A revealing article in this month’s Mother Jones magazine exposes the elitism and cynicism of the liberals. In their hearts, they really believe they should have the authority to direct our lives and spend our money, and they disdain the democratic process which rejects their plans to build a more expensive bureaucracy.
Mother Jones assembled and recorded a conversation among seven San Francisco liberals. The star of this performance was Congressman George Miller (D-CA), who is chair of the Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families and one of the principal architects of the daycare bill that Congress passed last October.
This particular group was assembled to brainstorm the question of why it was so difficult politically to pass a daycare bill in Congress. It was hard for these out-of-touch liberals to face up to the reality that the American people simply do not want Uncle Sam to take over the responsibility and cost of raising preschool children.
This conversation makes clear that Congressman Miller knew, at the same time all the hoopla about the alleged “daycare crisis” was going on, that there was no public demand for a child care bill. He also knew that the alleged demand we heard about was manufactured out of whole cloth by liberal special-interest groups.
Here are Miller’s own words as published by Mother Jones: “I spent eight years in getting the child-care bill passed in Congress, and at its zenith, there was never a child-care movement in the country. There was a coalition of child-advocacy groups, and a few large international unions that put up hundreds of thousands of dollars, and we created in the mind of the leadership of the Congress that there was a child-care movement — but there wasn’t a parents’ movement.”
Starting in January 1988, Miller and his liberal friends in Congress and in the media kept up a steady drumbeat of bleeding-heart demands for the establishment of a new federal daycare bureaucracy with billions of dollars of taxpayer financing. For three years, the television networks aired blatantly biased propaganda calling for federal financing, regulation, supervision and control of preschool children under a new Federal Commissioner.
Now we know that, all the while, the insiders knew that the only people seeking this appropriation were the unions and the advocacy groups that had a financial interest in the legislation because they were expecting to load their pals onto the payroll as bureaucrats, administrators, providers, regulators, and researchers. The Children’s Defense Fund, of course, was leading the pack.
One of the participants in Mother Jones’s roundtable suggested that the reason the Congressmen didn’t hear any demands from parents for federal daycare was the inaccessibility of the political process. Miller pooh-poohed this, saying, “No, I think the political process is very accessible. I’m telling you, I will have town-hall meetings in front of hundreds of people this week. These issues won’t be raised!”
Congressman Miller even admitted in this conversation that the American people are not asking for a parental leave bill, which the feminists are pushing so hard in the current session. He said a recent poll indicates that only 13 percent of Americans even know that a parental leave bill is being considered by Congress.
But even though parents weren’t asking the Federal Government to plunge into daycare, Miller and the liberals tried to force federal daycare on them anyway because they know that building a new federal program requires developing a middle-class constituency for a federal handout (called an “entitlement”).
But that’s not the way Miller and the other Big Daddies of Federal Baby-Sitting explained it to the voters. Oh, no; they based their public arguments on the urgent need to help “the poor.”
Now Miller is bitter that the bill didn’t turn out the way it was planned. “The benefits all went to poor people,” he said. “And the middle class woke up and found that after they waged the battle for eight years, there’s nothing there for them.” That spoiled the plan of the liberals, because now there is no middle-class constituency demanding a bigger slice of the pie.
So, the next, move of these liberal plotters is to demand “universal health care” for children even though they admitted in this conversation that “stopping smoking, drinking, any y kind of drug use, and reducing stress during pregnancy is far more important for the well-being of children prenatally and postnatally, than what happens in a doctor’s office once every couple of months. And that isn’t going to be accomplished by national health care.”
But the liberals will press for national health care for children anyway because, as one of the participants said, that would “make a whole lot of other things possible ideologically that weren’t before.” Children, it seems, are just pawns in the political game.