Joe Biden, the Republicans, and Kids’ Stuff | The New YorkerJoe Biden, the Republicans, and Kids’ Stuff
As the new Administration enters its next hundred days, the child wars are likely to grow more intense and, in some quarters, more detached from reality.
“Superheroes Are Everywhere,” a children’s book celebrating ordinary people, by Vice-President Kamala Harris, has landed, like so many things in American politics today, in the middle of a very childish controversy. It began when residents of Long Beach, California, organized a toy-and-book drive for unaccompanied child immigrants being housed in a convention center there. Someone donated a copy of Harris’s book, and a journalist touring the facility saw it on a cot and took a picture of it. Partisan mayhem ensued, with headlines in the New York Post and on Fox News and complaints from sundry Republicans about an imaginary scheme to put a copy in a “welcome kit” for every immigrant, as if it were the Little Red Book, or an enrollment brochure for the Democratic Party. “Was Harris paid for these books? Is she profiting from Biden’s border crisis?” Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee, asked on Twitter.
Such fantastical pettiness is not confined to the immigration debate. As the new Administration enters its next hundred days, children are poised to be at the forefront of President Joe Biden’s agenda. The address that he delivered to a joint session of Congress last Wednesday night included the American Families Plan, a set of transformative programs, amounting to almost two trillion dollars, largely directed at children. With that move, Biden launched his next major legislative fight. In the months to come, the child wars are likely to grow more intense and, in some quarters, more detached from reality.
Biden’s proposals include one that would make pre-kindergarten programs for three- and four-year-olds universally available. “You know who else liked universal day care,” Senator Marsha Blackburn tweeted, before the speech was over. She linked to a Times story from 1974 about state-run nurseries in what was then the Soviet Union. Of CONTINUE READING: Joe Biden, the Republicans, and Kids’ Stuff | The New Yorker
