventy percent of North Carolina's voters, Republicans and Democrats alike, endorse it, and when Hunt left office in 2000 his approval rating was comparably stratospheric.
What's more interesting, voters sometimes reject a candidate who comes off as indifferent to kids' needs. That's the bottom line from the 2004 race in Texas' congressional district 17, one of the nation's most lopsidedly Republican. More than 60 percent of the voters are registered Republicans, 64 percent label themselves conservatives while only 12 percent say they're liberals. In 2004 President Bush carried the district with nearly 70 percent of the vote – no surprise, since Crawford, the home of the president's ranch, is located there. But the Democratic candidate, Chet Edwards ran 37 percent ahead of the national ticket and won the seat. Kids' health concerns are the main reason why.
The proudest boast of GOP candidate Arlene Wohlgemuth was that, as a state senator, she engineered massive cuts in the state's health and human services programs, saving Texas taxpayers $1 billion. But Edwards turned this braggadocio into Wohlgemuth's biggest vulnerability. Those cuts lopped 150,000 youngsters from the rolls of the Children's Health Insurance Program, generally known as CHIP, and half a million more lost dental and eye care. One simple campaign message, showing a working mother worrying about what she'd do if her child got sick, unhinged Wohlgemuth.
"Children were never my primary concern," she said, a statement she came to regret. Eleven percent of the voters—enough to swing the election—said that her record on children made up their minds, and one-quarter of Edwards' supporters had children's needs foremost in mind. "CHIP was the issue that set the table," says Edwards. "It defined everything that came later. I never would have won without it."
The focus groups, the polls and the political stories – taken together, they argue that candidates are wise to push for quality pre-k and universal child health care.... "What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, the community must want for all its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy." John Dewey, America's foremost education reformer, said that more than a century ago and suitably updated, it would make a decent line for a 2008 stump speech.
