Politics Stand in Way of Workable GOP Welfare Plan

Despite a broad agreement around the country--and apparently between the two contenders for the presidency--that the welfare system should be overhauled, a new GOP welfare reform plan unveiled Wednesday seems more likely than ever to run aground on the shoals of presidential politics.

There are surprisingly few areas of disagreement between President Clinton and the GOP welfare proposal, which like past plans would impose work requirements, end the 60-year-old guarantee of cash benefits to the poor and give states more power to run their own programs.

But the new proposal puts the GOP on a collision course with the White House because it includes provisions to give states a freer hand in running Medicaid, a step that Clinton vehemently opposes.

Democrats accused the GOP of deliberately courting a presidential veto. Republicans said Clinton was just looking for an excuse to avoid signing welfare reform. The bottom line, many members of both parties said, is a poor outlook for enacting welfare reform this year.

“I am concerned now that with presidential politics we will not get it through,” said Wisconsin’s GOP Gov. Tommy G. Thompson.

Clinton has seemed to move far closer to the Republican position on welfare than anyone could have imagined possible for a Democrat just a few years ago.

He has embraced the once-controversial five-year limit on welfare benefits. He has praised Wisconsin’s sweeping welfare reform plan. He has instituted new measures to require teenage mothers on welfare to stay in school.

Republicans, seeing it all as a mad scramble by Clinton to protect himself on an issue that traditionally played to GOP strength, have mounted a concerted campaign to show that Clinton’s record on welfare does not match his rhetoric.

Central to the GOP indictment of Clinton’s record is that he has twice vetoed welfare reform bills. A third Clinton veto may be in the offing if Republicans do not back down from their plan to link their new welfare bill to a plan to water down the entitlement status of Medicaid.

“It’s not a perfect bill,” White House advisor Bruce Reed said of the new GOP welfare proposal, “but the major flaw in the Republican plan is that it’s attached to a bad Medicaid bill.”

The new bill draws on recommendations of the National Governors’ Assn., which early this year produced bipartisan plans for reforming welfare and Medicaid. But Democratic governors disavow the new GOP plan.

Vermont Gov. Howard Dean said Democrats never agreed to link welfare and Medicaid reform and had called for $10 billion more in welfare funding than the GOP bill would provide. He also criticized the GOP bill for imposing a different formula for distributing Medicaid funds to the states.

“This is election year hogwash,” said Dean. “They want to get the president to veto the bill and I would encourage him to do so.”

Republicans accuse the Democrats of finding fault just to give Clinton political cover to oppose the bill. “We held as closely to the governors’ bill as we possibly could,” said Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr. (R-Fla.).

In one big concession, the new GOP bill adds $4 billion to the $18 billion that last year’s bill included to subsidize child care for mothers getting off the welfare rolls. The bill also accepts the governors’ recommendation that states be allowed--not required--to cut off cash benefits to women who have more children while on welfare.

The new Medicaid proposal would guarantee coverage for pregnant women, small children and other specified groups of the poor. But Democratic critics say those guarantees are inadequate because states would also get broad new authority to define the scope of benefits and otherwise impose new limits on coverage.

Those proposals, Democrats said, are veto bait. “As long as these things are coupled, you will not see welfare reform,” said Rep. Robert T. Matsui (D-Sacramento).

As if to underscore the difficulty of reaching agreement in an election year, the Dole campaign and the White House on Wednesday spent a second day arguing over Clinton’s portrayal of his welfare record.

Arguing that Clinton was misrepresenting his record to blur their differences, GOP officials Wednesday pointed to a statement earlier this week from a White House aide saying that the administration had not denied any state requests for waivers from federal law to perform welfare experiments. In fact, the administration has rejected three state requests while approving 61, said Michael Kharfen, spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services.

Another dispute opened over Clinton’s record on allowing states to test welfare recipients for drug abuse. After Dole proposed Tuesday that all states be allowed to require random drug testing, Clinton fired back that he had already granted a waiver from federal law allowing South Carolina to perform such tests.

But South Carolina Gov. David Beasley, a strong Dole supporter, charged that the administration had actually undermined the state’s request by refusing to allow the state to punish those found to be using drugs.

Administration officials said Beasley was vastly exaggerating the extent to which Clinton had limited the state’s plan.

This complex dispute may be emblematic of what voters will face in a race between two candidates skilled at obscuring differences when they choose. On such precise details now ride the daily torrent of charges and counter-charges between two presidential campaigns eyeing each other’s record with lawyerly eyes.