For the most part, Bill Clinton’s reconstruction of the Democratic Party is a masterpiece that did not survive the consummate political artist’s time in power: balanced budgets seem like a relic of a bygone era; the pro-growth, business friendly wing of the Democratic Party has given way to Elizabeth Warren style populism; and modulated stances on social issues have been replaced with legal fights against Catholic hospitals, rhetorical battle cries about a “War on Women”, and a place in the party’s platform for a fifty state right of same sex marriage.
The exception, the one preserved centrist jewel from that era, had been (until last week) the 1996 reform of welfare. As a policy instrument, the conversion of welfare from an entitlement to an earned benefit conditioned on work, job training, or secondary level education like a GDE program rested on decades of data about the perils of dependency in poor communities. As a political instrument, coupling public assistance with a work requirement achieved a stunning result: a benefit program that had been deeply controversial, and racially polarizing, was re-crafted as a bipartisan amalgam of left-leaning altruism and right-leaning notions of personal responsibility.
As a result, one of the most contentious ideological disputes between seventies and eighties era conservatives and liberals all but disappeared as a flashpoint. It has been Social Security and Medicare–not welfare–that movement conservatives have sought to redesign in the past eight years, and the most provocative expenditure of public dollars in the last four years has been the transfer of nearly a trillion dollars to the banking and automobile industries rather than any form of public assistance.
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Artur Davis: Setting Welfare Back on Fire
