Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Until this week, the Obama campaign's strategy of
interest group payoffs and demonization of Romney seemed, if tawdry, at least a
possible route to re-election. The president's promises to deliver more and
more "free" stuff for carefully selected grantees -- adorned in the
language of sticking up for the "middle class" -- appeared to have a
chance of success.
But the decision to embrace one of the least popular
Democratic positions of the past 100 years -- opposition to the work
requirement for welfare recipients -- is inexplicable politically. It's also
illegal and imperious. Let's stick with politics, because it's old news that
Obama has contempt for the rule of law. He's declined to "take care that
the laws be faithfully executed" on many subjects: immigration, the
Defense of Marriage Act, labor laws and environmental rules, among others.
Those were lawless but politically logical acts. Not this.
Welfare policies (along with weakness on defense and
crime) had been a vulnerability for Democrats throughout the 1970s and 1980s --
an Achilles heel that Bill Clinton recognized in 1992. His promise to "end
welfare as we know it" was the gravamen of his claim to "new
Democrat" status. Once safely elected, Clinton downgraded welfare reform,
and, in fact, increased funding for all of the traditional welfare programs in
the federal budget. But when Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives
in 1994, they took the initiative. By 1996, after vetoing two welfare reform
bills, Clinton was advised by Dick Morris that if didn't sign the legislation,
he wouldn't be re-elected; it was that important to voters. Immediately after
signing the bill, Clinton's approval rating on welfare jumped by 19 points.
The law changed the old AFDC, Aid to Families with
Dependent Children, to TANF, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. In place
of the open-ended entitlement to benefits for unmarried women and their children,
the law imposed a five-year limit and the requirement that those able to work
seek employment. In 2005, the work requirements were strengthened.
The prospect of asking welfare recipients to seek work
struck most liberals in 1996 (including Obama) as degrading, cruel and doomed
to failure. Three high-ranking Clinton administration officials resigned in
protest. The New York Times called the reform "atrocious," objecting
that "This is not reform, this is punishment." Tom Brokaw,
interviewing the president, said "all the projections show that ... (the
reform) will push, at least short term, more than a million youngsters ...
below the poverty line." The Children's Defense Fund called the law
"an outrage ... that will hurt and impoverish millions of American
children ... and leave a moral blot on (Clinton's) presidency." Sen.
Daniel P. Moynihan called the law "the most brutal act of social policy we
have known since the Reconstruction. ... In five years' time, you'll find
appearing on your streets abandoned children ... in numbers we have no
idea." Sen. Edward Kennedy, with characteristic understatement, called the
bill "legislative child abuse."
Well, what really happened? Welfare caseloads declined by
50 percent within four years of the law's passage and by 70 percent by the time
Obama took office. The overwhelming majority of those who left welfare rolls
did so because they found jobs -- and not just the worst jobs, either. By 2001,
a Manhattan Institute study found, only 4 percent of former welfare mothers
were earning minimum wage. The poverty rate declined from 13.8 percent in 1995
to 11.7 percent in 2003. Black child poverty dropped to its lowest levels in
history. Childhood hunger was cut in half. It was the greatest social policy
success of the past 50 years.
Yes, the late 1990s were boom years for the economy. So
had the 1960s and 1980s been. Yet welfare rolls increased during those previous
expansions.
Why did Obama do it? Why issue new regulations from the
Department of Health and Human Services (in bold violation of the law) granting
waivers to states to alter work requirements? Obama's election notwithstanding,
there is little reason to think that the nation has moved left on the welfare
issue. Most working Americans, including most poor Americans, believe that
paying people for idleness is wrong.
Obama is trying to persuade Americans that while he has
expanded food stamps to unprecedented levels, extended unemployment insurance
to 99 weeks, vastly increased the already overwhelmed Medicaid program, created
a new trillion dollar entitlement with Obamacare and expanded the size of the
federal government to a percentage of gross domestic product not seen since
World War II, that he is not the dependency president. By stepping back into
history to embrace the Democrats' nemesis -- unrestricted welfare -- he has
clinched the argument for the opposition.
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