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Here's a sign of the times: Former Education Secretary William J. Bennett, whose moralizing "Book of Virtues" has been lodged near the top of the bestseller list for months, now has on his desk requests from about 100 Republican candidates to come and speak on their behalf in the fall election.
Here's another: In Tennessee, moderate Democratic Sen. Jim Sasser opened his reelection campaign recently with a television ad that announced he's "working to strengthen moral values: (with) prayer in school and welfare reform that emphasizes work."
In Michigan, Republican Senate hopeful Spencer Abraham is running ads that portray him as a "young father, raising his twin daughters with the traditional values he learned growing up in mid-Michigan" and declare, "In a time of moral crisis, he's ready to fight for our families." In Georgia, Democratic Gov. Zell Miller says government programs must reflect and reinforce the "same values I learned at my mother's knee."
From coast to coast, moral decline is rocketing to the top of the agenda for campaign 1994. In a growing number of races for state and federal office, candidates are lining up to lament the trends in American family life-and linking problems from crime to the decay of the cities to a perceived breakdown in the transmission of values from one generation to the next.
"Values and the breakdown of family is really emerging as an issue," says Carter Eskew, a Democratic media consultant. "It has been ascending for a while, but it is higher than it has ever been."
This focus on family sometimes teeters on the edge of smarminess: It has already become common for male candidates this year (prominent among them Republican Senate hopeful Oliver L. North in Virginia) to air television ads in which their wives earnestly testify to their husbands' commitment and engagement as fathers.
But to a substantial extent, this dialogue about values is bubbling up from a widespread public anxiety. In a Times Poll last week, for instance, a majority of all those surveyed said American families are more threatened by "a moral climate that hurts community standards" than by economic strains.
This bipartisan sermonizing about the nation's moral course represents a remarkable political reversal from 1992, when then-Vice President Dan Quayle...