But in Washington, a march is never just a march, and Stand for Children provoked predictably partisan carping. A veteran of the civil-rights wars in Mississippi and an intimate of Hillary Clinton’s, Edelman, now 56, became a legend in the children’s-rights movement (she recently received her 101st honorary university degree). But both liberals and conservatives have begun to see Edelman as out of step with the issue she is most identified with: reforming the social safety net.
Back in the 1970s, she had the inspired notion that welfare programs were more likely to win political backing if they were said to be for children rather than for poor adults. ““We stand here advocating just government, a government that does not give more to those who have and less to those who have not,’’ Edelman said on the Mall. But policymakers of all stripes increasingly believe the best way to protect kids is to try to change the behavior of their parents by getting grown-ups off the dole and into a job. ““Saying that the problem of poverty is simply greedy politicians versus poor kids doesn’t work anymore,’’ says Mickey Kaus, author of ““The End of Equality,’’ a neoliberal welfare critique.
That’s not to say Edelman doesn’t have a following. Her Children’s Defense Fund has a budget of $13 million a year, and the 3,541 ““endorsing organizations’’ that signed up for the march – including the Salvation Army, the March of Dimes and the AARP – demonstrate the depth of her support. Still, in a way, the whole enterprise im- plicitly acknowledged that the children’s movement is slipping. It was a loud, buoyant effort to thrust Edelman’s liberal convictions back onto the policy stage. She invited no politicians, not even the First Lady, a former CDF board president.
That’s not entirely surprising. Last fall, when the Clinton administration was considering supporting a measure that would have cut welfare spending, Edelman published a blistering open letter in The Washington Post. A sheepish White House backed down, but with a cost: the Clintons were said to resent Edelman’s moralizing. (A spokesman for Edelman concedes relations with the White House are strained.)
Politicians weren’t the only ones not invited to the march. Some conservative family organizations were miffed that they weren’t asked even though liberal groups such as Greenpeace and the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund were. ““What does Greenpeace know about children?’’ asked Kristi Hamrick of the Family Research Council.
It wasn’t a particularly useful Beltway exchange. ““This is too polarized,’’ said Douglas Besherov, a centrist welfare analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. ““My view is not whether we have too much government or too little government, it’s that we have crummy government. Let’s fix the programs we have.’’ For all the headlines it generated, the march probably didn’t do much to move people toward that sensible center.
