Living History (59 page)

walked several steps ahead. We had been out for more than an hour before an American tourist yelled from across the street, “Hillary! Hi!” My cover blown, people started gawking, waving and yelling greetings. I shook hands and said hello and resumed walking for several more hours.

Later, we were greeted by a young American couple who asked if they could be photographed with me. The man was in the Army and stationed in Bosnia. He knew I had visited months before and was eager to tell me his experiences. “So far, so good,” he said in a classic American understatement. Meeting this earnest young man and his wife brought to mind President Goncz’s fears about a future filled with conflicts, and I wondered what lay ahead for them and all of us.

I’m a pushover for big, stirring ceremonies, and the opening moments of the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta on July 19 were as good as it gets. Bill declared the games open to a fanfare of horns and cymbals, followed by a soaring operatic chorale that enveloped the tens of thousands of athletes and spectators packed into Olympic Stadium. Muhammad Ali, shaking from Parkinson’s disease, steadied his right arm and held up a blazing torch to light the Olympic flame. It was an unforgettable moment for the world and for the ailing champ.

The celebrations turned to horror a week later when a pipe bomb detonated in Centennial Olympic Park, near the games, killing one woman and injuring 111 people. Bill condemned the bombing as “an evil act of terror.” I laid flowers in the park, near the site of the attack.

Within days of the bombing, the FBI named a part-time security guard, Richard Jewell, as the likely suspect. Jewell, who had first been called a hero for discovering the pipe bomb, struggled to defend him self against the full weight of the accusation. For months the media staked out his home and broadcast twentyfour-hour coverage. Finally, in late October, Jewell was exonerated, and the bombing was ultimately linked to Eric Rudolph, a fanatic anti-abortion activist believed to have escaped into the Appalachian wilderness, and never caught.

The Olympic bombing brought an unsettling end to a summer marked by tragic events, including the crash of Flight 800, a passenger jet that went down in the Atlantic after taking off from New York’s Kennedy Airport, and the terrorist bombing of Khobar Towers, a U.S. military installation in Saudi Arabia, that killed nineteen Americans.

Since his first State of the Union, Bill had sounded the alarm on global terrorism. In the 1980s, terrorism was not regarded as a pressing national security threat, though more than five hundred Americans were killed by terrorists in that decade. The 1993 World Trade Center and 1995 Oklahoma City bombings escalated Bill’s concern. He frequently talked publicly and privately about how easy travel, open borders and technology gave terrorists new opportunities and means to wreak violence and fear. He immersed himself in the literature on the subject and he met regularly with experts on chemical and biological warfare. He would often return to the residence anxious to tell me about these meetings.

What he learned dismayed him. In 1995, he sent comprehensive anti-terrorism legislation to Congress to toughen laws for prosecuting terrorists, to ban fundraising that channeled money to terrorist causes or organizations and to increase controls over biological and chemical weapon materials. The legislation that finally passed in 1996 omitted key elements that he had requested, so he went back to Congress for increased funding and authority, including provisions for wiretapping and chemical identification. It was difficult, however, to focus public attention or muster congressional support for the actions he thought necessary.

Domestic issues dominated both the Democratic and Republican agendas in the months before the summer’s political conventions. The Republicans were hammering on their usual issues: bashing big spending liberals and “social engineering” programs: welfare, abortion rights, gun control and environmental protection. Bill’s reelection campaign centered on government policies that he argued would build community, expand opportunity, demand responsibility and reward enterprise.

I thought about how to present the issues I championed and better relate them to the public’s concerns. Countless families, including my own, tend to congregate after school or work to discuss the issues of the day, often sitting around the kitchen table. I began describing Democratic Party issues as “kitchen table issues,” which became a catchphrase in the campaign. The discussion of kitchen table issues led some Washington pundits to talk derisively about “the feminization of politics,” an attempt to marginalize, even trivialize, policies such as family leave or extended mammogram coverage for older women or adequate hospital stays for mothers after delivering their babies. With that in mind, I coined my own term―“the humanization of politics”―to publicly advance the idea that kitchen table issues mattered to everybody, not just to women.

By 1996, as he had promised in the 1992 campaign, Bill had reduced the nation’s deficit by more than half, presided over a booming economy that had created 10 million jobs, cut taxes through the Earned Income Tax Credit for 15 million low-wage workers, protected workers from forfeiting their health care coverage when they lost their jobs and raised the minimum wage. And we were successful in passing initial reform in our nation’s adoption laws: a nonrefundable tax credit of up to $5,000 per child for all parents who adopt and $6,000 for parents who adopt children with special needs; and a prohibition on denying or delaying adoptions on the basis of race, color or national origin. Ever since I had worked on behalf of foster children as a law student, I had hoped to improve the chances that foster children would find permanent, loving families. These new provisions helped, but I knew that more needed to be done. I convened adoption experts in a series of White House meetings in 1996 and outlined a blueprint that led to the passage of the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, which for the first time provided financial incentives for states to move children from foster care to permanent adoptive homes.

Time was also running out for the sixty-year-old welfare system, which had helped to create generations of welfare-dependent Americans. Bill had promised it would be reformed, and the White House had been engaged in months of difficult negotiations and bare-knuckled political conflict. The Republicans knew the public strongly favored welfare reform, and they hoped either to railroad Bill into passing a bill that was far too hard on women and children, denying essential services to millions of needy recipients, or to use his vetoes of their punitive proposals against him in the upcoming election. Instead, welfare reform became a success for Bill. I strongly argued that we had to change the system, although my endorsement of welfare reform came at some personal cost.

America’s first welfare program was introduced in the 1930s to help widows with children at a time when there were few opportunities for women to enter the workplace.

By the mid-1970s, the percentage of births to unwed mothers was rising, and by the mid-1980s unmarried mothers were the overwhelming majority of welfare recipients. By and large, they were women with little education and few job skills. Even if they could find work, they could not earn enough to escape poverty or get jobs with health insurance for their children; therefore there was little incentive for them to leave welfare for work.

Staying home became a rational choice for some in the short run, but it led to the development of a permanent welfare class, and it fed taxpayer resentment, especially among low-income working parents. I didn’t think it was fair that one single mother improvised to find child care and got up early every day to get to work while another stayed home and relied on welfare. I shared Bill’s belief that we should provide incentives and support like child care and health insurance to help people work instead of rely on welfare.

During Bill’s first term as Governor, Arkansas participated in a Carter Administration “demonstration” project designed to provide more support and encouragement to move people from welfare to work. Seven years later in 1987 and again in 1988, Bill was the lead Democratic governor working with Congress and the Reagan White House on welfare reform. He chaired the National Governors Association hearings, where he presented testimonials from women who had moved off welfare under his plan in Arkansas, and they described how much better they felt about themselves and about their children’s futures.

Bill was invited to the ceremony in October 1988 when President Reagan signed into law a welfare reform bill that included many provisions he and the Governors had sought.

By 1991, when Bill launched his campaign for President, it was clear that the reforms weren’t producing much change because the Bush Administration didn’t fund the new programs or aggressively implement them in the states. Bill promised to “end welfare as we know it” and to make the program pro-work and pro-family.

At the time Bill took office, America’s welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC, received more than half of its funds from the federal government but was administered by the states, which contributed between 17 and 50 percent of the payments. Federal law required coverage of poor mothers and children, but the states set the monthly benefits. As a result, there were fifty different systems that provided benefits ranging from a high of $821 for a family with two children in Alaska to a low of $137 in Alabama. AFDC recipients were also eligible for food stamps and Medicaid.

On the legislative agenda of 1993 and 1994, the economic plan, NAFTA, the crime bill and health care took precedence over welfare reform. And when the Republicans gained control of Congress, they had their own ideas about how to reform the system.

They advocated strict limits on how long people could be on welfare; block grants of welfare funds to the states, including Medicaid, school lunches and food stamps; the cessation of all benefits to legal immigrants, even those who were working and paying taxes; and, as introduced by Newt Gingrich, a system of orphanages to house and raise children born out of wedlock to teen mothers. The Republican plan provided minimal support to help people make the transition to work.

Bill and I, along with members of Congress who wanted productive reform, believed that people able to work should work. But we recognized that assistance and incentives were necessary to help people move permanently from welfare to employment and that successful reform would require large investments in education and training, subsidies for child care and transportation, transitional health care, tax incentives to encourage employers to hire welfare recipients, and tougher child support collection efforts. We also opposed cutting off benefits to legal immigrants and shipping children of poor parents to orphanages.

In late 1995, the administration and Congress began serious efforts to pass legislation.

Much political posturing ensued. I think many Republicans were hoping that if they kept enough “poison pills” in the bill, they would put the President in a lose-lose situation. If he signed the bill, he would disappoint key Democratic constituencies and leave millions of poor kids vulnerable. If he vetoed it, the Republicans would have a popular issue in the 1996 election with voters who wanted reform and didn’t know the details of the legislation.

Some in the White House urged the President to sign whatever reform the Congress sent him. To do otherwise, they argued, would incur huge political costs for both the Administration and congressional Democrats in the upcoming election campaign. Many disagreed, arguing that the only solution was for Bill to outmaneuver the Republicans and convince the public that reform was his issue. My feelings about welfare ran deep and were probably more complicated than my husband’s. I believed that the system desperately required reform, but I had spent time as an advocate for children and women caught up in the system, and I knew that welfare was often essential as a temporary support for poor families. Yes, I had seen it exploited; but I had also seen it rescue people who used it to weather a rough period. Although I had privately argued against Administration decisions before, I had never publicly opposed an Administration policy or any of Bill’s decisions.

Now, however, I told him and his top staff that I would speak out against any bill that did not provide heath care through Medicaid, a federal guarantee of food stamps, and child care assistance for people making the transition off welfare. I also believed that these kinds of supports should be available to the working poor to lift them above the poverty line too.

The Republicans passed a bill with strict time limits on welfare, no supports for the transition to work, no benefits for legal immigrants, an end to federal oversight and accountability in how states spent federal welfare money. In short, the states would be free to determine what to offer in monthly payments, child care, food stamps and medical care or whether to offer them at all. After a vigorous debate inside the White House, the President vetoed the bill. Then the Republicans passed another bill with only minimal changes. I didn’t have to lobby hard with Bill, who knew he could not sign this one either.

Bill vetoed it, insisting that all poor children were entitled to child care, nutrition and medical benefits.

The third bill passed by Congress had the support of the majority of the Democrats in the House and Senate. It contained more financial support for moving people to work, offered new money for child care and restored the federal guarantees of food stamps and medical benefits. But it cut off most benefits to legal immigrants, imposed a five-year lifetime limit on federal welfare benefits, and maintained the status quo on monthly benefit limits, leaving the states free to set benefit limits. The federal welfare grants to the states were set at the amount states received in the early 1990s, when welfare rolls were at an alltime high. That meant the states would have the financial resources to provide the safety net that true reform required, and incentives to allot significant funding to programs that supported and encouraged work and independence.