Senate Liberal Chides GOP, Clinton for Neglecting Poor

Evoking the legacies of Robert F. Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt, the Senate’s most unabashed liberal Friday called for “an honest national conversation” to focus attention on poverty in America, especially among women and children.

In a breakfast interview with Los Angeles Times editors and reporters, Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) chided President Clinton and Republicans alike for neglecting the needs of the working poor.

Wellstone suggested that last year’s welfare reform legislation, which he vehemently opposed, was a misguided initiative, and he said the role of government “must not be used to mask the grim realities of American poverty.”

The debate over welfare reform largely turned on alternating views of the work ethic, as many people equated poverty with a lack of desire to work, Wellstone said.

The newly reelected, second-term senator called for full funding of the Women, Infants and Children program, a nutrition program for poor women and their children, and Head Start, an education program for poor youngsters.

He said the nutrition program now reaches only 60% of those eligible, while Head Start reaches only 30%. Given the “irrefutable and irreducible evidence” that both programs work, current spending levels are “a scandal,” Wellstone said as he took a swipe at Clinton.

“I might be able to explain why we don’t fully fund Head Start with a Republican president,” he said. “I can’t explain it with a Democratic president. I don’t know why, with a Democratic president, we don’t have a budget to fully fund Head Start, to fully fund WIC.”

Wellstone said he intends to raise these issues during the upcoming Senate debate on a proposed constitutional amendment to require a balanced federal budget. Other issues on his agenda include campaign finance reform and increasing the maximum level of Pell grants, from $2,700 to $5,000, for needy college students.

On campaign finance reform, Wellstone urged Clinton to speak out forcefully. “He can’t be in an ostrich-like position,” he said. “You need a president, you need strong leadership on this.”

Later in the day, Wellstone repeated his remarks in an address at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Wellstone said he has been increasingly troubled since the electorate’s turn to the right in the 1994 elections, and for months has been contemplating a major speech on “race, poverty and gender.”

“I think when historians write about this period of time, there will be an indictment, and the indictment will be all the ways in which we have abandoned too many children and devalued the work of adults that work with children,” Wellstone said.