The Clinton administration was on the verge of signing the most important social policy legislation since the 1960s - a law that would end the welfare entitlement that had locked poor Americans in a cycle of dependency for decades - and stalwart liberals were railing against the bill as a pending calamity: Women and children would be sleeping on grates. The shift to federalize the program would create a "race to the bottom" as states beat each other to the finish line in the abandonment of the poor.
Peter Edelman, a top advisor to President Clinton on domestic policy, resigned his post, and wrote a blistering attack on the legislation in the Atlantic, "The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done."
"Wait until the next recession," opponents screamed. We'll be back in the 1930s.
Well, amid the current economic uncertainty - with all the talk about a Bush "depression" descending over the land - talk of a welfare policy calamity's making a comeback.
This morning's New York Times has an important piece that suggests Hillary Clinton's rethinking her support for the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA):
In the summer of 1996, President Bill Clinton delivered on his pledge to “end welfare as we know it.” Despite howls of protest from some liberals, he signed into law a bill forcing recipients to work and imposing a five-year limit on cash assistance.
As first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton supported her husband’s decision, drawing the wrath of old friends from her days as an advocate for poor children. Some accused the Clintons of throwing vulnerable families to the winds in pursuit of centrist votes as Mr. Clinton headed into the final stages of his re-election campaign.
Despite the criticism and anxiety from the left, the legislation came to be viewed as one of Mr. Clinton’s signature achievements. It won broad bipartisan praise, with some Democrats relieved that it took a politically difficult issue off the table for them, and many liberals came to accept if not embrace it.
Mrs. Clinton’s opponent in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Barack Obama, said in an interview that the welfare overhaul had been greatly beneficial in eliminating a divisive force in American politics.
Mrs. Clinton, now a senator from New York, rarely mentions the issue as she battles for the nomination, despite the emphasis she has placed on her experience in her husband’s White House.
But now the issue is back, pulled to the fore by an economy turning down more sharply than at any other time since the welfare changes were imposed. With low-income people especially threatened by a weakening labor market, some advocates for poor families are raising concerns about the adequacy of the remaining social safety net. Mrs. Clinton is now calling for the establishment of a cabinet-level position to fight poverty.
As social welfare policy returns to the political debate, it is providing a window into the ways in which Mrs. Clinton has navigated the legacy of her husband’s administration and the ideological crosscurrents of her party.
In an interview, Mrs. Clinton acknowledged that “people who are more vulnerable” were going to suffer more than others as the economy turned down. But she put the blame squarely on the Bush administration and the Republicans who controlled Congress until last year. Mrs. Clinton said they blocked her efforts, and those of other Democrats, to buttress the safety net with increased financing for health insurance for impoverished children, child care for poor working mothers, and food stamps.
Mrs. Clinton expressed no misgivings about the 1996 legislation, saying that it was a needed — and enormously successful — first step toward making poor families self-sufficient.
“Welfare should have been a temporary way station for people who needed immediate assistance,” she said. “It should not be considered an anti-poverty program. It simply did not work.”
During the presidential campaign, she has faced little challenge on the issue, in large part because Mr. Obama has supported the 1996 law. “Before welfare reform, you had, in the minds of most Americans, a stark separation between the deserving working poor and the undeserving welfare poor,” Mr. Obama said in an interview. “What welfare reform did was desegregate those two groups. Now, everybody was poor, and everybody had to work.”
Mr. Obama called the resulting law “an imperfect reform.” Like Mrs. Clinton, he called for an expansion of government-provided health care, child care and job training to assist women making the transition from welfare to work — programs he says he helped expand in Illinois as a state senator.
Asked if he would have vetoed the 1996 law, Mr. Obama said, “I won’t second guess President Clinton for signing.”
Among some advocates for the poor, the growing prospect of a severe recession and evidence of backsliding from the initial successes of the policy shift have crystallized fresh concern. Many remain upset that Mrs. Clinton, once seemingly a stalwart member of their camp, supported a law that they contend left many people at risk.
“If there is no national controversy about welfare reform, we paid an awfully high price,” said Peter Edelman, a law professor at Georgetown University who has known Mrs. Clinton since her college days, and who quit his post as assistant secretary of social services at the Department of Health and Human Services in protest after Mr. Clinton signed the measure.
“They don’t acknowledge the number of people who were hurt,” Mr. Edelman said. “It’s just not in their lens. It was predictably bad public policy.”
Forcing families to rely on work instead of government money went well from 1996 to 2000, when the economy was booming and paychecks were plentiful, economists say. Since then, however, job creation has slowed and poverty has risen. The current downturn could be the first serious test of how well the changes brought about by the 1996 law hold up under sharp economic stress.
“We should have enormous concern about the lack of a fully functioning safety net for families with children,” said Mark H. Greenberg, director of the Poverty and Prosperity Program at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research group.
Notice the language here, of "forcing families" to work rather that receive government handouts, and of the "current downturn" that's now a test of how well the PRWORA will hold up under "current economic stress."
This is truly an amazing spin.
First, Hillary Clinton, as the Times piece notes, was one of the biggest backers of welfare reform and praised the legislation in her memoirs. Indeed, her support for "ending welfare as we know it" strained her relationship with top welfare entitlement advocates like Marian Wright Edelman (the wife of Peter Edelman).
Clinton's new welfare focus contrasts with her campaign's appeal to the middle class; it is a bid to capture the support the Democratic Party's big government constituencies who were attracted to John Edwards' two America's class warfare campaign.
But note, too, that here we are, not even 18-months since the 10th anniversary of the 1996 reform, when the economy's not even officially been declared in recession, and we're seeing serious discussion on the left of dismantling the most important domestic policy legacy of the Bill Clinton administration.
In the summer of 2006, National Review argued that the Clinton welfare law was "the most successful transformation of social policy in 50 years."
It still is, and it's way too early to rejuvenate left-wing big government social programs ostensibly designed to allieviate poverty. The underlying attack on AFDC-style welfare programs is that they stifle individual responsibility and self-sufficiency. This has become bipartisan consensus in the last couple of decades, at least among Democratic party centrists.
Not just that. The economic situation hardly merits calls to renew welfare entitlements:
Unemployment's creeped back up to 5.1 percent in the most recent statistics, a level that's far from some purported calamitous endpoint. I see "help wanted" signs wherever I go, at good, attractive retail businesses. People are working and making do, and we've yet to see stories of women and children sleeping on grates.
We may face some difficulties yet, but it seems awfully early to move toward a counter-revolution on welfare handouts.
All of this goes to show how incredibly opportunistic and shallow are contemporary left-wing policy debates.
In November 2006, the Atlantic ran a long feature essay on Hillary Clinton's political achievements during her first term in the Senate, glorifying her staunch fidelity to DLC-style political moderation of 1990s.
Now look where she is, scoring cheap political points demonizing a program that not even two years ago her husband Bill Clinton was pumping up as "creating a new beginning for millions of Americans."
Photo Credit: New York Times
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