American Dream

by Jason DeParle

  Buying the second premise, though not the first, most cabinet members opposed both parts of the bill. The secretary of Health and Human Services said veto. The Labor secretary said veto. The Treasury secretary said veto. The Housing secretary said veto. The chief of staff said veto. David Ellwood, “the godfather of time limits,” had left the administration a year earlier. But he dashed off a distressed op-ed, urging a veto, too. Clinton then turned to someone he knew would tell him to sign: the author of the end-welfare pledge, Bruce Reed. Reed had waited five years to make the case that followed. He argued that the central provisions would work as intended, moving recipients into jobs. He said the immigrant cuts could be restored later (about half of them were). He said that if Clinton vetoed a third bill, he might never get another chance. He even argued that President Roosevelt had faced a similar decision; before creating the WPA, his celebrated work program, Roosevelt had abolished a program of cash aid, throwing millions of people off the rolls. But above all, Reed said, you promised. Clinton had pledged to “end welfare,” and the only way to do it was to sign.

  Clinton ended the meeting without announcing a decision and returned to the Oval Office. With the cabinet milling in the cramped West Wing halls, he summoned a few people to run through it again. Leon Panetta, the chief of staff, was an immigrant’s son who said the immigrant cuts were too deep: veto. Vice President Al Gore said the current system was just too damaged: sign. Then Clinton asked Reed once more: what had FDR done?

  Given what was known at the time, there were plenty of reasons to veto. Time limits had morphed into arbitrary restrictions at odds with a safety net. “Work” had evolved into a game that could be played with accounting gimmicks. No one knew whether women like Angie would be able to find jobs, much less whether the jobs would bring “meaing” or “dignity” or “hope.” The package came wrapped in extraneous budget cuts, and Clinton’s lapses of leadership had let the process go astray. This wasn’t at all what he had promised when he promised to end welfare. “I understand why they were scared of this,” Clinton later said of his liberal critics. “I was scared of it, too.” But there was also one good reason to sign, and it was the reason he would cite on television a few hours later: “I will sign this bill—first and foremost, because the current system is broken.” Clinton’s pledge to end welfare had been turned against him by a curious mix of idealists and rogues. But in at least one sense, the rogues were right. It was time to do something different. “All right, let’s do it,” Clinton said. “I want to sign this bill.”

  NINE

  The Radical Cuts the Rolls: Milwaukee, 1995-1996

  Imagine for a moment that you are Angela Jobe. You are twenty-nine years old with four kids to raise. You have just quit your job. Your landlord has tired of your crowd’s wild parties and is throwing you out. If you need help, you know you won’t get it from the men who fathered your kids. You’ll be ninety when Greg gets out of jail, and Vernon (fortunately) isn’t around. You’ve got a new man, but the kids resent him—they always do—and so far his main contribution to your finances has been to wreck your car. You know you’re not on top of the kids the way you need to be, but it’s hard to raise them all alone, even harder with no money, and at least you manage to keep everyone fed. One of the reasons is welfare. You’ve had it for nearly a dozen years. You’ve never raised children without it. While you don’t like to admit it, welfare is one of the few sources of stability in your life: whether you’re sick or healthy, depressed or inspired, you know that at the start of each month you’ll get a $708 check. And now in the summer of 1995, the country’s in a fever to take it away. You don’t follow the details, of course, but you can’t miss the talk in the air. Black leaders warn of slavery’s return. The priests say your kids will starve.

  What crosses your mind?

  “I don’t pay no attention to that crap!” Angie said, looking back. “I ain’t thinking ’bout welfare!” Opal, the newshound of the group, - wasn’t thinking about it, either—she was busy in drug treatment. Jewell claimed to have noticed even less: “Didn’t know, didn’t care.”

  Even accounting for some false bravado, it is hard to square such studied indifference with the tenets of the national debate. From a distance, the threesome seemed the very definition of dependency. Together they had been on welfare for twenty-seven years; they had moved to Milwaukee just to get the benefits they now stood to lose. They appeared to embody the one assumption that the partisans on both sides shared—that the program was central to recipients’ lives—which made conservatives so keen to restrict it and liberals so afraid of its loss. But as Angie and Jewell saw the world, if the money was there, they were happy to take it; if not, they would make other plans. With welfare or without it, Angie said, “you just learn how to survive.”

  The bill was still stalled in Congress in June 1995 when the trio left the First Street compound behind. They spent welfare’s dying days apart, accumulating more of the misadventures that gave the system its bad name. If Angie felt anxious, it wasn’t about welfare but the prospect of living alone. In Chicago, she had relied on Greg, and in Milwaukee she had forged a family out of Opal and Jewell. Now she was setting off on her own, with four kids between the ages of eleven and two and a loneliness she tried to ignore. A variety of men had come and gone in the four years since Greg’s arrest. Angie had cared for some and tolerated others, but she sustained a relationship with none, and when she got to feeling empty inside she filled the hole with beer. Love, order, a father for her kids—there were lots of things missing from Angie’s life. But, she figured, “I could always find me a job.”

  Just as Angie moved to her new place, another “old-ass” rental house on the near north side, the welfare office summoned her to a job-search class. Since Darrell had just turned two, she was no longer exempt, and the JOBS program was growing marginally more vigilant. Angie knew the routine: you sit through a week of pep talks, then make up a phony contact sheet listing all the employers you’ve called. “You think these people out here doing fifty million contacts and don’t nobody hire ’em?” she said. “Come on!” She played along for two weeks, then decided it was time to go back to work. She had been off for five months.

  While her dream of a postal career had faded away, the local branch was hiring, and Angie gave it a final try. This postal job, her third, was the worst. It only offered her five hours a day, and the shift began before dawn. “Who the hell want to be looking at mail that early in the morning?” she said. Since she was no longer living with Opal and Jewell, she left eleven-year-old Kesha in charge at home (with brothers ages nine, six, and two) and hoped for the best. Angie lasted six weeks until Kesha went back to school, and with that her hopes of postal glory—“a job for life”—sputtered to a close. Two months later, with the older kids in class, Angie took a job at a Budgetel. The 10:00 a.m. shift was more civilized (and Lucky’s grandmother babysat Darrell). But motel maid work was nasty. Tampons, condoms, underwear—“You never know what you’re going to find” in someone’s sheets. With another five-hour shift, “I wasn’t making crapola,” Angie said. She hung on for nearly four months, but when she collected her tax money early the next year, she quit and took one of her breaks. As usual, she hadn’t reported the jobs, so she still had her full welfare check.

  For a year or so, Angie had thought of digging out her nursing smocks. She had lasted only three weeks in her first job at a nursing home. And lots of people made fun of a job that requires you to handle bedpans. But Angie was pushing thirty, and she had always told herself she would do something “professional” when she was grown. She practiced by taking Kesha’s pulse and registered for the certification exam. In a nursing home, unlike a motel, “at least you know who peed in the bed.”

  While the end of group living left Angie lonely, Jewell welcomed the new privacy zone; as a homebody, she liked controlling her home. For her, the main drawback was the need to pay rent, something she never had done before. Greg’s drug money had p
aid the rent in Chicago, and thanks to Mrs. Allen’s deteriorating condition, no one had paid it in Milwaukee. At her new place, a duplex bungalow with a crack addict upstairs, Jewell discovered that she and Lucky had to pay “all our bills—had to pay rent and every-thing!” This struck her as somewhat unjust. Though welfare and food stamps totaled about $10,000 a year, rent and utilities consumed more than half, and Lucky drank too much to keep steady work. Jewell had dabbled in jobs before. Now she needed one.

  Unlike Angie, who prided herself on her work history, Jewell had never given work much thought. She pictured herself doing something classy, like working in an office. But she couldn’t type well enough. She did know a lot about hair and nails, and her skills as a kitchen-table beautician kept her in demand. But absurdly, the state required a high school degree to work in a beauty shop. The phone company was filling customer-service jobs; Lucky’s cousin got one at $9 an hour. Jewell failed the reading test. Phone work didn’t suit her, anyway, as she discovered a few months later in a telemarketing job. Talking on the phone was something Jewell excelled at. Talking to white people was not, and it proved to be the primary work of a Milwaukee telemarketer. White people made Jewell uneasy, and she avoided them when she could. Now she had a supervisor standing at her shoulder, coaching her to mimic their nasally Midwestern vowels. Jewell had a terrific telephone voice—a smooth, empathetic tone that lots of men found seductive. But she said “like-ded” for liked and “send-ded” for sent, and she had no luck getting strangers in Wauwautosa to give to the state police. Much of her shift was spent listening to them scream, “Don’t call my damn house anymore!” She gave up after a couple weeks, wondering why the police needed money anyway: “Don’t they make enough?”

  As she scraped by on welfare over the summer, Jewell had other problems in mind. Tremmell, her four-year-old, was talking oddly, and an exam revealed he was deaf in one ear; he was going to need special help. Jewell had also taken in Opal’s three girls, while Opal tried to get clean. That left her responsible for five young kids, and on some days Lucky made six. She returned to the job search in the fall of 1995 and discovered the post office was hiring temps for the holiday season. While Angie was eager to put postal work behind her, before she went postal herself, Jewell saw the vast downtown processing center as a temple of opportunity, even on a shift from midnight to six. It paid twice the minimum wage, and she could listen to headphones while she worked. Since she never even considered telling her caseworker about the job (“For what?”), she still had her full welfare and food stamps along with a paycheck. “Money was just coming in from everywhere,” she said.

  About the time she started the job, welfare resumed its lackluster efforts to push her into one. Jewell had been classified as a mandatory participant in the JOBS program for two years. But she had thrown the first nine appointment letters in the trash. When her tenth no-show finally triggered a penalty, it amounted to 6 percent of her combined welfare and food stamps, and she was flush with under-the-table earnings. Even so, she wandered in to set things straight. Lots of recipients had covert work, but Jewell now faced the special challenge of pretending to look for a job she already had. Soon, the awkwardness grew. Jewell was in the office one day when the computer spit out a list of her previous employers—all of them news to her caseworker. Office cleaning . . . telemarketing . . . airplane seat factory. Jewell tried to sound perplexed as her worker read off the list. “Unh-uhh,” she said. “Somebody probably was using my Social Security card!” Technically, she could have been charged with fraud. But her current job was too recent to appear on the list, and like most caseworkers, Jewell’s considered the old stuff more trouble than it was worth. Jewell was left to submit a fake job-search log, and when asked how she managed to find the only Milwaukee employers not hiring, she just shrugged. “Well, I went! They just didn’t hire me.” After two months of the obvious ruse, her caseworker put a note in the file: “Client not real motivated.” “I wasn’t,” Jewell later laughed. “ ’Cause I was already working!”

  Soon Opal was working, too, though as usual work occupied a place on the edge of her mental horizon. While Angie left First Street reluctantly and Jewell with a sense of relief, Opal left while coming unglued, racing to a rehab center. Medicaid financed a three-week stay, but after five years of smoking cocaine, even Opal knew she needed more than that; when her three weeks ran out, she left for a halfway house run by a storefront preacher. Pastor L. R. LeGrant required her residents to work, and Opal got hired at the Budgetel. She also started attending nightly meetings at Narcotics Anonymous, where a fellow twelve-stepper caught her eye. Within a few months, they were living together, and years later she talked of Kenny with a word she rarely applied to men. “I still love Kenny—I do,” she said.

  Opal was now twenty-eight—old enough to be getting herself together but young enough to rebuild a life. Kenny was a decade older and adamant about keeping them both off drugs, a welcome contrast to some of the men in her past. The kids came home from Jewell’s, and as the makeshift family of five settled in, someone meeting Opal never would have surmised her problems. About then, the welfare office picked up the trail. Like Jewell, Opal was already working when she was summoned to her job-search class. Like Jewell, she ignored the notices until her caseworker reduced her check. Then, like Jewell, Opal had to master the art of the fake job search while already holding a job. Conning her caseworker was a skill Opal had; keeping a job was not. She missed too many days, and the Budgetel fired her.

  Finding another job proved easy, even for a recovering addict with a trail of pink slips. Opal threw in an application at Target and charmed her way into a job as a cashier. Cash registers weren’t good places for Opal; too much temptation lurked in the till. As a cashier at a Chicago Wendy’s, she had taught herself to skim $100 from a single shift. The trick was keeping the math in her head—pocketing only the sales she didn’t key in—and Opal, with a semester of community college, prided herself on her math. In the Target locker room, she caught wind of an easier scheme: cashiers would steer their friends through their lines, neglect to ring up most of the sale, and take a cut of the shoplifted goods. Opal sent Kenny through with a list: bathroom rug, garbage can, shower curtain, and clock—all in matching green and gold. “My bathroom was the prettiest room in the house,” she said. Then Jewell and a friend gave it a try, and by the time the cart reached Opal’s line it had the makings of a dumb-criminal joke. They grabbed twelve jackets, ten pairs of pants, eight shirts, six sets of pajamas, and a pile of underwear and gloves, along with a bottle of Batman soap and a jumbo pack of Charmin. The mountain of merchandise was worth more than $800. Watching on camera, the store detective noticed it heading toward Opal while bypassing shorter lines. When he saw her ring up a $90 sale, he called the cops. Jewell had nothing to say as the police took her away. But Opal went out in style. “If O. J. Simpson’s innocent,” she yelled, “so am I!”

  The episode cost Jewell a morning in court and a $200 fine. No big deal. The real cost became clear a few months later, after her temp job at the post office ended. The postal service was hiring again, this time for permanent jobs. Jewell hurried to apply and with two successful stints as a temp worker she surprised herself by getting hired. The starting pay was $11 an hour! Plus health insurance and paid vacations. She had already finished the orientation when a supervisor said they needed to talk—something about a court case had appeared on her background check. With that, the break of a lifetime vanished, done in by a cartful of shoplifted clothes. If part of the underclass dilemma wasn’t just the lack of opportunity but the inability to answer when opportunity knocked, Jewell was now a walking example—and a particularly heartbroken one. She wasn’t one to waste energy on regrets, but for years she talked of the post office in tones reserved for true love lost: “I would a never quit them. I would a never got fired. If they call me now, I’m going back.”

  As Opal and Jewell rode off in handcuffs in the fall of 1995, they were part of the
tableau that made big-city welfare programs seem ungovernable. Tommy Thompson had been in office for nearly a decade and called himself the country’s leading reformer. Outside Milwaukee, he had cut the rolls 45 percent. Inside city limits, the rolls had dropped just 7 percent, and even that was large by urban standards. Streetwise clients, incompetent staff, the undertow of crime and drugs—the sheer mass of the poverty and social disorder made the cities seem a world apart. At least by urban standards, Milwaukee’s economy was strong; unemployment in Detroit and Cleveland ran nearly twice as high.

  Onto this stage rambled a curious sight: an affable, paunchy, middle-aged bureaucrat in a leaky old Mercedes-Benz, convinced that he - could make work programs work even in the heart of the ghetto. Nothing about Jason Turner suggested a figure about to make welfare history. He tangled his syntax and chewed cheap cigars. His shirttails were so chronically untucked that Thompson privately nicknamed him “Scruffy.” But a few months before Congress passed the new law, Turner seized control of the Milwaukee program and set off the first urban exodus. In doing so, he turned an obscure patch of Midwestern blight into a policy lab that would draw visitors from around the globe. And he pioneered many of the methods that other states would use to cut the rolls.

  Turner belongs to a welfare subgroup that confounds most stereotypes: the right-wing idealist. After decades of toil in conservative causes, he arrived in Milwaukee with two convictions. The first, in which he would be wholly vindicated, was that welfare recipients were much more capable of working than most experts had guessed. Even he didn’t understand how many already had jobs. But he sensed that the number was high and trusted it could grow a lot higher. When Jewell said of welfare, “A lot of people was just getting it because they can get it—they know how to go out there and work,” she was giving voice to the animating life-thought of Jason A. Turner.