American Dream

by Jason DeParle

  Yet Clinton didn’t “accept that bill”: he vetoed it, twice. It wasn’t the advocates who changed his mind and it wasn’t a study; it was, of all people, Newt Gingrich. With a spectacular meltdown in the fall of 1995, Gingrich did for the Left what it couldn’t do for itself: he momentarily discredited the drive to end welfare. By the time the House and Senate reconciled their competing bills, welfare was caught up in a much larger fight, over whether to balance the budget. In their running battle, Gingrich appeared to be winning: Clinton had agreed in theory, while resisting specific assumptions and cuts. By mid-November 1995, federal spending authority gave out, and Gingrich tried to force Clinton’s hand. He passed a bill to keep the government running, but only if Clinton made new concessions, including cuts in Medicare. Clinton refused, and the government shut down. The Grand Canyon closed. Medical research ceased. The Pentagon stopped paying bills. Caught up in his antigovernment fervor, Gingrich had bet that voters - wouldn’t care, or would blame Clinton if they did. Wrong both times, he compounded his problems with a bizarre display of pique. Having cast the shutdown as a principled stand for fiscal discipline, he offered another reason: Clinton had ignored him on a trip aboard Air Force One. “This is petty: I’m going to say up front it’s petty,” he said at a reporters’ breakfast. But when “nobody has talked to you and they ask you to get off the plane by the back ramp . . . [y]ou just wonder: Where is their sense of manners?” The New York Daily News drew Gingrich in diapers.

  Epic fights can turn on less-than-epic events. The day Gingrich closed the government with a whine was the day Clinton won back his presidency. (And also the day he lost it: that night he met an intern named Monica Lewinsky.) The closure continued for six days, and the public blamed the Republicans two to one; Gingrich’s job-approval rating sank to the depths of Nixon’s during Watergate. Overwhelmed with frustration and fatigue, Gingrich broke down in an aide’s office and sobbed. A second shutdown lasted three weeks, through the Christmas holidays, and Clinton looked like a sandlot hero who had faced down the bullies again. Until then, Clinton had sought political life by embracing Republican plans. He, too, favored block grants. He, too, was a balanced-budget man. Now the advantage lay in their differences, especially his refusal to accept the cuts in Medicare, a middle-class entitlement as popular as welfare was reviled. Welfare was, by contrast, a minor battleground, but this was no time for surrender. Give in to Gingrich on welfare? After a year of retreats, Clinton had a new answer: never!

  He vetoed the GOP bill in December 1995 as part of the broader balanced budget. He vetoed it again in January 1996 as a stand-alone bill. Following his lead, the rest of the party reversed course, too. Thirty-five Senate Democrats had voted for the bill in September. By December, all but one changed their vote. In part, that’s because a negotiation between the House and Senate had produced a significantly tougher bill. But it’s also because the welfare zeitgeist had momentarily changed. The bill and the millions of lives it would touch were hostage to larger events.

  Gingrich was slow to grasp his defeat. In marathon budget talks throughout December, Clinton charmed, chatted, winked, and smiled—and never surrendered an inch. “I’ve got a problem,” Gingrich complained. “I get in those meetings and as a person I like the president. I melt when I’m around him.” His wife said the gulling reminded her of a scene from Leave It to Beaver. Gingrich had been humiliated, but Clinton had a problem, too; having pledged to end welfare, he was approaching the 1996 election with two vetoes to defend. Gingrich swore to block any bill that would give Clinton a third chance. Dole, running for Clinton’s job, was likewise opposed to a deal, since he wanted to make the vetoes a campaign issue. With Gingrich and Dole in control of Congress, their opposition to a third bill seemed to rule one out.

  But among the GOP troops, other forces were taking hold, including an unlikely one: true belief. The chairman of the welfare subcommittee in the House, Clay Shaw, was a genial country-club Republican who had joined Ways and Means for the usual reasons, to work on taxes and raise campaign funds. But after a year of wielding the welfare gavel, Shaw had declared himself on “a rescue mission” to liberate the poor. (“This bill is about hope!” he barked, when another Republican tried to insert a measure Shaw considered punitive.) His staff director, Ron Haskins, a former U.S. Marine with a PhD in child development, was appalled to see Republicans blocking a welfare bill just to spite Clinton. “All of us are here to improve the nation’s laws,” he wrote to GOP members. “At the risk of seeming a little naive . . . [w]hen we reach age seventy-five and look back over our careers, will we feel we accomplished less because we didn’t get full credit?” Operating outside the inner circle of power, Shaw and Haskins launched a long-shot effort to pass a new bill modeled after the Senate plan Clinton had already praised. They weren’t total naifs. If Clinton signed, they would have a law. If he didn’t, they would have an issue. “The politics were quite ravishing,” Shaw said. “We’d win either way.”

  The dealmakers got a break in February, when the National Governors Association convened. In the partisan fervor of the previous year, block grants had failed to win the group’s support. But by 1996, passions had cooled and self-interest had clarified: caseloads had already dropped 10 percent, so a block grant set at previous years’ levels promised an immediate profit. With White House encouragement, the governors endorsed a block-grant plan much like the Senate’s. Still, Gingrich and Dole remained opposed, and they found a new way to stop it: attaching a “poison pill” that would block grant Medicaid, imposing a huge health-care cut Clinton (and his wife) wouldn’t abide. Shaw and Haskins couldn’t believe it: Republicans were propping up the welfare status quo. A strategy memo from Representative Jennifer Dunn showcased a cynicism stark even by election-year standards. Emphasize “the tragedy of welfare and its crushing cruelty for the children,” she wrote. But “draw opposition and, probably, a veto.” Emphasize the suffering of children, and make sure they suffer some more.

  By June, Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee were starting to rebel. If some worried about saving the poor, more were worried about saving their seats. They hadn’t accomplished much, and Clinton was set to run against a “do-nothing Congress.” The prospects for a bill improved when Dole resigned from the Senate to campaign full-time; now he could no longer block it. But Gingrich remained firmly opposed. “We’re not going to give the president a bill he can sign,” he told House Republicans. With that, the rebellion grew. “He doesn’t care about us!” screamed Jim Bunning of Kentucky. “This is nuts!” said Dave Camp of Michigan, who collected one hundred Republican signatures urging a separate welfare bill. Perhaps Gingrich really believed what he said—that a welfare bill would save American civilization. That it would keep twelve-year-olds from having babies and seventeen-year-olds from dying of AIDS. He still - wasn’t willing to let one pass. Not if it might let Clinton out of a jam.

  What finally swayed him wasn’t a vision of liberating the needy but of something even more appealing: dividing the Democratic Party. The newest House Republican, a Louisiana party-switcher named Jimmy Hayes, clinched the case. Clinton was too skilled to be hurt by poison pills, Hayes told Gingrich. But sending him a clean welfare bill would leave him an impossible choice: damned (by his liberal party) if he signed, damned (by the public) if he didn’t. The Democratic Party loves welfare, the ex-Democrat said. Imagine what would happen at the nominating convention if Clinton abolished AFDC. Picture the pickets; imagine the protests! Hayes thought Clinton wouldn’t do it: he’d hand Dole a third veto. Gingrich thought Clinton would sign: he was too wired to public opinion to resist. But he was persuaded the price would be high. “We thought we would cause a split in their party,” Gingrich later said. And on that, “We were just wrong.” With Dole gone, momentum for a stand-alone bill had grown in the Senate, too. Party leaders made their decision in a July 9 conference call and announced it two days later: both houses would pass an unencumbered welfare bill. It was up to Clinton
now.

  What would he do? Even the most astute Clinton watchers could only guess. In January, he dismissed the Senate plan he once had lavishly praised. (“Moot.”) Then he turned around and praised it again. (“A good bill.”) In February, he hailed the governors’ plan as “all any American could ever ask.” The next day his spokesman criticized it. In June, Clinton praised a protest against time limits. Then he resumed his call for “tough time limits.” A good negotiator uses ambiguity, and Clinton was a brilliant negotiator. But after nearly five years of pledging to end welfare, he owed the country a statement of first principles. There was lots of talk about the importance of training (“Government’s going to have to train everybody”), but virtually no training in any of the bills. There was lots of talk about community service jobs (“what the Government’s going to have to do is build a jobs program”), but nothing that made states provide them. There was, from start to finish, great confusion over time limits. Were they a precursor to a work program or an arbitrary ban on aid? As late as the spring of 1996, Clinton acted as if he opposed the latter: “I don’t think it’s a good idea to say, ‘You can stay on welfare two years and then we’re going to cut you off, no matter how young your children are or whether you have a job.’ ” But that is what hard time limits do. They cut people off no matter how young their children are. Even if they don’t have a job.

  To the end, Clinton clung to the pretense that it was possible to separate the economics of mother and child: “I say, ‘tough on work, yes—tough on kids, no way!’” But you can’t be “tough on work”—punish women who violate work rules—without the risk of being tough on their kids. Clay Shaw, less intellectual but more intellectually honest, acknowledged from the start that some families would be hurt, including some children. “We regret that there will be a certain negative side to what we’re doing,” he said. “Some people are going to fall through the cracks.” His argument was that their numbers would be small and the long-term gains worth it—a risky stance but a coherent one. Clinton’s position was no position at all: “I don’t think it’s a good thing to hurt children.” Did anyone? Did Gingrich?

  With his dodging and dashing, Clinton did himself a disservice. He left the impression he was merely playing a cynical game to win an election—an impression that still chafed him years later. “I was really steamed when everybody said, ‘Oh, Bill Clinton just did this for the ninety-six election’!” he told me. “Hell, I didn’t have to do this to win the election. . . . I was going to win the election in ninety-six on the economy. I did it ’cause I thought it was right.” Indeed, for all his technocratic renown, a surprising thing about Clinton’s approach to welfare was that his policy preferences weren’t all that strong. Block grants or entitlements, hard time limits or soft ones—he could argue it either way. (“Frankly, I thought I knew more about it than people on both sides,” he said.) The pledge to “end welfare” had let loose a storm, and Clinton was borne along like everyone else, albeit on waves of his own making.

  Yet beneath the maddening evasions and elisions, he did have a more consistent vision and a less self-serving one—a vision of how welfare had poisoned the politics of poverty and race. Welfare cast poor people as shirkers. It discredited government. It aggravated the worst racial stereotypes. It left Democrats looking like the party of giveaways. In the speech in which Clinton first pledged to “end welfare,” he also called for a rebirth of broader progressive traditions: “We’ve got to rebuild our political life before the demagogues and the racists, and those who pander to the worst in us, bring this country down.” He clearly saw the two causes—ending welfare and reviving liberalism—as efforts that were linked.

  More than most liberals, Clinton also showed an intuitive confidence in the welfare poor. “Part of it was being a governor for twelve years and going to the welfare office and meeting people on welfare,” he told me. Plus, “I’d always known poor folks. I just never thought they were helpless.” While Moynihan warned that without welfare, “the children are blown to the winds,” Clinton, in my later talk with him, described recipients in the same way that Angie described herself. He called them “scrappy survivors.” He had never adopted the apologetic tones of mainstream liberalism. Perhaps the best speech of his presidency was his 1993 homily in Memphis, urging the black underclass to stop destroying itself. Speaking from the pulpit where Martin Luther King Jr. had preached his last sermon, Clinton chided the congregation to imagine what King would say to them now. “I fought for freedom, he would say, but not for the freedom of people to kill each other,” Clinton said. “Not for the freedom of children to have children and the fathers of those children to walk away from them as if they don’t amount to anything. . . . I did not fight for the right of black people to murder other black people with reckless abandon.” A black audience in a poor black city interrupted with applause eleven times.

  While the Left saw the bill heading to his desk as an unthinkable surrender, Dick Morris plied him with the opposite argument, which was closer to what Clinton really believed. By signing a bill, even one with some problems, he wouldn’t be abandoning the poor. He’d be setting the stage for a broader liberal resurgence. Once taxpayers saw the poor as workers, a more generous era would ensue. Stereotypes would fade. New benefits would flow. Eager for Clinton to sign, Morris bolstered the case with his ubiquitous polls. One survey split respondents into separate groups. The first was asked about spending on a set of antipoverty programs—Head Start, food stamps, housing, and the like. The second was asked about the same programs but told to assume that “the president has signed a bill requiring welfare recipients to work and setting time limits.” Under that assumption, support for new spending rose ten to fifteen points. To Morris, that clinched the case: the country would do more for the poor once the poor did more for themselves.

  He gave Clinton the results at a campaign meeting on July 18, 1996, the day the House passed the bill. The Morris critics in the room, of whom there were many, wondered if the numbers had been cooked. If so, they were cooked by someone who knew his clients’ tastes. “I just instinctively knew it was true,” Clinton told me, recalling the survey years later. “I really believed that if we passed welfare reform . . . we could diminish at least a lot of the overt racial stereotypes that I thought were paralyzing American politics.” He would make the same case publicly at the signing ceremony: “After I sign my name to this bill, welfare will no longer be a political issue. . . . Every single person . . . who has ever said a disparaging word about the welfare system should now say, ‘Okay, that’s gone. What is my responsibility to make it better?’ ”

  Morris didn’t rely on an appeal to idealism alone. In the same meeting, he emphasized another poll: it showed that a veto would turn Clinton’s fifteen-point lead into a three-point deficit. Morris’s accompanying memo warned, “Welfare veto would be a disaster.”

  On July 31, 1996, Clinton ran out of time. The House was about to vote on the conference bill, and the Democrats demanded to know where he stood. Opponents had looked to Hillary Clinton to save the day, but the signals weren’t reassuring. In July, her old friend Donna Shalala went to the White House to argue against the bill. Mrs. Clinton heard her out but warned that the president was in a political bind; Shalala came away certain that she wanted him to sign. About the same time, Mrs. Clinton reached out in an unlikely direction, arranging a visit with Doug Besharov, an analyst from the conservative American Enterprise Institute; with a sanguine view of the bill, Besharov was the kind of person likely to assuage any lingering doubts. Dick Morris quotes her saying at the time: “We have to do what we have to do, and I hope our friends understand it.” That’s not much different from how she put it in her memoir: “If he vetoed welfare a third time, Bill would be handing the Republicans a potential political windfall.”

  Still publicly unresolved, the president summoned the cabinet to a sudden meeting. Everyone filed in looking for clues. Mrs. Clinton was out of town. She must be distancing h
erself: a hint he would sign. Elaine Kamarck, a welfare hard-liner, had been invited to attend. Clinton must have wanted her support: another signal he would sign. At one point, Clinton turned red with indignation, denouncing the unrelated cuts in programs for immigrants. He’s overdoing it, one cabinet member thought; an additional clue. Conscious, no doubt, of being studied, Clinton told the group to focus on the merits, saying that with the Democratic convention coming he could argue the politics either way. Ken Apfel, a White House aide, walked the group through the specifics. AFDC would end, replaced by a block grant with fixed funding and vast new local control. The new program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, would limit recipients to no more than five years of federal aid, and states could set limits as short as they pleased. They would be required to enroll half their recipients in “work activities.” But they could reduce that target point for point simply by cutting the rolls. Those were the bill’s core features, and the Republicans had dictated them. At some point, Clinton had criticized them all.

  Clinton did win two debates. The bills he vetoed would have made large cuts in food stamps and Medicaid. The one before him made lesser, though still considerable, food-stamp cuts, but (except for immigrants) left Medicaid in place. (“That’s why I vetoed those first two bills,” Clinton told me. “I thought there ought to be a national guarantee of health care and nutrition.”) He also won some of the lesser debates over the welfare provisions themselves. He got assurances of continued state spending; exemptions from the time limits (for up to 20 percent of the caseload); and more money for child care. Because of the child-care money, the new program was actually projected to spend a bit more than the status quo, a remarkable concession from a Republican Congress. But the bill came with huge unrelated cuts—totaling $54 billion—in programs gratuitously labeled “welfare.” About 40 percent of them were aimed at legal tax-paying immigrants, who in most cases were barred from food stamps and in some cases from Medicaid, too. Incensed at the budget cuts, Clinton told the group he had gotten “a good welfare bill, wrapped in a sack of shit.”