by Tom Corbett
This turned out to be the trip from hell though not because she and I found ourselves traveling together, at least not on my part. Cancelled flights, bus trips from Madison to Milwaukee, sitting on the tarmac waiting for the weather to clear for what seemed like days, and sundry other hurdles turned a four-hour trip into a twelve-plus-hour ordeal. To avoid talking about welfare, politics, or other sensitive subjects, I regaled her with stories of my life. After all, my life just happens to be one of my favorite topics.
By the time we reached the Washington hotel at 3:00 AM or so, she was in desperate straits. Importantly, she had agreed to help repair the State’s relationship with the Institute (well, not quite true just yet) and to give me her firstborn, anything to avoid hearing any more about Tom’s early years. I was struck with an insight at that very moment. The power of an excruciatingly boring story cannot be overestimated. Exposed to endless repetitions of my life, I suspect even Sarah Palin would break down and willingly sign on as an Obamacare fan.
As much fun as it might be to torture others, there are more defensible reasons for setting down my recollections. My story, if truth be told, is not terribly unusual or dramatic. Variants of my journey from an ethnic working-class childhood to modest success as a policy wonk, and even some limited success as an academic, is neither exciting nor remarkable. Countless others have tread down similar paths. And yet, each of us, no matter how humble or unremarkable, has a story to tell. Each life contains moments of drama, despair, joy, sadness, triumph, failure, roads that should not have been taken, and redemptive moments that, on occasion, set things right. Looking back, even my ordinary tale has all these elements.
I also came to realize that if my memories are not retrieved and recorded, they will soon surely be lost. Clearly, no one else will document my journey through life, neither for commercial gain since there would not be any, nor for historical justification since not that much of note occurred.
And so, it is up to me to set my story down before all is lost amidst cognitive decay and mental confusion. This narrative, in effect, serves as my personal journey through a series of social policy challenges that dominated the past half century or so of our political history. It encompasses such topics as poverty, welfare reform, and the growing inequality in social opportunities.
I do not cover everything. That would be too daunting, and even I can take pity on others. But this work does touch upon many of the highlights and lowlights which I have shared with others verbally when necessity required that they endure my company. You will soon understand why I have so few friends. The chapters that follow permit the reader to journey through what I often call my policy candy store. I characterize my professional career as such because, despite everything, it was a pure delight and a joy to experience. This remained true despite the many frustrations, the failures, and the grueling hours.
There were many nooks and crannies in my professional candy store and I get to many of them. In addition, I do spend time talking about my ill-fated tenure as a wayward academic which I touch upon obliquely toward the end, but which remained an irresolvable tension throughout my career. For the most part, I tried to focus on those topics representing the more thematic and substantive narratives of my career as a policy wonk. More to the point, these issues are the inspiration for much that I have learned about doing public policy and about the joys attached to such professional pursuits.
I typically start a narrative about one of my topical themes with the phrase, “I am reminded of the time that my phone rang” or “I saw a message” or something similar that would alter the trajectory of my professional life. The course of my professional life owes much to fortune and serendipity. In short, I have been very fortunate to stumble upon some of the biggest social policy issues of the past four-plus decades, largely without any forethought whatsoever. It was as if some invisible hand were guiding my career. Perhaps this serendipity has something to do with the luck of the Irish, though it could be argued that, in truth, this just might be more of a curse?
In all honesty, I am not the brightest bulb on the marquee. Still, even I eventually realized that I was blessed with a few gifts. I could sit among diverse audiences, whether government officials or academic types or social workers or think tankers or ordinary folk and really feel the contours of the dialogue about me. I could quickly drive to the core of what was being said, often weaving a central story out of diverse and seemingly unrelated threads. I could conceptualize a pattern out of the separate strands of complex narratives, sometimes in ways that took the conversation in an unexpected direction. At some point, I realized that many people, including prominent academics and key public officials, listened to what I had to say. I had come a long way from my rough-and-tumble working class origins.
It is a good thing I had such skills since I had few others. If I were required to make my way through life doing real work, it would have been a pitiful sight indeed. I have often felt like one of those scribes in ancient Egypt, scribbling testimonies all day to inflate some Pharaoh’s ego. Like those ancient scribes, my work was inconsequential. Still, it kept me occupied and sufficiently busy to keep me from doing real harm in the world. Surely, had I been born into an earlier era, I would have starved had I been required to till a field or build a pyramid. And heaven forbid that I would be expected to go into battle for the Pharaoh. That would be a shortlived endeavor as demonstrated by the gaping wound in my back suffered as I ran from the battlefield in total panic.
Obviously, you do not need to be a genius to contribute to the policy world. I am exhibit one! Still, in my experience, a lot of young promising policy types shy away from the challenges because they assume that doing policy is terribly arcane and technical and thus will be as boring as waiting for paint to dry or watching a lopsided curling match. Let me say from the outset that this book should paint a very different picture of what policy is all about, a picture that stresses the human element in the exercise of the policy arts.
I think doing policy should be fun. I believe whatever we do in life should be fun. Otherwise, it would be work, a terrible four-letter word. I warn you now that my better half has spent our married life trying to beat the wit out of me to no avail. If someone asks me whether I need help with my bag upon entering an upscale hotel with my spouse, I am likely to respond with “no, thanks, my wife is capable of getting up to the room by herself.” Or when the waiter asks where I would prefer to sit, my likely response is, “Today, I think I will try a chair.” There is no off-switch. Wit or no, I find it difficult to imagine going through life without finding some humor even in very serious situations. If we do not laugh, we just might cry.
Throughout this book, I wax exuberantly on the joys and rewards of doing policy work. True enough, my love for the policy arts is, in my mind, warranted and justified. Still, let me end this introductory essay with a confession. If my first love was not being a conventional academic, and it wasn’t, it probably does not lie in being a policy wonk either. As I look back over a long life, I see more clearly that my passion was in self-expression, the act of writing. This is what I wanted to do as a young lad. While my working-class delinquent friends dreamed of being cowboys or athletes, I fantasized about being the next Hemingway or Joyce. I was an oddball right from the get-go.
Discretion prevailed, though, and I decided that a paid job as an academic would guarantee three squares a day and a roof over my head. I do like to eat. Besides, pretending to be an academic meant I could pretty much do what I wanted. What freedom! Moreover, I never got past my amazement that someone would pay you, with real money, for having fun struggling with society’s more intractable problems. Who would have thought? Doing policy mostly has been a joy, even with the impossible impediments, the brutal hours, and the tensions that interfered with sound sleep. I recall jolting awake before dawn most mornings, worried about being behind in everything. I recoil with horror at those Friday evenings getting stuck in O’Hare airport on my way back to Madison. I stil
l relive the many failures and frustrations as the best of intentions went unrealized. In the end, none of that seems to matter.
Longevity and experience as a policy wonk has brought home one lesson about finding one’s way in life. I recently had lunch with my cousin who has two grand-daughters. Her eldest takes after her grandfather, Jack, who loved mathematics and computers, and who self-taught himself the early computer language, Fortran, when he was a high school teacher in the early 1960s. As computers spread, he had rare skills and was hired to teach the subject at a local college. On the other hand, the younger grand-daughter takes after my cousin who is an avid reader. My cousin even reads all my works but, like me, can barely operate a smart phone.
Guess what? The elder grand-daughter went to a very good technical college and is a successful engineer in Boston. The younger offspring, who responded enthusiastically to the writing muse, attended an excellent liberal arts college and now works for a New York publishing house. I am convinced the genetic dispositions of each parent is reflected separately in their two grand-children. This vignette suggests to me that we each possess a niche that is within us from the moment of conception. The trick is to figure out what it is and where we belong. Since my retirement from policy work and the academic world, I have gone back to my abandoned first love. The lesson I have fully embraced is to never forget about those inner muses. Find them, even if later in life when you are one short step from the nursing home.
Tom Corbett
Madison Wisconsin
June 2018
CHAPTER 1
A CANDY STORE
Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.
—Winston Churchill
I will be very direct. This chapter, this book in fact, is not about any candy store, which is a labored metaphor designed to capture the fun I had during my policy career. Rather, these pages embrace selected recollections touching upon my struggles and joys as a rather addicted policy wonk. In the subsequent chapters, the reader is taken on a compelling, often witty, journey as I grappled with some of the more challenging policy issues of the past few decades—poverty, welfare reform, and our efforts to create a more just and workable society. While those issues are deadly serious, my efforts to address them often were futile and quite inept. Not surprisingly, my bumblings about the policy world afford me a rich vein of needed humor and comic relief, a needed antidote when one continuously butts his head against impossible social challenges. Best of all, it is a journey that takes you directly into the trenches of doing policy. So, if you have ever wondered what it might be like to do public policy from an insider’s perspective, or at least close to the inside, keep reading. This will get you as close as you are likely to get without getting your hands dirty, soiling yourself, or perhaps experiencing irritating bouts of nausea.
My hapless journey takes you along into the heart of those complex and contentious policy challenges that defy easy answers, and which often generate heated ideological and partisan passions. Because of this, or perhaps despite this, each of these societal problems has become a treasured counter in my metaphorical sweets shop. Thus, any trip through my allegorical confectionary business can be dramatic, stimulating, humorous, seductive, frustrating, and hopefully rewarding at times. From my perspective, it was a heck of a journey, and a wonderful place to browse around for unforgettable memories. The best thing is that no calories are involved, a good thing since I already have consumed far more than my lifetime quota.
Let me start the journey rather late in my career. The phone in my University of Wisconsin office rang one day, in the latter part of the 1990s. The voice on the other end asked if I would come to a significant national event to be held in Chicago. Would I be willing to participate in something called an electronic focus group comprised of various national welfare experts and officials? As a “reward,” I would get special seating for a “town hall” meeting featuring President William Jefferson Clinton.
I waffled. I was getting so many requests to give talks, participate on panels, or consult on policy issues that my daily rounds of teaching, research, consulting, and administration often suffered. In the end, though, I relented. The university-based research institute I helped manage at the time needed public exposure to keep needed resources flowing. So, perhaps I could accommodate them. That was a weakness of mine, having trouble saying no—squeezing in just one more event. Besides, they would pay the bill and I liked Navy Pier, the site of this big event.
I was never quite sure how some of these calls came my way in the first place. Oh sure, most callers were members of a familiar crowd. They were the academics, think tank scholars, government officials, philanthropists, evaluation firm experts, social welfare trade organization types, advocacy group representatives, and media folk that were bound together by an interest in poverty and social welfare. I would repeatedly run into such folk at conferences and workshops and meetings and other such venues. Some I had worked rather closely with over time. Others were simply familiar faces in a crowd that toiled in the welfare war trenches.
Some calls, though, left me perplexed. How did such and such a person find me? I never thought of myself as famous or noteworthy. I was rather a failure as a conventional scholar and never much of a traditional researcher. Yet, the calls kept coming to give talks, attend workshops, consult, or provide comment to media types. When the national newspaper, U.S.A. Today, had a series called “know your expert” where they highlighted one so-called expert from various fields, they selected me as the national welfare and poverty specialist. They did a full article on me with a picture and all. I mean, we are talking U.S.A. Today, a publication read in more bathrooms around the country than any other newspaper. How in the world did they find me? Even more perplexing is why they selected me. Most of my colleagues were even more perplexed than I.
So, off to Chicago it was. The high-tech focus group was fun, though the purpose eluded me even after it was finished. After an informal chat with the economics editor for the New York Times, who had earned his doctorate at MIT and wanted to chat about a prior colleague of mine, Sheldon Danziger (also an MIT grad), an event official approached me. She handed me a special badge for the following days’ big event. “Thanks for helping us out,” she said, “and don’t forget to wear this badge to the town hall meeting tomorrow morning.” “Sure,” I responded, and gave the matter not a second thought, stuffing her offering in my pocket.
And so, I arrived at the big “town hall” session the next day, the highlight of the conference. I was stunned at the size of the crowd. Welfare, and its reform, was big business in the 1990s and the President was clearly a draw. Still, I was used to conference crowds in the dozens or hundreds at best, not the thousand or two that had gathered in Chicago. When I reached the first security checkpoint, they glanced at my badge and waived me on. I got to the second, and then the third checkpoint, each time I was waived on. Then I get to the stage. Surely, I will be stopped at this point, I thought. But no! “Dr. Corbett, please take one of the chairs on the stage.” Oh snap, I thought, I would have worn clean underwear if I knew I would be this close to the President.
And so, one fine day in the late 1990s, I found myself on a stage in a large conference hall at Navy Pier in Chicago. With me on that stage were, among others, President Clinton, a few Fortune 500 CEOs, and a few former welfare recipients who were now successful members of the workforce. The event was a major celebration of the welfare reform legislation passed in 1996 that created TANF, the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program. The purpose of the legislation was to move those nondisabled adults thought to be dependent on cash assistance into the workforce. This event was to celebrate how well the law was working. Thus, we had the Fortune 500 CEOs and the exemplar former recipients who went from abject dependency to regional VP of marketing in some major corporation, all in less than six months. The audience loved the rags-to-riches stories. It was like one of those old-style revival meetings wher
e the lost sinners were being saved to the exuberant huzzahs of the true believers.
I can still remember shaking Clinton’s hand as he looked directly at me. What should I say? Perhaps I should mention the role I played in developing his welfare reform bill, the one that never made it out of committee. Or perhaps I should plug my research institute, which received considerable federal funding. Surely, I can mention how the governor of my home state (a Republican who often challenged the President on his approach to reform) had also publicly attacked me on occasion for being a total numbnuts on welfare issues, and for not always supporting his own approach to reform. Surely, we can bond over this common antagonist. But like so many others before me, I stood mute, a state that many colleagues had longed hope might become my permanent condition.
Years later, after my retirement, my next-door neighbor told me he was going to an event in New York, where he would meet former President Clinton. Jokingly, I told him to give Bill my regards. I was jesting since the Big Guy could not possibly have any idea regarding who the hell I was. After all, I only met him one other time. That was during my year-long sabbatical of sorts in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) while working on his welfare reform legislation. The meeting was in a very large group setting, where my only notoriety was setting off the security device several times while trying to enter the room. I was almost down to my BVDs before I made it through.
