CARRIED AWAY WITH KIDS

By Richard Stengel

Viewers of the Democratic Convention can be forgiven for wondering why there wasn't a changing table on the podium or a little Gymboree just offstage. The poster child of the Democratic Convention in Chicago last week was the child, and families were valued above all else, their virtue synonymous with parenthood. The reason is elementary: the political world revolves around baby boomers and now the baby boomers' world revolves around their children.

Policies were constantly formulated in terms of tots. E. coli bacteria doesn't just kill people, it kills "children." The problem with pollution is that it poisons "playgrounds." The reason to fight crime is so that "children's lives are not shattered by violence." Look at President Clinton's initiatives: literacy for all eight-year-olds, extra money for child care, adoption tax credits, flex time and family leave. Every voter was a child once, but it's possible that voters without children might have felt a bit lonely at the family table in Chicago.

In showing off their women and children, the Democrats sought to one-up the Republicans at every opportunity. In San Diego the Republicans had more than 40 women speakers. By Wednesday evening the Democrats had almost 50. The Democrats' yuppieish keynote speaker, Evan Bayh, trumped yuppieish Republican keynoter Susan Molinari's newborn with his twins. Advantage, Chicago.

Republican images of children tend to be either the unborn variety or little Sally and Tommy holding empty bankbooks in their hands. Bob Dole always cites children in the context that it isn't fair to pass our debts on to them. The Democratic imagery in Chicago veered between idealized Gerber babies (after his speech, President Clinton played peekaboo with brother Roger's cherubic toddler) and children besieged by a host of modern threats, from TV violence to tainted burgers to weary mothers holding down three jobs. Between the White House's proposals on teen smoking and Al Gore's oath to protect children from lighting up, the Clinton-Gore team seemed to be running against the Dole-Gingrich-Joe Camel ticket.

But the shiny, Brady-ish, we-are-a-family theme was undermined in unintended and sometimes ironic ways. An opening-night song was from Rent, a musical featuring a drag queen with aids, which aggressively rejects middle-class platitudes. Jesse Jackson, who has spent three decades in public life acting almost as though he had no family, suddenly carted out some of his kids for an appearance on a Larry King show in which he praised the maternal attributes of his usually invisible wife. Gore, in his speech recalling his sister's death from lung cancer, neglected to mention that he continued to raise and sell tobacco on his Tennessee farm for several years after she died.

Even the unofficial anthem of the convention, the cheery Latin dance hit Macarena, cited by Gore and mimed by Hillary Rodham Clinton and thousands of delegates, held a hidden message. The song (which is performed in the kind of lockstep the party wanted from its delegates) is an ode to seduction. "Dale a tu cuerpo alegria, Macarena," goes the chorus in Spanish. Translation: "Give your body joy, Macarena."

While the convention enumerated the risks to children, few speakers discussed the children most at risk. Author Alex Kotlowitz, who has written extensively about the inner cities, noted that there was much talk of college tax credits and mothers being able to spend 48 hours in the hospital but not of sons and daughters of legal immigrants who will no longer be eligible for food stamps. "I've heard virtually no discussion," he said, "of the most vulnerable children among us: children growing up in poverty."

Ultimately, the convention was the Democratic apotheosis of politics by anecdote, family-style, of course. From Jesse Jackson's long account of his father's confrontation with racism to Senator Barbara Boxer's use of a videotape of the father of a boy who died from eating a tainted hamburger at Jack-in-the-Box, the Democrats created a whole convention around the sandbox of personal experience. The mere mention of mothers and fathers or sons and daughters seemed to confer an automatic halo on the speaker, virtue by association. Concern for children can mask a multitude of sins.

While the sentiment in regard to children was grand, the initiatives were legislative miniatures, like the pocket portraits of children carried by Victorian fathers. No one favors children smoking or the most impressionable among us being subjected to violence on television. The question that voters will have to decide is whether to anoint the Democrats for ideas that are worthy but without risk. Bill Clinton urged that the election be a debate about differences in ideas, but when it comes to children and families, no one can argue with him.