All posts by bradley

The New York TImes has an inter­est­ing piece up on the legacy of Pres­i­dent Clinton’s wel­fare reform efforts.  These efforts were a part of Clinton’s broader re-election strat­egy of tri­an­gu­la­tion: the attempt to co-opt the issues and views of one’s oppo­nents, thus pulling the rug out from under them.  In this spirit, Clin­ton, a baby-boomer, former-hippie Demo­c­rat, declared the era of big gov­ern­ment over and promised to end “wel­fare as we know it.”  Well, as we now know, the impli­ca­tions of the “reform” of wel­fare were cat­a­strophic for mil­lions of peo­ple and dis­pro­por­tion­ately affected the poor (duh!) and women:

The poor peo­ple who were dropped from cash assis­tance here, mostly sin­gle moth­ers, talk with sur­pris­ing open­ness about the des­per­ate, and some­times ille­gal, ways they make ends meet. They have sold food stamps, sold blood, skipped meals, shoplifted, dou­bled up with friends, scav­enged trash bins for bot­tles and cans and returned to rela­tion­ships with vio­lent part­ners — all with chil­dren in tow.

Got that?  “Mostly sin­gle mothers…with chil­dren in tow.”  Doesn’t sound like bar­bar­ians pound­ing at the gates of the Repub­lic, does it?  Clinton’s pur­suit of wel­fare reform was a shrew polit­i­cal maneu­ver, as he won re-election and increased Demo­c­ra­tic num­bers in Con­gress in the 1998 midterm elec­tions, but at what cost?  Clin­ton was cash­ing in on the con­ser­v­a­tive rhetor­i­cal game sur­round­ing wel­fare that began in the pre­vi­ous decade when Rea­gan sum­mar­ily con­demned “wel­fare queens” in their Cadil­lacs, run­ning around buy­ing fancy cars and pre­mium cuts of steak on the tax­payer dime.

So while it was a shrewd polit­i­cal maneu­ver, it was also a crass and despi­ca­ble act, exploit­ing the mis­in­formed, racist and sex­ist hatred against wel­fare recip­i­ents ini­tially ginned up by Rea­gan and his min­ions.  Thank­fully for Clin­ton he has a legacy to speak of; unfor­tu­nately for him, it will be a legacy tainted by the pain and suf­fer­ing of inno­cent fam­i­lies forced into the harsh cold by poli­cies he actively pur­sued, all so he could enjoy “four more years.”

HERLINK

Texts from Hillary