have the Clinton two-step again here: teh same routine: they claim
they did it for the benefit of all those who liked it; she claims
she had questions about it for those who didn't like it. We've got
Hillary and Bill and thus two sides of the same mouth.
--- In Dems2008@yahoogroups.com, "rickyslife.com" <rickyslife@...>
wrote:
>
> I remember when he signed this legislation there were alot of
people who were upset
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Citation
> To: ..Democrats_2008 Group
> Sent: Friday, April 11, 2008 10:14 AM
> Subject: [Dems2008] Can't believe Edwards would think that a
Clinton has......
>
>
>
> any interest in poverty --
>
> New York Times
> April 11, 2008
> From Welfare Shift in '96, a Reminder for Clinton
> By PETER S. GOODMAN
> In the summer of 1996, President Bill Clinton delivered on his
pledge to "end welfare as we know it." Despite howls of protest from
some liberals, he signed into law a bill forcing recipients to work
and imposing a five-year limit on cash assistance.
> As first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton supported her husband's
decision, drawing the wrath of old friends from her days as an
advocate for poor children. Some accused the Clintons of throwing
vulnerable families to the winds in pursuit of centrist votes as Mr.
Clinton headed into the final stages of his re-election campaign.
> Despite the criticism and anxiety from the left, the legislation
came to be viewed as one of Mr. Clinton's signature achievements. It
won broad bipartisan praise, with some Democrats relieved that it
took a politically difficult issue off the table for them, and many
liberals came to accept if not embrace it.
> Mrs. Clinton's opponent in the race for the Democratic
presidential nomination, Senator Barack Obama, said in an interview
that the welfare overhaul had been greatly beneficial in eliminating
a divisive force in American politics.
> Mrs. Clinton, now a senator from New York, rarely mentions the
issue as she battles for the nomination, despite the emphasis she has
placed on her experience in her husband's White House.
> But now the issue is back, pulled to the fore by an economy
turning down more sharply than at any other time since the welfare
changes were imposed. With low-income people especially threatened by
a weakening labor market, some advocates for poor families are
raising concerns about the adequacy of the remaining social safety
net. Mrs. Clinton is now calling for the establishment of a cabinet-
level position to fight poverty.
> As social welfare policy returns to the political debate, it is
providing a window into the ways in which Mrs. Clinton has navigated
the legacy of her husband's administration and the ideological
crosscurrents of her party.
> In an interview, Mrs. Clinton acknowledged that "people who are
more vulnerable" were going to suffer more than others as the economy
turned down. But she put the blame squarely on the Bush
administration and the Republicans who controlled Congress until last
year. Mrs. Clinton said they blocked her efforts, and those of other
Democrats, to buttress the safety net with increased financing for
health insurance for impoverished children, child care for poor
working mothers, and food stamps.
> Mrs. Clinton expressed no misgivings about the 1996 legislation,
saying that it was a needed - and enormously successful - first step
toward making poor families self-sufficient.
> "Welfare should have been a temporary way station for people who
needed immediate assistance," she said. "It should not be considered
an anti-poverty program. It simply did not work."
> During the presidential campaign, she has faced little challenge
on the issue, in large part because Mr. Obama has supported the 1996
law. "Before welfare reform, you had, in the minds of most Americans,
a stark separation between the deserving working poor and the
undeserving welfare poor," Mr. Obama said in an interview. "What
welfare reform did was desegregate those two groups. Now, everybody
was poor, and everybody had to work."
> Mr. Obama called the resulting law "an imperfect reform." Like
Mrs. Clinton, he called for an expansion of government-provided
health care, child care and job training to assist women making the
transition from welfare to work - programs he says he helped expand
in Illinois as a state senator.
> Asked if he would have vetoed the 1996 law, Mr. Obama said, "I
won't second guess President Clinton for signing."
> Among some advocates for the poor, the growing prospect of a
severe recession and evidence of backsliding from the initial
successes of the policy shift have crystallized fresh concern. Many
remain upset that Mrs. Clinton, once seemingly a stalwart member of
their camp, supported a law that they contend left many people at
risk.
> "If there is no national controversy about welfare reform, we
paid an awfully high price," said Peter Edelman, a law professor at
Georgetown University who has known Mrs. Clinton since her college
days, and who quit his post as assistant secretary of social services
at the Department of Health and Human Services in protest after Mr.
Clinton signed the measure.
> "They don't acknowledge the number of people who were hurt," Mr.
Edelman said. "It's just not in their lens. It was predictably bad
public policy."
> Forcing families to rely on work instead of government money went
well from 1996 to 2000, when the economy was booming and paychecks
were plentiful, economists say. Since then, however, job creation has
slowed and poverty has risen. The current downturn could be the first
serious test of how well the changes brought about by the 1996 law
hold up under sharp economic stress.
> "We should have enormous concern about the lack of a fully
functioning safety net for families with children," said Mark H.
Greenberg, director of the Poverty and Prosperity Program at the
Center for American Progress, a liberal research group.
> In many ways, Mrs. Clinton has sought to moderate her liberal
image since leaving the White House. But on welfare, she has faced
the opposite problem: accusations from some liberals that she sold
out their principles for a politically calculated centrism.
> On the campaign trail, Mrs. Clinton is largely focused on the
middle class. Since the departure from the Democratic race of John
Edwards, who had made poverty a centerpiece of his campaign, there
has been little debate about social welfare policy. But in promising
on Friday to establish a cabinet-rank poverty-fighting position if
she is elected, Mrs. Clinton reintroduced the topic and the question
of her record.
> In the interview, conducted last month, Mrs. Clinton said she had
followed through on her promise to address what she viewed as
shortcomings in the welfare law after being elected to the Senate in
2000. She said she had pressed for legislation that would have
increased financing for child care for poor mothers by up to $11
billion, seeking to expand food stamps, and allowing welfare
recipients to draw cash aid while attending school.
> Those provisions were blocked by the Republican leadership.
> "We've had to mostly spend our time since President Bush came in
to office preventing bad things from happening," Mrs. Clinton said.
> Many welfare advocates dispute Mrs. Clinton's characterization.
Since entering the Senate, they say, she has shown a predilection for
compromise at the expense of the poor.
> When the overhaul bill came up for reauthorization, Sandra
Chapin, a former welfare recipient affiliated with a coalition called
Welfare Made a Difference, lobbied Congress to allow more women to
attend college while they received aid. Mrs. Clinton "wouldn't have
anything to do with it," Ms. Chapin said.
> Ms. Chapin, now program director of the Consumer Federation of
California, posted an e-mail message to a discussion board in
February accusing Mrs. Clinton of having "had a hand in devaluing
motherwork in this country, and no doubt sending thousands of
children and their families deeper into poverty."
> In the interview, and in her memoir, Mrs. Clinton said she had
serious misgivings about some of the changes proposed to the welfare
system as the issue percolated through Washington in the mid-1990s.
> Her husband had taken office with a pledge to dismantle the old
system. He embraced time limits for cash aid and allowing states to
largely decide for themselves how to spend the money. He set out to
expand job training, access to health care, child care and food
stamps.
> When the Republicans took over Congress after the 1994 elections,
making Newt Gingrich the House speaker, they seized the initiative.
Twice, they passed bills seeking to impose time limits on welfare
benefits while cutting other aid. Twice, Mr. Clinton vetoed the
bills, with the encouragement of Mrs. Clinton.
> In August 1996, three months before Election Day, Congress sent
the White House a third bill. This one imposed time limits on cash
benefits and barred most legal immigrants from receiving welfare. But
it maintained guarantees for Medicaid and food stamps and increased
financing for child care. This time, Mr. Clinton signed.
> "I agreed that he should sign it and worked hard to round up
votes," Mrs. Clinton wrote in her memoir.
> Mrs. Clinton remained troubled by parts of the bill, she wrote in
her memoir, particularly the provision barring welfare for legal
immigrants. But "pragmatic politics" had to be considered. "If he
vetoed welfare reform a third time," she wrote, "Bill would be
handing the Republicans a potential political windfall."
> Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of Children's Defense Fund, an
activist group that had given Mrs. Clinton her first job, blasted the
Clintons as betraying the poor, opening a rift that Mrs. Clinton
called "sad and painful." Mrs. Edelman's husband, Peter, quit his
administration post.
> In the years that followed, the number of those on welfare rolls
plummeted by more than 60 percent. A study last year by the
Congressional Budget Office found that from 1991 to 2005, poor
families with children saw their inflation-adjusted incomes climb by
35 percent, as employment climbed.
> In recent years, however, low-skilled women have struggled. The
percentage of poor single mothers neither working nor drawing cash
assistance surged from under 20 percent before the welfare overhaul
to more than 30 percent in 2005, according to the Congressional
Research Service. During the same period, the number of children in
poverty rose to 12.8 million from 11.6 million, according to census
data.
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