Clinton Details His Plan for Welfare Reform

Almost daily, Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton injects the theme into his campaign appeals: He is a different kind of Democrat, pressing a different kind of agenda with a different kind of strategy.

On Wednesday, that was abundantly clear. First, Clinton took his campaign to the Atlanta suburb of Jonesboro and told an audience of mothers and children that the time had come to reform the nation’s welfare system in ways that place more pressure on recipients to take responsibility for their lives.

The Arkansas governor then traveled to Atlanta, where at the annual National Baptist Convention he displayed a visible chilliness toward the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a man used to being courted by Democratic presidential nominees.

Clinton took to the stage on which Jackson was seated with dozens of others and initially ignored the civil rights leader, with whom he has feuded over a variety of issues, before turning toward him to shake his hand. Jackson returned the favor--fiddling, frowning and looking bored as Clinton delivered his speech to the largely black group.

Afterward, Jackson approached Clinton onstage and the two men engaged in a brief discussion. Then Jackson guided Clinton into a nearby men’s room, where they chatted for another few minutes.

Jackson later said they had agreed to meet more formally next week. “He says he would like for us to get together . . . which is all right,” Jackson said.

Earlier this week, Jackson agreed to help the Democratic ticket by heading a voter registration drive. The effort is to include a Jackson-led bus caravan from New Orleans to Chicago later this month.

Jackson endorsed Clinton the weekend before July’s Democratic National Convention convened, but has not campaigned with him or his running mate, Tennessee Sen. Al Gore.

With his speech on welfare--conservative by the standards of his party’s past nominees--and his arm’s-length approach toward Jackson, Clinton continued to demonstrate that he is trying hard not to follow the path trod by his Democratic predecessors, who have lost the last three presidential elections and five out of the last six.

Clinton sought to stress his differences with the party’s past philosophy as he spoke in Jonesboro to participants in a pilot program aimed at moving recipients off the welfare rolls and into jobs. The speech also amplified themes of a new 30-second television commercial that the Clinton campaign began airing in 10 states Wednesday.

Clinton told his listeners: “It’s time to end this (welfare) system as we know it and to start with two simple principles. First, people who can work ought to go to work, and no one should be able to stay on welfare forever. And second, no one who does work and who has children in the home should live in poverty, as too many are today.”

The governor proposes that education, job training, child care and transportation be provided for welfare recipients. Once they completed a training program, the recipients would be required to find jobs. If they could not, they would be given a community service job.

His plan also includes a pledge to develop a national system to track fathers delinquent in child support payments, a refundable tax credit to guarantee that no family with a working parent lives in poverty and a provision to adjust the minimum wage to keep pace with inflation.

Clinton said his proposals “would literally make welfare what it ought to be, a temporary hand to people who have fallen on tough times.”

He said the concept was neither conservative nor liberal. But his remarks had a conservative flair.

For instance, he took pains to dispel any notion that he wants to broaden government’s reach, saying: “There will never be a government program for every problem.” He added that government “can never take responsibility for people that they ought to take for themselves.”

Clinton plugged a similar plan he said has shifted 17,000 people in his state from welfare into self-sufficiency in recent years. He did not mention that overall, the welfare caseload in Arkansas has risen during that period--a fact the Clinton campaign blames on what it says has been the Bush Administration’s mishandling of the economy.

Clinton estimates that on the federal level, his plan would cost an estimated $6 billion annually for four years, to be financed from savings the candidate says would accrue through reductions in the defense department budget and other cuts in federal administrative costs.

Clinton has put forward the welfare reform plan from the beginning of his candidacy; indeed, his initial theme of “opportunity and responsibility” was inspired by the welfare proposal. But it seemed more than a coincidence that his discussion of the issue Wednesday came in the South, where Clinton is trying to win back the affection of whites who have fled the party to side with the Republicans.

In his speech to the Baptist convention, he pleaded for a sense of national unity and an aggressive government role in improving education and job opportunities.

He also responded to Republican attacks on the Democrats for omitting “God” from their party platform.

The Republicans said there was something wrong with the platform because it “didn’t have G-O-D in it,” Clinton said, spelling out the word. “Well, I got to readin’ it, I don’t think my (U.S.) Constitution has G-O-D in it. But I sure like it. And we Baptists were forged in the conviction that church and state should be separated but that we should never take God out of our hearts.”

Clinton’s first appearance of the day was made via satellite from Georgia to the national convention of the B’nai B’rith, meeting in Washington. He praised recent gestures on the part of Israel to liberalize relations with the Arab nations, crediting Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin for “breathing new life” into the ongoing Middle East peace talks. Since his June election, Rabin has loosened restrictions on some Palestinians living or working in Israel, released Arab prisoners and reversed the deportation orders for others.

Clinton also said the United States should press Saudi Arabia and others to end their boycott against the Jewish state.

On another controversial Middle East issue, Clinton repeatedly linked the proposed sale of 72 F-15 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia to assurances of Israeli military supremacy in the region.

“I would support the sale of some versions of the F-15 to Saudi Arabia. But we must not sell any offensive version of the F-15s to Saudi Arabia that could threaten Israel, tilt the military balance or erode Israel’s qualitative military edge,” he said.