American Dream

by Jason DeParle

  The Gingrich version of ending welfare bore another watermark: more and more programs risked being labeled “welfare” and subjected to deep cuts. A month after becoming Speaker, Gingrich startled his troops by announcing he would produce a balanced budget, which no Congress had done in decades. Since he had also promised large tax cuts (skewed to the wealthy), he would need spending reductions far beyond AFDC. That was part of his goal. Gingrich saw social spending as the spoils system that sustained the Democratic Party (through a network of advocates, beneficiaries, and bureaucrats). A balanced budget was the stake that he could drive through its heart. His targets included food stamps, school lunches, disability payments, foster care and adoption programs, and aid to immigrants. “You cannot sustain a welfare state inside a balanced budget,” he said. The $12 billion increase that Clinton had proposed became a $65 billion cut.

  To say the bill sped through the House makes its passage sound like a given. But Gingrich policed his precarious majority with a skillful mix of inspiration and fear; thirteen defectors could cost him the vote. One divisive issue involved how much freedom to give the states: should the money come with “strings” attached, or “no strings”? Even more contentious were the fights over the so-called “illegitimacy provisions.” Led by Rector, some conservatives favored a ban on aid to unwed teenage mothers that would last throughout their lives. Others with equally conservative credentials (like the National Right to Life Committee) worried an outright ban would prompt more teen abortions. With a scaled-down restriction still in place, it took an all-out effort by Gingrich himself to survive a crucial rules test by a margin of three votes. Having escaped a near-death experience, the bill passed in March 1995 on a vote of 234 to 199. Nine Democrats added their support, with just five Republicans opposed.

  Democrats reacted with disbelief. An unthinkable leader (“Speaker Gingrich!”) was doing unspeakable things. One Democrat suggested naming the law the “Make Americans Hungry Act.” The Republican bill was worse than slavery, said Major Owens of Brooklyn, since at least on the plantation “everybody had a job.” John Lewis, the civil rights hero, likened the Republicans to Nazis. The rancor was real, but the most notable sight wasn’t the Democrats’ resistance. It was the depths of their accommodation, as they found themselves surrendering ground they had defended tooth and nail. Having spent decades fending off work requirements (“slavefare”), liberals now attacked conservatives as insufficiently tough—“weak on work!” The world had changed so much so fast that even the Democratic leader, Dick Gephardt, would no longer say whether he supported something as basic as the federal entitlement. “You can’t get hung up on that word,” Gephardt said. “We’re not trying to get people entitled. We’re trying to get people to work.” Worried that mutineers would give Gingrich a veto-proof majority, Gephardt managed to unite the Democrats around a substitute bill. But he kept conservatives on board only by embracing much of Gingrich’s agenda: drop-dead time limits of four years and cuts totaling $9 billion. Liberals like Bob Matsui, who had thought the Clinton tonic too strong, were swallowing something incomparably stronger. The Democrats’ main sponsor was Nathan Deal, the Georgian who had been railing about the “stench” from welfare’s “carcass.” A month after the caucus rallied around his plan, Deal joined the GOP. Now there were literally no Democratic alternatives. There were only competing Republican visions of what ending welfare would mean.

  One night with the revolution in full raucous swing, I holed up in one of its marketing labs, the disheveled office of the pollster Frank Luntz. Fluorescent lights painted the air green, and all was silent except for Gingrich railing against the welfare state: “By creating a culture of poverty, we have destroyed the very people we are claiming to help.” Colored lines crawled across his videotaped face—blue for Democrats, yellow for Republicans, and red for Independents. Hands on electronic dials, members of a focus group had weighed the Gingrich speech a syllable at a time. Luntz leaned forward and warned: “Here it comes—bang!” And bang it was. All three squiggles leapt in appreciation of a signature Gingrich line: “Caring for people is not synonymous with caretaking for people.”

  The squiggles, as much as the legislative fine print, measured the depths of what Gingrich achieved. He redefined compassion. Until roughly this point in the poverty debate, the arguments followed familiar lines. Claiming the mantle of social concern, liberals called for more programs and spending; calling for personal responsibility and fiscal restraint, conservatives resisted. Now and then conservatives managed to roll programs back, but by labeling reductions “punitive” or “mean,” liberals could usually prevail. Gingrich set the old arguments on their head. While Reagan attacked poor people for abusing the programs, Gingrich attacked programs for abusing the poor. He didn’t complain, as Reagan did, of high-living welfare queens; he reminded the public that poor children were suffering and said welfare was to blame. While Reagan talked of welfare recipients whose “tax-free cash income alone is over a hundred fifty thousand dollars,” Gingrich talked of “twelve-year-olds having babies” and “seventeen-year-olds dying of AIDS.” When I noted the change in tactics, Gingrich responded with the smile of a man well-pleased with his cleverness. “Congratulations!” he said. “You cracked the code!” The rhetoric did more than soften the message. It created a logic for deeper cuts: The less we spend, the more we care! As leader of the opposition, Moynihan decried the strategy as an “Orwellian perversion.” But he acknowledged its reach. “You’ll hear it in our Democratic caucus,” he said. “‘We are liberating you, breaking your chains!’ ” Even Gingrich was surprised at his success. “I thought we’d be in more trouble on hurting the poor,” he said.

  The idea that ending welfare would liberate the poor was not wholly a Gingrich invention. Intellectually, Charles Murray had made the case a decade earlier in Losing Ground. Ending welfare won’t mean that stingy people have won, Murray wrote, but that “generous - people have stopped kidding themselves.” Politically, caring conservatism found its first champion in Jack Kemp, the manic housing secretary who ran around promising to free the poor from “the government, liberal plantation.” But where Kemp brought a seeming earnestness to the cause, Gingrich brought cunning and the pollsters’ mad science. A management consultant named Morris Shechtman lent Gingrich the “caring-caretaking” line; in a daylong seminar for Gingrich and his staff, he called on recipients like Angie and Jewell to “grieve the unbundling of caretaking” and develop better “change-management skills.” Another useful Gingrich ally was Richard Wirthlin, the former Reagan pollster, who distributed a memo about thirteen “power phrases” to “redefine compassion.” “When Rep. Dunn”—Jennifer Dunn of Washington—“uses the word ‘hope,’” he wrote, “her score moves up (+20)” points.

  If hope was one part of the GOP message, fear was the other. Welfare may have been harming the poor, but most voters worried about the poor harming them: mugging them or bringing mayhem into their schools. Murray, the original welfare abolitionist, had moved on in The Bell Curve to warn of a dystopian future in which an underclass marked by low intelligence laid siege to a barricaded, cognitive elite. One reason the word welfare inspired so much loathing was the breadth of its reach: it conjured everything from crime to infectious disease. “You can’t maintain civilization with twelve-year-olds having babies and fifteen-year-olds killing each other and seventeen-year-olds dying of AIDS,” was the full text of the Gingrich refrain. Of all the allies that Gingrich summoned, the most important was the status quo, a circumstance that no one could defend. When the welfare bill moved to the floor, the leadership armed every Republican with a list of horrifying stories, including that of a four-month-old boy who “bled to death when bitten more than one hundred times by the family’s pet rat.” Let the Democrats defend that! What pet rats had to do with welfare, no one explained. Gingrich’s point was simpler: anything’s better than this.

  Gingrich could operate as a breathtaking cynic, and for some of his followers
the new compassion was just the old politics of race and class. In writing about welfare for The New York Times, I kept some of the mail I received. Some letters came in cramped grandmotherly script, with checks to pass along. Then there were notes like this: “Excuse me, but I think these little low-life scum on welfare should get exactly what life gave me, nothing. . . . They’re human garbage.” Or, “Dear Sir: What does it take before the liberal social reformers realize that 2000 years of civilziation [sic] has passed black people by.” Or, “I as a middle class white person is paying for their children because the bloods can’t keep it in their pants.” One way to look at the billions in cuts is as what happens when a party controlled by southern white men gains power over a program that disproportionately aids black and Hispanic women. For all of Gingrich’s efforts to prep his troops, some wound up with their wingtips in their mouths. Floridian John Mica made his case for ending welfare while holding a “Do Not Feed the Alligators” sign. Democrats jeered the reptilian reference, but the zoologists of the GOP pressed on. Barbara Cubin of Wyoming likened recipients to domesticated wolves.

  Still, the House crusade wasn’t particularly cynical or crude. Or at least it wasn’t merely cynical or crude. The longer it went on, the more some members bought their lines. They didn’t see themselves as people who cut school lunches to finance tax breaks for the rich. They were emancipators. Freedom riders! Liberators of the liberal plantation! After decades of predictable scripts, the debate turned downright avant-garde. Democrat Harold Ford was a black legislator from Memphis whose district abutted cotton fields and abounded with sharecroppers’ children. “The bill . . . is mean-spirited, Mr. Chairman,” he began. Mr. Chairman was Clay Shaw, a genial Fort Lauderdale accountant with no sharecroppers in his district—just sugar-white beaches and rich retirees. But he wasn’t taking any guff. It is your party that defends the “last plantation in this country,” Shaw erupted. “And for you to sit there and say that we are punishing kids—we are the ones that are going forward to try to break the cycle of poverty . . . ! No I do not believe it is the Republicans who are cruel. I think it’s the Democrats!”

  Long after the dust had settled, I had the chance to ask Clinton what he thought of all this. Had his nemesis, Gingrich, used the talk of liberating the poor as a fig leaf for budget cuts? “No,” Clinton began, surprising me. “Well, I think the answer is yes and no. . . . I think it was a political strategy. But I believe Newt Gingrich believed in it. I think a lot of them did.” Clinton warmed to the theme: “Some of the Republicans just thought, ‘I’m going to make my conservative white folks happy.’. . . I think a lot of them thought most poor people were lazy. I think a lot of them thought poor people were undeserving. I think a lot of them had a different kind of conservative insight, which is the government can’t help anybody, anyway, so why are we wasting money?” Nonetheless, Clinton continued, “there were a lot of conservative evangelicals, for example, who were for this who did it out of love . . . [who believed] that work could be liberating and responsibility was ennobling and empowering. . . . So I think you had a lot of things going on at once there.”

  Among the oddest converts to the Gingrich cause was Christopher Shays of Connecticut, a former Peace Corps volunteer and one of the most liberal members of the GOP. With a district that included the Bridgeport slums, he was also the rare Republican with ghetto constituents. After hearing Gingrich’s speech about the horror of “twelve-year-olds having babies,” Shays drove home and told his wife, “Oh my gosh, I agree with this guy.” In corners of his own district he’d seen equally disturbing things. While he had some doubts about whether the GOP plan was “as well thought out as I’d like it to be,” Shays said, “I’ll take almost any alternative over what we have now.” And on the day it passed the House, Shays was at Gingrich’s side. “My Speaker came up to Connecticut and started talking about some issues I had been thinking about in my heart,” he said. “About . . . how we could have twelve-year-olds having babies, and thirteen-year-olds selling drugs, and fifteen-year-olds killing each other. . . . In my heart I thought I was a caring person. But I realized I was a caretaking person.” Then the unlikely convert concluded with some unlikely words: “My hero is Newt Gingrich.”

  The rise of Gingrich left Clinton in a funk. He needed to pass a welfare bill, but what kind of bill could he get? What cleared the House in March 1995 was the opposite of what he had proposed. Funding had been cut, not increased. The work program came with no jobs. Time limits were no longer a preface to a jobs program but an arbitrary ban on aid. Clinton’s idea of a social contract had been: “We’ll do more for you, and you’ll do more for yourself.” Gingrich had amputated it: “Do more for yourself.”

  Clinton’s name hadn’t been on the fall ballot, but from coast to coast his presidency had been the issue: his wife, his health plan, his tax increase. Republican ads had shown their Democratic opponents morphing into the president. He lost fifty-two House seats, eight in the Senate, and ten governorships. Operating furtively, Clinton’s new strategist, Dick Morris, urged him to “fast forward the Gingrich agenda” and sign a welfare bill. The sooner he did, the sooner he would disarm the opposition. One of Clinton’s new pollsters, Doug Schoen, told him voters had him pegged as a social liberal; he needed to “get welfare off the table,” Schoen said. A widely read article by Mickey Kaus in The New Republic called Clinton’s failure to end welfare “the fundamental strategic mistake of the Clinton presidency.” That was an argument that Clinton later echoed. “I should have done welfare reform before we tried health care,” he said. “The Democrats might have had something to run on.”

  As hard as the question of what Clinton could get was the question of what Clinton wanted. In the formative hours, no one knew, including he himself. “It wasn’t really until the summer that he developed a clear position on what he would accept or not accept,” Dick Morris said. “On anything, really.” Echoing Gingrich, Clinton made three references in a six-day stretch to the need “to liberate” the poor. Speaking to county officials in March 1995, Clinton brought up Lillie Harden again: “She said, ‘When my boy goes to school and they ask him, “What does your mama do for a living?” he can give an answer.’ ” But when conversation turned to what to do, Clinton got maddeningly dodgy. He praised his own bill. (“I still hope it will be the basis of what ultimately does pass.”) Then he renounced his own bill. (“I - WASN’T pleased with it, either.”) He praised block grants. (“I loved block grants . . . and I haven’t changed just because I have become president.”) Then he criticized block grants. (“It is not fair for the federal government to adopt a block-grant system, which flat funds big things that are very important.”) He emphasized the importance of last-resort jobs. (If “these people can’t find jobs in the private sector, how can we require them to work?”) But he also praised bills without them. He criticized the House bill. He didn’t say he would veto it. The evasions hit a peak in the fall, after the chief of staff, Leon Panetta, issued a veto threat. Was he speaking for the president? The White House talking points guided spokesmen: answer “yes and no.”

  Clinton’s defenders say the hedging was strategic, and no doubt some of it was. “We called it the ‘Modified Madman Theory,’” said Bruce Reed. “If they didn’t know what it would take, we could get more.” Others called it a rope-a-dope, conserving the powers of the presidency while Gingrich discredited himself with his most outlandish proposals. Some ambivalence, even expedience, is forgivable on Clinton’s part. He’d suffered a blow, the politics were shifting, and many of the substantive orthodoxies would later be proved wrong. As a former governor, Clinton generally trusted the states (more so than most of his aides), and he didn’t think the entitlement really mattered, given the disparity in state benefits. How crucial was it, he asked Morris, when Alaska paid a mother with two kids $923 a month and Mississippi gave her $120?

  But Clinton wasn’t evasive on some of the issues; he was evasive on all of them. And the more he hedged, the more G
ingrich set the terms of debate. As the bill headed to the House floor in March 1995, what Clinton talked about most wasn’t time limits or funding or community service jobs but an obscure tool of child-support enforcement—the Republicans’ failure to take the “crucial” step of suspending the - driver’s licenses of deadbeat dads. With the entire safety net up for grabs, that’s where he made his stand? Nearly half the states already had license-suspension laws, and most of the men that Angie knew - didn’t have licenses. But the issue had scored well in White House polls. “In no time in recent memory has there been a greater need for presidential leadership on this issue,” wrote Donna Shalala, the secretary of Health and Human Services, betraying an impatience subordinates don’t usually display toward presidents. “[U]ntil you make it clear what we believe in and stand for, Republicans will control the debate, and we may get a bad plan that the public does not understand.”

  With Clinton’s fidelities unclear, the administration dissolved in palace intrigue. Operating in secret through the middle of the spring, Morris urged Clinton to “attack the bill only from the right,” like calling for tougher work rules. Leon Panetta, the chief of staff, attacked from the left, on issues like the entitlement and budget cuts. Shorn of influence, David Ellwood lost heart for the fight. Just as his critics had warned, the Republicans had weaponized his concept of time limits and launched a counterstrike. He resigned in the summer of 1995 and returned to Harvard, where he spent the next few years in disillusioned exile, wondering where Clinton’s core convictions lay. To be sure, the fog was thick. But a moment of subtle revelation arrived in May 1995, as the debate moved on to the Senate. Reuters called the White House one night, seeking comment on the latest GOP plan. Ginny Terzano, the spokeswoman on duty, checked with Panetta, then gave a response: if the Republicans “went to a block grant” and “did not provide a safety net for children, then the president would veto the bill.” A few days later, she ran into Clinton. Who told you to say that? he asked. Terzano was taken aback. The chief of staff, she answered. “That’s okay,” she quotes Clinton as saying. “But I really want to sign a welfare reform bill.”