Earth to Planet Obama: Help the kids

CHICAGO — The thousands of my colleagues swarming Sen. Barack Obama's hometown were looking forward to the Democratic nominee's foreign-policy views as shaped by an eight-day tour through two war zones.

In reality, the man-who-will-be president can talk about anything he wants. This is Obama's world, the rest of us orbit it.

He deserves the status. Obama is a pragmatic and deep long-range thinker, qualities in desperate need as America tackles a staggering $482 billion deficit, troop withdrawals in Iraq and buildups in Afghanistan. Obama is the one I want playing nuclear chicken with Iran, not the other guy, he of the short fuse.

All in due time. But there is another issue on Planet Obama that I would like to see engagement on: the plight of U.S. children.

While newspaper scribes, broadcasters and bloggers waited for Obama, my attention was turned briefly by a powerful national report ranking states by the well-being of their children.

States doing the best are New Hampshire, Minnesota, Massachusetts and Connecticut. States with the worst outcomes are New Mexico, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

Washington state ranks 11th, placing our efforts closer to something akin to success. We're doing well. Last year, the state ranked 13th among the 50 states. In 2003-2004 our ranking was 17th.

Ten benchmarks were used by the Annie E. Casey Foundation to produce an overall rank for the 2008 Kids Count Data Book: percent of low birth-weight babies; infant mortality rate; child death rate; rate of teen deaths by accident, homicide and suicide; teen birthrate; percent of children living with parents who do not have full-time, year-round employment; percent of teens who are high-school dropouts; percent of teens not attending school and not working; percent of children in poverty; and percent of families with children headed by a single parent.

Washington measured well against the national average on all 10. Nationwide, the rate of low-birthweight babies is the highest in four decades. We're well below the national average. The same with infant mortality and high-school dropouts.

Urban centers presented a darker portrait and Seattle is no exception. Just over a third of the city's children live in families where no parent has full-time, year-round employment. The national average is 33 percent. Nearly a third of Seattle's children live in single-parent households. Racial disparities glare throughout.

We need a President Obama to deal with all of this. If he could focus his pragmatism and uncanny ability to call us all to account, this country could see a reform of children's services the way President Clinton transformed welfare.

No need for a cadre of high-paid advisers to map it out. The Casey Foundation offers a credible gold standard, backed by $3 billion in assets and a mission to improve the lives of disadvantaged children. The nonprofit, created by UPS magnate Jim Casey, is the largest child-welfare philanthropy in the world.

The confluence of a powerful foundation and a White House sympathetic to domestic issues such as child welfare could do wonders. The threat of a looming veto has kept some of the best legislative initiatives trapped in Congress. Bills extending assistance to foster-care youths beyond age 18 and offering unemployment insurance to the disproportionate number of women forced out of the work force for compelling family reasons are all things that will improve the lives of children.

The next president must carry a dual passion for foreign and domestic issues. Leaving Paris for London last week, Obama showed he's trying to strike a balance.

"One of the values of this trip for me was to remind me of what this campaign should be about," he told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. "It's so easy to get sucked into day-to-day, tit-for-tat thinking, finding some clever retort for whatever comment your opponent made. And then I think I'm not doing my job, which should be to raise up some big important issues."

He's right. The 186,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan constitute hefty challenges. But on any give day, 500,000 children languish in foster care around the country. That qualifies as a big issue, too.

Lynne K. Varner's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is lvarner@seattletimes.com; for a podcast Q&A with the author, go to www.seattletimes.com/edcetera