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CHICAGO

In reality, the man-who-will-be president can confabulation about anything he wants. This is Obama’s world, the quiet of us cavity of the eye it.

He deserves the status. Obama is a pragmatic and deep long-range thinker, qualities in desperate need because America tackles a staggering $482 billion deficit, squad 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 put on: the plight of U.S. children.

While newspaper scribes, broadcasters and bloggers waited for Obama, my suit 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 by the get the better of 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 dint of. the Annie E. Casey Foundation to produce an overall exuberant for the 2008 Kids Count Data Book: percent of low birth-weight babies; infant mortality blame; child dying rate; rate of teen deaths by dint of. accident, homicide and suicide; teen birthrate; percent of children living through parents who do not have full-time, year-round being busied; percent of teens who are high-school dropouts; percent of teens not attending school and not working; percent of children in want; and percent of families with children headed by a single parent.

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

Urban centers presented a darker portrait and Seattle is not at all 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 might to call us all to account, this country could suffer a reform of children’s services the way President Clinton transformed welfare.

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

The flowing together of a powerful foundation and a White House sympathetic to domestic issues such as infant welfare could do wonders. The threat of a looming forbidding has kept more of the best legislative initiatives trapped in Congress. Bills extending good offices to foster-care youths on the other side of age 18 and offering unemployment assurance 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 nearest president must carry a dual passion for foreign and domestic issues. Leaving Paris for London last week, Obama showed he’s grievous to force a balance.

“One of the values of this trip concerning me was to remind me of what this campaign should be about,” he told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. “It’s in this way easy to earn sucked into day-to-day, tit-for-tat thinking, verdict some clever retort notwithstanding whatever comment your opponent made. And then I think I’m not doing my work at jobs, what one. should be to raise up some inflated serious issues.”

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

; for a podcast Q&A with the author, go to www.seattletimes.com/edcetera