Volunteer Conference Leaves Skeptics on Right, Left Unimpressed

WASHINGTON — This week’s conference on volunteering, touted by an impressive cross-section of the political establishment as an answer to the nation’s social problems, left much to be desired in the view of skeptics on the left and right.

They are critical of the ballyhooed three-day gathering in Philadelphia--not for what happened there, but for what was left out.

“A missed opportunity,” said Adam Meyerson of the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based conservative think tank.

President Clinton, who joined three of his predecessors and scores of other political leaders at the conference chaired by retired Gen. Colin L. Powell, should have used the occasion “to explain what it means to say that the era of big government is over,” Meyerson argued. “He didn’t say: ‘Here are things that are government responsibilities that government should do better, and here are things that have been government responsibilities that we should turn back to the private sector.’ It was all a big muddle.”

Among liberals, Francis Fox Piven, a professor at City University of New York and longtime advocate for the poor, contended that fostering the sense of public solidarity needed for effective volunteering “would take a lot more than this parade, at which all the big shots got to display themselves.”

At the Philadelphia event, Piven complained, the government was used to promote “a kind of cultural fiesta.”

Other liberals lamented the meetings as a reflection of a stalemated political environment, dominated by anxiety over the federal budget deficit. “Nobody wants to break the bipartisan consensus on doing nothing,” complained Ruy Teixeira, a political analyst for the Economic Policy Institute.

The harshest rhetoric about the conference came from the peripheries of the ideological spectrum.

On the right, the Rev. Pat Robertson commended the goals of the meeting but fretted during one of his “700 Club” television broadcasts that “what starts out as a noble initiative” can become a coercive effort on the government’s part. He added: “And then you’ve got the Hitler youth corps, you know, where all the young frauleins have to run and put on their little uniforms and march to the Fuhrer.”

On the left, “Workers World,” published by the self-described “independent Marxist-Leninist” Workers World Party, called the conference a “multimillion-dollar exercise in hypocrisy,” adding: “The president’s summit, by extolling the virtues of volunteerism, gives comfort to the tangled web of right-wing foundations, institutes and corporations that have their own interests in promoting that word.”

Both liberals and conservatives found fault with some of the conference’s premises.

To Bob Borosage, head of Campaign for America’s Future, a liberal policy group, the event had an anachronistic quality. “At a time when you have 60% of mothers working and many fathers holding down two or three jobs to keep incomes stable, you are suggesting [that] they spend a lot of time volunteering,” he said. “That harkens back to an economic system of the old days, where men worked 40 hours a week and women stayed at home. Most Americans today have to struggle to find time with their own kids.”