Next president should lead on disability issues

There are 56.7 million Americans with some form of disability. Some look at that number and boldly state we could comprise the largest voting bloc this presidential election cycle.

They are wrong.

Behind that figure are real people – a wealthy stockbroker who is going blind and an inner-city mother with two kids with autism, one of whom also has cerebral palsy. Although both lives are touched by disability, other facts – economic, racial and religious, to name a few – also affect how they view politics.

The disability voting bloc is a pipe dream.

Candidates will or won’t address disability issues, but not to gain votes. How they prioritize the needs of people with disabilities, particularly the most vulnerable, is based on their own personal values.

We saw this in 1988, when George H.W. Bush made a promise to get the Americans with Disabilities Act passed. Once elected, he worked with then-Sen. Bob Dole as well as others, including the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, to fulfill his pledge.

None of the backers of the ADA exploited their victory for political gain, even though doing so might have helped Bush against Bill Clinton in 1992. They acted out of sincere conviction.

What if one of the current candidates shared the same concern about people with disabilities and made issues concerning them a major plank in his or her party’s platform?

Here’s one agenda:

▪  Appoint someone with one or more disabilities as a special White House adviser. This would signal a clear commitment to disability issues.

The first task of this adviser should be persuading the Senate to reverse its Dec. 4, 2012, rejection of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Pundits, including me, placed the blame squarely on talk show hosts and far-right websites. But the vote occurred a month after Obama had won re-election, yet he spent very little political capital on passing the UNCRPD.

The next president should devote a prime-time Oval Office address to refuting the absurd claims that the UNCRPD would take away parental rights and U.S. sovereignty. The next day, he or she should hold a town hall with advocates of the treaty and devote several other speeches to the issue until the Senate does its job.

▪  The president should host a White House evening with performers, actors, comics and musicians, subtly urging a higher profile of people with disabilities in the media, particularly on TV and in the movies.

If people with disabilities are portrayed by themselves, not only as victims or heroic overachievers, but as everyday people the way gays are, public acceptance of them and awareness of their needs would increase sharply. No person with a disability has the media clout of, say, Ellen DeGeneres, and there is no group to wine and dine Hollywood to better our media image. It would take presidential leadership.

▪  The new president should convene a White House summit on disability issues: transportation, education, employment and health care. From this meeting, bills should be developed and put high on the administration’s legislative agenda.

Will any president do one thing listed here? I don’t know. But it’s a platform for disability rights advocates to adopt as the struggle continues.

This story was originally published April 29, 2016 at 7:03 PM with the headline "Next president should lead on disability issues."