GOP Focus Should Be Kid Stuff

When my liberal colleagues learn I have been a registered Republican for 20 years, they look at me as if I had just been registered as a sex offender. But I have been persuaded by the GOP's traditional principles: democratic power closest to the people, checks and balances, civil liberties and equality of opportunity, family values -- a fluid society that respects the individual and fashions a path upward, based on hard work and contribution.

Those principles also include advocacy for children. Republicans understand that first and foremost, children need simply to be wanted -- and intended -- by two parents. Commitment from parents correlates closely with child health and happiness. Yet a third of California's births are to unwed mothers -- and it is not pregnant teens but adult women who account for the vast majority. And about 50% of births are unintended, according to the National Survey of Family Growth. Babies are born to women who want a teddy bear; they are the issue of men with the paternal commitment of salamanders.

Republicans have understood that "a village" cannot "raise a child" -- it takes a family. Too many Democrats view the world through the eyes of a social service establishment with a capacity to grow infinitely so that children become little more than pieces of paper sweeping across the desks of social workers.

And the history of the Republican Party gives us some cause for pride. We have opposed a large national debt, knowing that our children would be required to pay for it. We have sponsored school and other infrastructure investment and the GI Bill of Rights to give higher-education opportunity to a generation.

But something has gone terribly wrong. We have failed to live up to our commitment.

Going far beyond "limited government" principles, we have opposed the state reflexively. And we have adopted the proposition that lowering taxes stimulates the economy and generates more tax revenue. Ronald Reagan's biggest mistake was that mantra, and its result was the biggest deficit ever created.

If we were to take the percentage of adult personal income publicly invested in children in 1979 and commit the same percentage in 2003-04, we would spend more than $18 billion more for our children than Gov. Gray Davis' budget proposes.

Instead, Republican and Democrats alike are agreeing to disinvest: cuts in education, although we are already in the bottom third in spending per child, and in health care, although more than 1 million kids lack coverage.