Leaving families out: Republicans won't win debates on family matters until they stop seeing children in terms of GDP - gross domestic product

National Review, March 29, 1993 by Gary L. Bauer

Only days after outgoing Republican National Chairman Rich Bond gave an ugly and divisive speech blasting forces in the the party that he considers ugly and divisive, Republicans found themselves on the wrong side of a popular family-leave bill that steamrolled its way through Congress. To understand why the Republican Party was imprinted in hot asphalt on family leave is to understand at least part of the reason why it lost the Presidency in 1992. And it ain't because social conservatives wield too much influence in GOP circles.

Parental-leave legislation first appeared in Congress during the mid 1980s. The proposal, which required employers to provide 12 weeks of unpaid leave to workers with new babies or ill family members, was introduced by a trio of liberal Democrats (Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd, Missouri Representative William Clay, and Colorado Representative Patricia Schroeder). Not surprisingly, business opposition quickly mobilized. Arguments against government mandates on businesses were aired, often with great effect.

But while the business community's reaction served to reduce the scope of the legislation, it failed to reverse the slowly building momentum for some sort of family-leave bill. The reason was simple: family leave has symbolic power. As framed by its sponsors (and the all-too-cooperative media), the legislation pitted the interests of stingy employers against the interests of family-oriented workers. It pitted Ebenezer Scrooge against Bob Cratchit.

Opponents responded by marshalling evidence to show that most employers bear no strong resemblance to Ebenezer Scrooge and trying to reframe the battle as pitting job-creating employers against meddlesome government regulators.

This strategy, however, failed to keep the family-leave juggernaut from rolling through Congress - in large part because it failed to challenge the Left's claim to represent modern-day Bob Cratchits. Americans like business more than they like government, but they like family more than they like business. And they like family more than they hate government. In other words, it is not enough to be probusiness and anti-government: the key to winning issues that fall in the family-business-govemment nexus is to be pro-family.

After years of openly attacking the family, the Left has learned this lesson well. Following the lead of welfare-state radicals like Marian Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund, liberals increasingly are advancing a Big Government agenda under the guise of "helping families" and "investing in children."

When challenged, the liberals' family agenda has been exposed as an attempt to replace parental involvement and responsibility with government programs and/or mandates on employers. For example, conservatives won the debate over federal child-care legislation several years ago by arguing that it would be better to give overtaxed families per-child credits, and let them take care of their own childrearing responsibilities, than to tax them with one hand and offer them a narrow menu of subsidized day-care programs with the other.

Sadly, the GOP made no similar effort to seize the high ground in the family-leave debate. They played an inside-the-Beltway legislative game of Hold That Line, unaware or unconcerned that they were losing the public-relations battle outside the Beltway. Not only did this apparent indifference to family-oriented workers doom their chances for success on this issue, but it also undercut the GOP's ill-defined "family values" message and reinforced the perception that the Bush Administration was out of touch with ordinary people.

Opportunities to seize the high ground abounded. In letters and memos and meetings and articles and speeches, profamily leaders urged opponents of the bill to:

- Point out that the bill's primary purpose was to strengthen a new mother's attachment not to her baby, but to her career. (Joseph Allen, one of the proposal's architects, had expressed concern that "substantially longer leaves or leaves not based on attachment to the labor force might actually discourage women from working.")

- Call attention to a University of Connecticut study showing that since most employers do not find it economically advantageous to hire replacements for leave-taking workers, the real burden of unpaid leave is shouldered by dumped-on co-workers whose family time is threatened by the increased workload.

- Champion alternative work-and-family reforms, such as changes in the tax treatment of home-office expenses to facilitate home-based work and creation of a "parental preference" policy, which would give priority in re-hiring to mothers who leave the labor force to rear children or care for ill family members.

- Vigorously push a dramatic expansion of the Young Child Tax Credit (a little-known tax provision which provides nearly $400 in tax relief to families with newborns).

To be sure, all of these ideas carried political risks, not the least of which was the increased possibility of a grand "compromise" with leave proponents. But the alternative - allowing liberals to masquerade as the defenders of America's families - merited taking such a risk, especially since this battle over unpaid leave was viewed by both sides as a warm-up for the real battle to come over mandated paid leave.