Clinton Defends His Welfare Reform Plan

Have I been unfair to Bill Clinton?

He thinks so, and so does Mickey Kantor, the California finance director of the Arkansas governor’s campaign to win the Democratic presidential nomination.

Both took strong exception to my column last week raising questions about one of Clinton’s central campaign themes: the notion that many of America’s most troubling social problems--particularly some of those associated with long-term poverty--are the result of individual irresponsibility.

“Personal responsibility movement” adherents seem to grow in number by the week. Welfare reform measures inspired by its proponents have been enacted in Arkansas, Wisconsin and other states. Key elements of the movement’s program are woven through Gov. Pete Wilson’s so-called Tax Protection Plan, an initiative that would slash payments under Aid to Families with Dependent Children up to a stunning 25%, this in a state where a typical welfare family’s payments leave it 30% below the federal poverty line.

Last week I argued that although the personal responsibility movement does have a kind of appealing simplicity, it doesn’t have much to say about the real condition of poor Americans: Most are working people trapped in jobs that no longer pay a living wage; single mothers compose the fastest growing segment of the working poor; there has been a shattering decline in annual income of minority high school graduates over the last two decades.

When he called last Friday, Kantor insisted that I had “misrepresented” Clinton’s sentiments on these issues. The Arkansas governor was, he said, “the only Democratic candidate to address these problems in a consistent, systematic way.” Worse, Kantor said, I had failed to report that on previous visits to Southern California, Clinton, who was in town to meet with wealthy potential contributors, had visited minority neighborhoods in South and East Los Angeles.

I said I had not questioned Clinton’s experience, simply the conclusions he had drawn from it. “Look,” Kantor snapped, “this country is in a lot of trouble, and we’ve just got to move beyond the old liberal and conservative b.s.”

If Gov. Clinton felt my comments were unfair, perhaps we could meet for an interview. Saturday afternoon, Clinton called me at home. “I read your column yesterday morning,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I don’t think we’re an inch apart on these things,” he said. Clinton is a man of strong but not dogmatic opinions and, over the next 30 minutes, we had something rather rare during close encounters with politicians--a conversation.

He has a detail man’s command of facts and figures and used it to describe his role in obtaining changes in federal welfare programs. These, coupled with state legislation to “reinforce” personal responsibility had, he said, allowed Arkansas “to get 2,400 individuals off AFDC, which is a lot of people in our state.”

“But governor,” I said, “you and I both know that most of those people still are living below the poverty level.”

“Below the federal poverty level--yes. But the standard of living is lower in Arkansas.”

Clinton insisted that my argument had not given his personal responsibility campaign credit for its even-handedness. “Friday morning,” he said, “I met with a group of Republican business executives, and I talked to them about responsibility, too. I pointed out that the difference between their salaries and what their employees make is unconscionably larger than the difference between what Japanese CEOs and their workers make. I told them they had a responsibility to address that problem.

“If you’ve gotten the impression that we’re only talking about personal responsibility for people on welfare and not in the board room, then we’re not getting our message across.”

Perhaps. But I have yet to see legislation introduced to cap executive salaries. Nor am I alone in catching a whiff of class struggle in the personal responsibility movement.

“As employed by Gov. Clinton and others, the term ‘personal responsibility’ is simply a code word for less government,” political analyst William Schneider told me this week. “After all, if you’re responsible for yourself, then guess who isn’t responsible for you or your welfare. The answer, of course, is the rest of us.

“Another way of putting it is that the Democrats are trying to decide whether they want to be thought of as the party of economic fairness or the party of economic growth. This dichotomy has existed since the 1970s, when the party split between its traditional supporters--the so-called ‘lunch box’ Democrats--and the ‘new politics’ people. Clinton, by the way, is firmly on the new politics side of that equation.

“To over-simplify only slightly, new politics Democrats are upper middle-class limousine liberals. They have a great deal in common with the upper middle-class country club conservatives who now predominate in the Republican Party. Both are well-educated, elite groups who tend to be liberal concerning matters of personal conduct, especially their own, and conservative on economic issues. Both elites also are, for understandable reasons, extremely uncomfortable with discussions of social class. There has been an element of class division in the Democrats’ split from the start, and Clinton’s candidacy has helped to make that explicit.”

What is less clear is how desperate people will respond when they confront an economic policy fashioned by the political equivalent of “tough love,” a policy that treats poverty as an addiction to be overcome:

“Hello, my name is Jane, and I’m a recovering welfare mother. . . .”