Modern liberalism’s central pretension — its insistence that the federal government must guarantee national solutions to our most glaring domestic problems — is dead. The centerpiece of the American welfare system is to be abolished by Bill Clinton’s signature on Republican legislation. “I never thought I would see it come to this under a Democratic president,” says Roxie Nicholson, a Labor Department policy analyst and bitter critic of the bill. Roxie and all the rest of us.
Federal entitlements do not end every day; indeed, none has ever ended before. And it means something especially big that this one entitlement — Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the automatic federal assistance program for unmarried poor mothers — is ending at this specific juncture in American politics. Now at the high-water mark of public approval in its post- 1994 battle against the “extremism” of a Republican Congress, the Democratic party is nevertheless unable to defend the basic anti-poverty program it has spent decades expanding.
President Clinton’s willingness to kill AFDC is therefore a big-picture concession of philosophical failure, a ratification of American conservatism’s advance. And it is this fact, we suspect, not the welfare bill’s likely consequences, that really explains the torrents of incoherent editorial fury now being directed Clinton’s way. The president is approving ” atrocious” legislation that will likely “throw a million more children into poverty,” the New York Times thunders. “Mr. Clinton acquiesces in legislation,” an even angrier Washington Post inveighs, “in which the federal government washes its hands of responsibility for welfare mothers and children.”
About the bill’s design and intention, this criticism is hysterical to the point of dishonesty. And about the president’s approval of the bill, it is therefore unfair. The legislation replaces AFDC’s cash entitlement to individual beneficiaries with a $ 16.4 billion lump-sum “block grant” to the 50 states. Those states will now use this block grant to finance and administer welfare programs of their own devising. And they will do so under modest and elastic federal restrictions. Federal welfare funds may no longer be spent on mothers under 18 who fail to stay in school or live with an adult. The money will only be available to non-working welfare householders for two years at a time, up to a maximum of five years.
But states may grant hardship exemptions from the overall five-year limit to a fifth of their welfare caseloads. The shorter two-year work requirement only applies to those seven states (with just 5 percent of the nation’s welfare recipients) that do not already hold federal welfare-reform waivers under previously existing law. And nothing in the new welfare legislation prevents any state from funding more extensive and generous benefits with its own tax dollars. Given such latitude, is there a state government anywhere in the country vicious enough to fashion a welfare program that produces long bread lines of homeless children? Are there voters anywhere in country who would tolerate such a result? We don’t believe it.
Neither do we believe the reflexive argument of wiseguy punditry that electioneering imperatives entirely explain the achievement of welfare reform this year. President Clinton has a well-earned reputation for manipulating word and deed in the service of narrow political interests. But is it really so “terminally gullible,” as the Post puts it, to imagine that “anything” about his welfare decision was honorable? The Post is offended that on welfare reform Clinton is “unwilling to put his own political standing at even marginal risk.” “Marginal” is the word for it. The president is 20 points up in the polls against a Dole campaign that was largely lifeless even before it “lost” welfare as an issue.
Bill Clinton will now probably be reelected. That’s too bad. But what exactly is new about it? Precisely because he did not really need to sign this bill, the remote possibility must be entertained that on balance Clinton simply thought it was the right thing to do.
It was. Republican congressional incumbents, for their part, now finally have a large, palpable legislative win to brag about, a powerful campaign argument with which to retain control of the House and Senate. This fall, Republicans will claim the bulk of the credit for the most significant federal initiative in domestic policy since the Reagan budget of 1981 — for the most significant reversal of social policy, particularly, since welfare began its descent into hell in the 1960s. The GOP will deserve that credit. Because this bill has one, overarching virtue that even its severest critics do not much bother to deny.
AFDC is indefensible. It is the economic skeleton and nervous system of a culture of illegitimacy that now claims more than 70 percent of all newborn black babies, wrecking the American inner-city landscape and generation after generation of its helpless residents. The federal government has been ” washing its hands” of responsibility for this travesty for decades — by maintaining AFDC in its current form and delaying the hunt for a more effective and genuinely compassionate alternative.
We do not know what that alternative should be, critics of welfare reform warn. No, we do not. But on the reasonable expectation that at least one of the 50 states might find it, and by insisting that the search finally begin, the 1996 welfare reform does something very, very good.
History will record this bill as the signal accomplishment of the 104th Congress and the first Clinton administration — and as a victory for American conservatism writ large. Not bad for two years’ work.
David Tell, for the Editors
