Fathers Vote Too!

Republicans at the pinnacle, nowhere to go but down?

by Roger F. Gay

In their 2000 national campaign, the Democratic Party included an anti-father plank in their platform. Fathers rights advocates ran a nation-wide get-out-the-vote campaign; "Fathers Vote Too!" Many fathers chose to vote against Democrats in the most powerful way, by voting Republican. Now the Republican Party must decide its own fate. They cannot avoid responsibility for domestic policy, and they can only remain in power with dads' help.

Democrats maintain an advantage among women, not because all women everywhere are socialists or Nazis, nor because of anti-male political positioning. They do so because some "women's groups" have long sought control of the Democratic Party. They are partisan loyalists who will not change sides and will continue to influence a marginal fraction of votes cast by women.

Given that this fix is a constant in our political culture, Republicans cannot win elections without at least an equal advantage among men. They received that support and won control of the White House. In addition, they have an impressive advantage in state governments throughout the country. Why then have they chosen to throw it all away?

Bush's cabinet choices have been people who espouse religious conservative views while supporting every feminazi position except pro-abortion. That character has been evident since the confirmation hearings of John Ashcroft. Let's not overlook the nominee that Pat Robertson went to the wall for, Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson. Thompson is destined to head the most powerful social services organization in government: the Department of Health and Human Services. It is a poignant fact that no great groundswell of opposition to the Wisconsin welfare reform model has emerged from the left.

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Thompson is called a "pioneer in welfare reform." Although he no more invented welfare reform than Al Gore invented the Internet, Wisconsin has probably shifted further from traditional American welfare programs to a welfare state than anywhere else in America. They have, to steal a familiar phrase, almost completely ended welfare "as we know it." The spearhead of this shift, the "child support enforcement" program is based on federal law that enjoys bi-partisan support.

It must be understood that child support reforms did little to change policies that already existed in relation to families who receive welfare, as we knew it. The primary thrust of the reforms was to place family law generally under federal bureaucratic control, breaking out of the established boundary of welfare programs for the poor.

The federal child support enforcement program was initiated by the efforts of Senator Russell Long in the mid-1970s. His father was relatively famous -- I should say notorious. Huey "Kingfish" Long was a Senator and Governor of Louisiana. He was well known for corruption and direct connections to organized crime, even in his day. National Socialists in North America called him, "The closest we've ever gotten to a genuine Folkish revolutionary leader."

From Senator Long, the cause passed largely to Democrats Tom Downey and Dan Rostenkowski. Rostenkowski lost re-election in a campaign finance scandal and was later convicted. Downey became a familiar face on C-SPAN, especially for his work on child support in the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Human Resources. His frequent loud and venomous attacks against fathers did not serve to keep him in office. The Democrat was replaced by a Republican --from New York.

Leftists recognized a problem in pushing for federal intrusion into family life during the Reagan years when welfare reform blossomed. They packaged proposals in the conservative rhetoric of "traditional American values" and "personal responsibility." They created a new public enemy known as the "deadbeat dad" and promised taxpayers great savings by "forcing fathers to take responsibility for their children."

Since then, every single bit of propaganda used to promote the reforms has been disproved by competent and credible research and contradicted by experience. Common sense is better than political propaganda. If you suspected that fathers are good people on the whole, you were right.

Federal child support reform provided taxpayers with a bill for an extra $4 billion a year, and it funded development of a new database system for tracking intimate details of the lives of every American adult (not just "deadbeat dads"). This is social management similar to that of the KGB and Hitler, with the efficiency of modern computers and a 50,000 strong human workforce.

Child support reform has not been for children, and judging by the level and character of complaints, the new system is frustrating and angering many women too. It started as nothing more than a trick to increase pork barrel spending, concentrate power in the federal government, to create several new profit making operations taking advantage of human misery, and it has been accompanied by a profound loss of basic human rights.

Why should Republicans continue to support these policies after they have been exposed? One Republican quipped; "What are fathers going to do, vote for Democrats?" Republicans need to understand the math. If just six hundred fewer had chosen to vote Republican in Florida, George W. Bush would not be president. That is only about 0.02 percent of the men who voted in Florida. There are of course, a great many more men who are fathers and potential fathers.

Seeing both parties as equally corrupt and abusive, fathers can do just as much damage by not voting for candidates of either party. Third party candidates are actively courting the father-vote. Recent history has shown that a third party movement can suddenly emerge in a big way, and do nothing less than "spoil" an election. With around half the nation's voters sitting on the sidelines already, the potential exists for something more.

Roger F. Gay is the lead researcher in Project for the Improvement of Child Support Litigation Technology, a research project focused on the science and design of child support guidelines. Since it began in 1989, the project has developed an in-depth understanding of child support decision-making and contributed, often with strong criticism, to the process of state review of child support guidelines. Commentary, testimony, and research reports are available at the project web site. E-Mail Roger at picslt@mail.lawguru.com