by Tom Corbett
After a groan, she went on with the business at hand. Apparently, the New Jersey governor was dedicating a new something or other involving welfare reform, and he was promised a representative from the Clinton administration. None of the real representatives, however, could go so the real power brokers nominated me. Ann promised me that all I had to do was stand there like a dummy. Perfect, I thought, I am just the man for that job.
On the train the next morning, I thought to myself, I bet Ann lied to me. She looks so innocent but… So, I worked up a few notes as I desperately tried to recall what the reform might be—they were all starting to sound the same to me. Fortunately, as promised, there was someone at the Philly station with a sign for Jim Corbett. Close enough, I thought. As he drove me over to Camden, I asked for an agenda. Sure enough, Clinton representative, Jim Corbett, was scheduled to speak right after the governor. I knew it, Ann had lied!
That was okay, by then I had been flying around the country giving talks on where the administration was going without really saying anything. My friend John Karl Scholz, now dean of the College of Letters and Sciences at U.W., had spent two stints in D.C, the last one as deputy assistant secretary for Tax Analysis in the Clinton administration where he worked under the brilliant and controversial Larry Summers. Karl, as he is known, was simply flabbergasted that I could go off and speak for the administration without my remarks being politically and substantively vetted. Either the ASPE brass trusted me, or they hoped that some angry mob would mortally attack me, thus sparing them from the ordeal of listening to my stupid ideas any longer. After considering the two possible explanations, Karl went with the second option.
Anyways, what surprised me was the barrage of media questions when I finished. “Well, what did you think of what the New Jersey governor was doing?” “Did it fit with President Clinton’s vision of reform?” “Why did the president support this initiative?” “And just what are you going to do with all the poor welfare people in Camden when they can’t get jobs and you throw them off the rolls?” Now that was a good one, there were no jobs in Camden. After I blah, blahed for a while, it ended.
I saw the light at the end of the tunnel which, unfortunately, was on the other side of the room. A gauntlet was positioned between me and freedom, composed mostly of favor seekers who, to my amusement, thought I was someone important. This barrier to freedom was buttressed by a gaggle of reporters who, despite my eloquence, were not yet quite convinced that New Jersey was showing the way for the nation on welfare reform. One young man slowed me up. “I have the solution for how to reach all the young, lost black men on our streets,” he said. When I asked what that might be, he pushed a business card in my hand and beamed, “Rap music.” I mumbled something about getting in touch and pushed on.
Another time, Wendell came into my office just before noon. “Tom, can you fill in for me. I am supposed to give a talk to an audience over at Social Security.” I assured him that would be no problem as I looked around for my calendar to mark the time and date. “The car is running downstairs,” he responded. I noticed that he once again had that same wry grin I had seen many a time. I had winged a lot of lectures and talks but this kind of request sounded more important. I often organized my talks on plane rides to various venues, but the car ride to SSA was not nearly as long. My recollection is that the expected speech was on the administration’s vision for welfare reform. I had been giving creative speeches on that topic for some time now.
Many of my talks that year were to various audiences with some stake in the reform effort. I think I was supposed to pave the way for the reality of what was coming, and to intuit where future resistance might lie. Thus, my forays into the real world were both a marketing and intelligence-gathering efforts. On several of these, Mark Greenberg, representing the Center for Law and Social Policy, had also been invited.
Mark was a Harvard Law educated advocate for the poor. He was not a shouter though. He was low-keyed and very analytical. He knew the federal regulations inside and out and was constantly sought after as a consultant by states. He always spoke in slow, measured terms; and often made me feel guilty that I was not as nice a person as he, nor as substantively informed; and certainly not as smart. After a career on the outside, he finally joined the federal government in the Obama administration. More recently, he joined the Migration Policy Institute here he worked on issues at the intersection of migrants and human services.
Mark and I got into a ritual. I would give the administration’s spiel, or what I thought was the spiel. It must have been okay since no one ever yelled at me upon my return to D.C. nor was I ever physically attacked by the audience, though ominous rumblings were occasionally heard. Then Mark would get up and say something like, “Now I have known Tom for many years and he is a very nice guy, ‘but’ beware of some of the things he is saying here today.” Then he would gently, in the most moderate and measured terms, explain how I had gotten in bed with Satan himself. When I was on some panel, I remember Wendell also commenting that he thought I was the most conservative member of this group. I recall thinking at the time, what the—! Someone should email my home state governor, Tommy Thompson, with this news. He is convinced that I am a left-wing terrorist nut case. Go figure!
On the other hand, there were a few uplifting moments! Not many, of course, but one stands out! I had written a piece for Focus called Child Poverty: Progress or Paralysis. It came out in the spring of 1993, just before I left for D.C. Over the next decade, I would come to appreciate what an impact that piece had, quite remarkable really. But for me, at the time, it had been published and then soon forgotten. I seldom looked back. I was the same with tests in school. Other students would gather to go over how others had answered the questions. I only wanted to walk away. It was a done deal.
My first inkling that my fifteen minutes of fame was about to break hit me like a two-by-four one day. Several of us working on the reform effort gathered to make a special presentation to a bunch of D.C. based movers and shakers. This was an audience of welfare specialists and various power brokers and I knew that the higher ups were quite nervous that this should go well, including folks from the White House Domestic Policy Council. As we waited to enter the meeting site, someone said that the room was abuzz because they wanted to meet this guy named Tom Corbett who had written this amazing article. What, this must be a joke!
I guess not. It turned out I was a minor celebrity. A few weeks later I got a call from the GAO, now the General Accountability Office. They had called UW to see if this Tom Corbett could come to speak to them about this Focus piece and were delighted to find me in D.C. I was a little disappointed that this chat would overlap with the ASPE summer picnic. We surely needed some down time. I promised the other staff that I just needed to run over to GAO for a quick chat and would soon catch up with them for the fun and games. When I got to GAO, the receptionist said, “Oh, you are our speaker for the afternoon.” That didn’t sound good. Then I walked into this large room that was filled with many, many people. This really didn’t look good. I never made it to the picnic.
The talk was much longer than planned and I, as I often did, improvised on the spot. The Q&A went on for a long time and then some people wanted to chat in a small group. About a decade later, I stopped by GAO to visit a former student who now worked there. One of her supervisors stopped by her office and introduced herself. She had been at that talk in 1993. She told me that they used my piece for several years when Congressional requests came in for background information on welfare. They thought it a most balanced and insightful piece. Go figure!
One day, a call for me was received at ASPE from a Sargent Schriver. My immediate reaction is that it was a call from either the D.C. or Arlington police. I had already been identified as a scofflaw by the Arlington city fathers for not paying a wheel tax while temporarily renting an apartment in their fair city. Apparently, you could not park on their streets without forking over some money for this tax. I thought the
y had caught me up in another such transgression. But the call was from the Sargent Schriver, Kennedy’s brother-in-law and launcher of both the WOP and the Peace Corps. Since I referenced his anti-poverty efforts in this article, I suspected he wanted to praise me or call me a schmuck for getting it all wrong. But I’ll never know since we never did connect.
The bill came out. It was long, complicated, and prescriptive, much as I feared would happen. As I mentioned earlier, a fair amount of my rhetoric had survived. That sad fact, however, was not going to save this sinking ship as it finally limped out of the harbor. After a committee hearing or two, Congress began to obsess about the fall elections. It was 1994 and Newt Gingrich and the Republicans were about to storm the barricades. Clinton’s effort to end welfare as we knew it was dead. Others would be better situated to say whether my contributions to Clinton’s proposal were meaningful in any way. I can say with confidence, however, that I left a lot of laughter behind. I did try to lighten the place up. It goes without saying that Washington is a place that desperately needs more laughter.
One fine day in June 1994, I packed up my Honda hatchback with my parting gifts and the best wishes of a staff I had come to appreciate so much before heading back to Madison. There was a bit of drama in those last days. There was some talk about my staying at ASPE. Despite the frustrations, I did enjoy the experience greatly. In retrospect, I probably never seriously entertained that possibility though my wife and I did look at housing in the area. In any case, it would have been a bigger mistake than the one I made in accepting the tenure track faculty position that had been ginned up during my Washington stay, another “back-forty” idea I discuss in more detail in a later chapter. Playing in my candy store from the sanctuary of the academy proved infinitely preferable to wandering about in the ideological jungle that Washington was becoming.
Back in Wisconsin, I would get to watch Tommy Thompson end welfare as we knew it up close and personal. In fact, Wendell kept saying to me and others at IRP, “You keep an eye on what the governor is doing, try to assess what is going on.” Fortunately for the intrepid readers of my tale, this part of the narrative is much shorter than my Washington adventures. We at IRP would be watching from the outside as Governor Thompson put together the Wisconsin Works or W-2 program. It is not as if we did not try to help. We tried very hard to get involved but with little success.
Upon my return, I found I was associate director of IRP. Again, I can’t recall how this happened. It just seemed to happen, along with this half-time clinical assistant professor position in Social Work. The rationale for the faculty position apparently came from the higher-ups in the U.W. celestial bureaucratic body. The faculty position appeared to solidify my ongoing teaching role. Not that long after my return, Barbara “Bobbi” Wolfe, the new director, invited all the head people putting W-2 together to a summit meeting on the top floor of Van Hise Hall. This included J. Jean Rogers, Jason Turner, Shannon Christian, and several other top officials including the secretary of the Welfare Bureaucracy, Gerald Whitburn.
The setting was where the board of regents for the whole U.W. system met…a site that offered spectacular views of Madison, the beautiful lakes that surround the city, and the bucolic countryside beyond. We brought in a powerhouse lineup of academic stars to describe their expertise and what they had to offer. We ended with an offer to help in any way we could and gave them our phone numbers. Our offer was met with dead silence. No one called. Did the governor hate us (me) that much?
I knew that we had fumbled the ball during one unfortunate IRP sponsored event. J. Jean Rogers was a top state official at that time and a very close confidant of the governor. We invited her to be on a panel to be held during the annual IRP Summer Workshop. This venue brought to Madison many high-tech poverty researchers from around the country where they fought over methodological approaches employed in their respective research papers. It was nerd heaven. But we always had one policy event to lighten the mood. This year it was a discussion of W-2 which already had captured national attention. I could see the horse manure right in front of me but, as usual, plunged ahead anyways.
Jean described the vision and principles of W-2 in somewhat general terms since it was still being planned. I moderated the session and could see that tension was rising between the governor’s confidant and Bob Haveman who also was on the panel. They were making side comments to one another. During the Q&A session, some particularly sharp questions came from the audience, particularly Robert Moffitt and Peter Gottschalk. By the end, I sensed that Jean was furious. Most likely, she thought she had been set up and by me since her invitation came from yours truly. Of course, she never saw how badly these guys and gals treated each other during their verbal brawls over picayune methodological disputes. This was just business as usual in the cutthroat world of the academy. She, however, did not know that. IRP was now deeper in the crapper, and I spent the evening wiping a lot of it off my shoes.
I guess I never understood just how deep the muck was until I was invited to an event at the Joyce Foundation in Chicago. They had been supporting my work, and I had a good relationship with some officials there. My favorite project officer, Unmi Song, called to ask if Tommy Thompson might come to speak at the dinner before their annual board meeting. I said sure, he was already unofficially running for president and probably wanted any exposure he could get. “But don’t ask me to contact him,” I added, “I guarantee you, I am not on his Christmas list.” “No problem,” she said as she invited me to the festivities. I never refuse requests from people who give me money, so I went but with some trepidation. Yes, I can be bought and for surprisingly little money.
The panelists that night included the governor (who thought I was a left-wing terrorist), Mark Greenberg (the liberal advocate who followed me around when I was in D.C. telling folks I had gone over to the dark side), and the mayor of Milwaukee (a Democrat who did not know me from Adam, but whose primary aide was someone I had worked with in the past).
As I was working the room before the event, the president of the foundation came up to me and whispered that the governor had arrived. Before I could say anything, she grabbed my arm and pulled me toward him. As soon as he recognized me, he got red in the face and started in, “Why are you always attacking me?” and added a few more bon mots before ending up with something about me “getting on his train.” Somehow, I did not get the impression that he was asking for my company on his next cross-country vacation.
I was saved for the moment when a Joyce board member, and law school professor at UW, saw what was happening and intervened to save me from further attack. The governor was quite vexed at my presence, and I feared he might stroke-out on the spot, his face was quite red. The brave intervention of the board member from UW proved only a temporary reprieve. After the dinner and talks, there was a Q&A session in which one member of the audience asked the governor what the foundation could do to help him with his work on welfare reform. He literally jumped up to the microphone. “I am glad you asked that. You can start by not giving money to these institutes that go around attacking me. I have brought in the best minds and we will reform welfare. Give me the money and I will make better use of it.” He started to sit down and then jumped back up, “And these comments are directed to Tom Corbett out there,” as he waived a menacing arm in my general direction.
I guess it really, really, really bothered him that I was there. It certainly gave me a better sense of his deep animus toward me and the institute. As he later swept out of the room, still obviously upset, he caught my eye and clearly mouthed the words “call me.” Now there was an invitation I could refuse. And all this time I thought I was a hell of a nice guy. Go figure!
I hate to say this, but people at my table were giggling throughout his tantrum. I suspect his actions were considered juvenile, if not outright childish. I can understand that politicians might see enemies everywhere. Perhaps he even thought the foundation was out to embarrass him, and that I was part of t
he scheme. Still, it escapes me how my presence could do that. I had never, not once, actively lobbied against any of his welfare proposals and even helped when I agreed with the direction he was taking things. In any case, his reaction was not the sort of thing done among the genteel world of philanthropic do-gooders. At one point I felt a presence at my shoulder. It was the foundation president. She leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Tom, in our eyes your stock has just gone up.”
Several years later, I coincidently happened to be visiting the foundation in Chicago on that president’s last day. She was leaving to assume the head position of a well-known national charity called Second Harvest. I was ushered into her office to extend my best wishes, and she brought up that incident saying she had used it during her interview for her new and far more public position. I was curious how she used the story but there were too many of her staff around. Not wanting to disrupt the ceremony, I made a graceful exit. It yet remains a matter of curiosity to me.
Evidence that I would not soon be on the governor’s Christmas gift list kept coming. During one of my endless trips back to D.C., a National Governors Association staff person mentioned that my name came up as a perfect resource person for a project they were launching. Her colleagues readily agreed. She was about to pick up the phone and then remembered that Thompson had recently become the titular head of the association. She suddenly had visions of him blowing his top and put the phone back down.
On another occasion, Bobbi Wolfe and I were chatting with the secretary of the Wisconsin Labor Department, whom Bobbi knew socially. Her department would play a major role in launching W-2. Again, we offered our assistance, thinking this might be a way to get involved. She would love our help, she admitted, but mentioned that we were in trouble over there, nodding in the direction of the Capitol. A favorite vignette of mine involves my spouse. She came home one day to say she had been introduced to the governor by her boss, the director of the Wisconsin state court system. She held the position of one of his two deputies. First, the governor flamboyantly kissed her hand before moving his kisses up her arm (that was her story at least and very believable). Second, her boss told her afterward that he was desperately relieved that she had kept her maiden name and that Tommy had no idea she was married to that dastardly Corbett guy. Chances for a judicial pay raise would have been shot that year for sure, he weakly joked.
