Popular Refrain on Welfare May Be Tricky Tune for Dole

As he stumped through the Midwest, in states that are likely to be central battlegrounds for the presidency, Sen. Bob Dole beat one of the same drums that helped rouse the region to Bill Clinton in 1992: welfare reform.

“When Bill Clinton came to Illinois in 1992, he went all over this state, talking like a Republican,” Dole told a cheering crowd in the Capitol rotunda here Monday. “Clinton said at the time that we’re going to end welfare as we know it. We sent him a welfare bill . . . , but then he vetoed it.”

But while Dole the candidate plays the issue boldly on the trail, Republicans back in Washington express growing concern about how Dole the Senate leader will handle the matter in Congress.

How, they ask, will Dole manage to pass some form of welfare reform legislation this year without giving the issue to Clinton?

The question goes to the heart of Dole’s unique position as he nears the Republican nomination. Never before has a sitting Senate majority leader squared off against an incumbent president in an election.

Welfare reform, more than any other issue, shows the dilemma in that confrontation. Producing a welfare reform bill the president would sign could demonstrate Dole’s leadership ability. Yet Clinton clearly would share the credit for pushing through a solution to one of the nation’s most intractable problems.

Failure to assemble a welfare plan Clinton would sign would allow Dole to continue hammering the president for standing in the way of reform. Yet part of the blame would be laid on Dole as well.

Nevertheless, at least some analysts believe that a strategy of provoking vetoes is the best approach for Dole. “Politically, it makes much more sense for the Republicans to pass a bill that is much, much tougher, forcing Clinton to veto it,” said Larry Sabato, a professor of government at the University of Virginia.

Passing a bill that Clinton would sign would be “wonderful for Clinton,” Sabato predicted. “It would be a wonderful endorsement of his view that a Republican Congress and a Democratic president is the best situation.”

There is no question that the issue is important to voters here, where Clinton’s pledge to “end welfare as we know it” helped establish him as a “new Democrat” in the eyes of the voters in 1992.

Studying the keys to Clinton’s victory, Republican analysts and pollsters found that each time Clinton sank in the polls in Midwestern swing states, his campaign played the same television ad: the welfare reform spot.

“Every time Bill Clinton went down in the polls, he trotted out his views on welfare,” Wisconsin Gov. Tommy G. Thompson, one of several Midwestern governors vying for the vice presidency, said in an interview. “But he never got around to signing any legislation.”

This time, welfare “is the Achilles’ heel of the Clinton administration,” he said.

Anger over welfare continues to be heard among voters here. “Welfare reform, that’s the No. 1 priority,” said Halina Bielowicz, 48, as children in bright costumes danced to Eastern European music at an ethnic rally for Dole last weekend in River Grove, Ill. “The breeding of third- and fourth-generations of welfare women is a disgrace.”

Focusing on the welfare issue here was part of Dole’s overall effort to shift focus away from his primary opponents and toward the general-election matchup with Clinton. The Midwest is “probably where the battle’s going to be in November,” Dole told supporters at a St. Patrick’s Day party and rally in Madison, Wis. Tuesday’s primaries were “sort of a preliminary bout. . . . Clinton carried this state in 1992. He’s not going to carry this state in 1996.”

To make good on that bet, Dole is “going to need some way to show the sharp differences in approach” between himself and Clinton, said Douglas Besharov, a policy analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Welfare is one of the major issues on which Dole and his advisors hope to do that. Clinton’s welfare proposal, which Congress received too late to act on at the end of his second year, would have retained federal control of the safety net for poor families.

Dole and the governors who introduced him, all of whom have signed into law welfare reform in their states, told voters that Clinton vetoed welfare bills after promising reform.

“Welfare is important to a lot of people,” Dole said over and over. “There will always be people--the very old, the disabled, the very young--who will need help. But we believe able-bodied people ought to work if they can work, that you shouldn’t have to work 16 hours a day so somebody else doesn’t work at all.”

Yet in trying to draw out his differences with Clinton on the issue, Dole faces several problems. One is Dole’s oft-noted difficulty in articulating his positions in language that voters find compelling.

Another problem is that even if Dole would prefer to push ahead with legislation that draws the sharpest possible contrasts with the White House, doing so would run the risk of infuriating his Republican colleagues in Congress who desperately want to tout welfare-reform accomplishments in their reelection campaigns.

Many of those members of Congress are backing a bipartisan measure conceived by the National Governors’ Assn. A group of Republican and Democratic governors, together with members of Congress, are scheduled to unveil the completed welfare overhaul next week.

Whether he likes it or not, it is too late, congressional insiders say, for Dole to stall that plan.

“I was in the Congress for 10 years, and I can’t imagine a Democrat or a Republican representative who would want to go home and face the voters having not passed welfare reform this year when everyone knows it needs to be fixed,” Delaware Gov. Thomas R. Carper, one of the Democratic governors working on the welfare initiative, said in an interview. “I believe welfare reform is alive and well. I expect the Congress to pass and the president to sign welfare reform this year.”

Clinton vetoed the welfare reform bill that Congress sent him late last year, saying it would be too harsh to children, because, among other things, it cut deeply into funds for disabled children and failed to provide adequate money to pay for child care for working welfare recipients. The current version is more moderate on most of the points Clinton criticized.

But given the popularity of the issue, the president would be hard-pressed to veto a welfare reform measure that comes with the support of the Democratic governors.

“Whether there will be a welfare reform bill this year is entirely political,” said Besharov.