ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, January 23, 1996 TAG: 9601230054
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAUL A. GIGOT
HILLARY Rodham Clinton says she wants to talk less about her credibility and more about her new book. But after reading her book, I wonder if that's possible. The book is her biggest fib yet.
``It Takes a Village'' is about children, though only in the sense that Huck Finn is about a rafting trip. Her book is in fact one of the slyest re-election manifestos ever written. It's a political platform wrapped in Dr. Spock, T. Berry Brazelton and Julie Andrews. Clinton is on a crusade to preserve the welfare state as we know it, and children are her shock troops.
This is not to say there aren't many things to like in her book. One of its striking features is how much could have been written by Bill Bennett. It reads like her own personal ``Book of Virtues.'' She rebukes ``nostalgia merchants'' who talk about ``family values'' even as she steals most of their arguments.
The first lady deplores divorce, praises two-parent families, extols religion, denounces TV sex and violence, endorses sexual abstinence through age 21 and hails personal responsibility. Joycelyn Elders was not invited to contribute a chapter, needless to say. She even has nice words for Promise Keepers, the group that unnerves many feminists because it stresses male obligations to wives and kids. A flap has erupted over whether Clinton should have acknowledged the ghostwriting aid of Barbara Feinman for this book. But that's nothing compared with how much she owes intellectually to Dan and Marilyn Quayle.
It's always possible the first lady has come to believe all of this. She has long had her spiritual side. But it might be more credible if this traditionalist rhetoric didn't look like a gauzy cover for the expansion of state power she tried to pursue when she really had clout - that is, during the Clinton presidency B.G. (Before Gingrich).
Just reading her book, you wouldn't know there was such a time. Her pal Ira Magaziner doesn't rate a mention. Health reform appears only as the general, and dubious, lament that the United States trails much of the world in ``affordable health care.'' Her account of all of this is about as complete as it was on cattle futures and Castle Grande.
Take one of her ideas that did pass in 1993: the Vaccines for Children (VFC) entitlement. Her book gives it credit for providing ``free vaccines to needy children through private doctors as well as clinics.'' And, of course, ``these advances are already under grave threat from budget cuts.''
In fact, VFC has been a parody of liberal reform from the start. It was sold to solve a problem that didn't exist, because U.S. childhood immunization rates were already near 90 percent. Poor kids could qualify for shots through Medicaid and the ``317'' program. The problem for the rest wasn't the cost of vaccines, but parental neglect or oversight.
Yet VFC eliminated the private market for vaccines and handed federal control to an agency that had never managed anything like it before. Robert Goldberg of Brandeis University estimates that by 1998 the program will have wasted $7 billion. Dale Bumpers, the Senate Democrat from Arkansas, calls VFC a disaster that ``will not immunize one additional kid.''
``It Takes a Village'' somehow overlooks Dale Bumpers. It never even hints that the program is controversial. Instead, Mrs. Clinton praises Betty Bumpers, the senator's wife, for her work in the private sector on childhood immunization! The first lady doesn't lack for brass.
All of this makes it hard to believe Clinton when she now says, on her book tour, that government should play just a ``relatively minor role.'' It's more likely she's following the counsel of her friend and mentor, Marian Wright Edelman, who invented the children's gambit.
As Mickey Kaus reported in The New Republic, Edelman says she founded the Children's Defense Fund in the 1970s because ``[w]hen you talked about poor people or black people, you faced a shrinking audience. ... I got the idea that children might be a very effective way to broaden the base for change.''
The strategy has always worked, adding federal entitlements in the name of children even in the Reagan years. The childhood-vaccines idea - which also came from Edelman - was supposed to have eased the political path for HillaryCare.
Now Edelman is playing the kids card again, this time to stop Republican reforms, which she says are ``really quite evil.'' She and her allies spread the word that somehow the 50 states would do worse by children than the current federally run welfare system. Not long after her blistering public letter of complaint, Bill Clinton changed his mind and decided to veto welfare reform, notwithstanding his promise of 1992. In her book, Hillary Clinton manages to deplore out-of-wedlock births without even mentioning welfare policy.
More and more, the Clintons' re-election strategy seems based on the assumption that Americans have memories that are as poor as theirs. So much of this administration seems to have happened so long ago that a major duty of journalists this year will be to remind people what it was really like. Judging by Hillary Clinton's book, this is going to be a full-time job.
Paul A. Gigot writes for The Wall Street Journal.
- Dow Jones
LENGTH: Medium: 94 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: KEVIN KRENECK/Ft. Worth Star-Telegramby CNB