Mississippi Leads the Way in Meanness : Clinton’s main (ex-GOP) man transfers his welfare bashing skills to President’s campaign.

Let me see if I’ve got this right. President Clinton’s top political adviser is a fellow named Dick Morris, who was previously a key operative in helping the Republicans gain control of Congress. Now he helps the President decide which congressional bills to veto and which to sign. And the White House wonders why the voters don’t think the President stands for anything other than getting reelected?

Morris secretly advised Clinton on how to win the 1992 presidential primaries at the same time he was being paid by Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi to help that noted Republican reactionary and current Senate majority whip get reelected.

“I think he’s brilliant,” Morris said of the senator who crusaded against federal support of child care for poor mothers forced to work. Lott has been a leader in the fight to end the federal entitlement to Aid to Families With Dependent Children, which means letting the states decide on how much needs to be done for the poor. As little as legally possible is Lott’s motto.

The states already have considerable leeway to set assistance levels, and in Mississippi, that translates to $120 a month for a mother and two children. Since this represents the lowest cash subsidy in the nation, one-third the national average, it should provide proof positive for Lott’s argument that cutting welfare payments will reduce poverty by reducing welfare “dependency.” In Mississippi, that has not proved to be the case. The welfare rolls have gone down but not the number of poor. According to the state’s own figures, one out of three children lives in poverty.

Maybe the state needs even more room to experiment free of federal regulation? The Clinton Administration buys that argument. The White House granted a waiver allowing Mississippi to deny additional benefits to mothers who have children while on welfare. President Clinton evidently accepts that an additional $24 a month is just too attractive an inducement to have another child.

The President has also approved a Mississippi program that seizes food stamp and welfare money from recipients and uses it to subsidize a mandatory work program. A welfare mother must accept a minimum-wage job in the private sector mostly paid for with federal funds. In what may herald a return to the plantation economy, this time around subsidized with public funds, the private employers put up only a dollar an hour of their own money.

These jobs are further subsidized by federally funded child care and, of course, the Medicaid program. But what happens if those programs are cut way back as the Republicans in Congress intend? Throw in a reduction of the earned-income tax credit and those minimum-wage jobs, even in Mississippi, become untenable as a way of keeping hearth and home together.

None of this is very different from the problems encountered by Project Success, the workfare program that Clinton sponsored when he was governor of Arkansas. The program was a bust, but it nonetheless served to embolden then-presidential candidate Clinton in his oft-repeated claim to “end welfare as we know it.”

Perhaps Clinton was drawing on his own rich experience as chairman of the Mississippi Delta Commission, which managed to do nothing to improve the lot of the poor in the most impoverished region of the country. Illiteracy and unemployment rates remained just where they were.

But who cares if any of these newfangled “reform” programs work? Don’t you get it? This is politics. Welfare bashing helps you get reelected, and that’s the goal that Trent Lott, Bill Clinton and their mutual adviser Dick Morris have in common. When it comes to political cynicism, these fellows are something else. Lott laughingly confided to reporters that it was Morris who came up with the Republicans’ “Slick Willie” label for Clinton. And yet Morris calls Clinton “my political soul mate.”

Unfortunately, Morris is probably right, which is why the President is already signaling that he will not use his veto to protect the poor. Clinton takes credit for pushing welfare bashing onto the national agenda in the first place, and he’s not going to abandon it now that he’s up for reelection. Instead, with Morris’s expert guidance, the President will save his veto for issues that have more of a middle-class appeal. In that case, I will save my one vote. I know that’s no big threat, but the President had better watch out lest more voters decide that, to steal a phrase from Gore Vidal, Clinton gives opportunism a bad name.