Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (60 page)

When this warfare stopped, reporters noted that the president had edged toward the political center in order to accommodate Republican demands. Then, as earlier, he pursued policies aimed at balancing the federal budget. But having branded Republicans as foes of Social Security and Medicare, Clinton had outmaneuvered them politically. Polls at the time indicated that the majority of Americans had come to regard Gingrich and other conservative Republicans as hard-hearted and extreme. In 1995–96, as on many other occasions since the 1960s, a great many Americans who denounced big government also resisted attempts to cut back middle-class entitlements.
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With this victory in hand, Clinton charged ahead into the 1996 presidential campaign. From the beginning, his journey was smooth. The GOP chose Dole as its presidential nominee. A World War II veteran who had earned two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star, Dole had lost use of an arm while fighting in Italy. Long a senator from Kansas, he had been Gerald Ford’s running mate in 1976. Though acerbic, he was a witty man who had many friends in Congress, where as a moderately conservative Republican he tried to cool the ardor of firebrands such as Gingrich. But Dole, like Bush in 1992, felt obliged to placate Pat Buchanan, who had surprisingly beaten him in the New Hampshire primary, and to appease Buchanan’s strong allies on the Republican right. He therefore accepted an anti-abortion plank in the party platform. Dole also agreed to name former New York congressman Jack Kemp, a moderate on most matters who was also a strong pro-life advocate, as his running mate. As if emulating Reagan’s campaign in 1980, Dole called for an across-the-board tax cut of 15 percent. At the same time, however, he demanded movement toward a balanced budget. These stances seemed contrived at best, and surely hard to accomplish, especially since he also urged increases in defense spending.

Dole was an uninspiring campaigner. At age seventy-three, he was the oldest major party nominee ever to seek the presidency for the first time, and he was neither an energetic nor compelling speaker. Democrats denounced him as an old-timer who had been Gerald Ford’s “hatchet man” in 1976. Especially toward the end of the campaign, Dole appeared to be bored and distracted. Increasingly stiff, he seemed to lapse into a stream-of-consciousness style of discourse on the stump. Some associates believed he had become bitter because he had felt obliged to give up his powerful place in the Senate in order to run for the presidency.
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Though Clinton expected to win, he was never one to take political chances. Looking for support from labor interests, he sought and received from the Republican Congress—which during the campaign in mid-1996 was anxious to soften its politically damaging right-wing image—passage of an increase in the minimum wage. A bipartisan majority also approved the so-called Kassebaum-Kennedy bill, which protected workers from losing their health insurance when they changed jobs. Clinton focused especially on positioning himself as a centrist. This posture had already been obvious in his 1996 State of the Union address, when he staggered liberals by intoning, “The era of Big Government is over.” The conservative tone of this message could hardly have contrasted more sharply with the call for governmental activism that he had sounded in his first inaugural.

This speech highlighted a main theme of his campaign: the preservation and expansion of “family values.” Parents, Clinton said, should work to curb youth gangs, reduce teen pregnancy and smoking, and help with community policing. Later in the campaign he emphasized his support of school uniforms and of television “V-chips” that would enable parents to block unwanted television programming.
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He also championed a Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 that defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman. The law added that no state was obliged to recognize same-sex marriage from another state. The Defense of Marriage Act was a symbolic move that reaffirmed prevailing understandings of marriage as well as laws that already existed in most states, but the measure was therefore hard for politicians to oppose, and it pleased foes of gay rights. Clinton’s campaign paid for seventy-odd spots that emphasized his administration’s support of the law.
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Clinton’s most controversial move in 1996 was to honor his earlier pledge to “end welfare as we know it,” by which he mainly meant establishing limits on the length of time that recipients might receive cash assistance. This he accomplished in August, after vetoing two earlier, more conservative versions, by signing the revealingly titled Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. This fiercely contested measure terminated the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, a federal-state entitlement that since 1935 had offered cash assistance to low-income families—most of them headed by single mothers with children under the age of eighteen.
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In 1995, federal-state appropriations for AFDC had given a total of $22.6 billion in aid to 4.8 million families—or to 13.4 million people.

At the time that the new law passed in August 1996, thereby establishing a program titled Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), economic recovery had begun to kick in, lowering the number of people receiving aid to 12.2 million and the total in aid to $20.3 billion.
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This was not a huge outlay: Social Security, America’s biggest social program, offered $365 billion in old age, survivors, and disability insurance to 43.8 million beneficiaries in 1996. Medicare paid $196 billion more.
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Nor were AFDC benefits large—life on welfare was often miserable. But while many Americans had come to believe, as Clinton did, that welfare dependency needed to be challenged, most liberals had long defended AFDC, which had been a key source of support for poor families headed by women. These liberals almost unanimously opposed the changes.

TANF, they complained, shifted responsibility for such families from the federal government to the states, which were to receive federal block grants that administrators would have wide discretion in allocating. Before long, foes of TANF predicted, welfare provisions would differ dramatically across the fifty states. Conservatives shot back that the new law distributed $16.5 billion a year—a generous sum that the states were expected to supplement. It was assumed that state officials would set up better programs of job training and education and improve support for child care. TANF, they said, would finally break the dependence of “welfare mothers” on cash assistance and ease them into the labor market. But liberals wondered: Would states be liberal in determining eligibility or in providing aid, especially if a recession were to descend? In case of hard times, they prophesied, states would join a “race to the bottom” that would devastate the welfare poor.

The new law included other features that outraged liberals. It stipulated that able-bodied heads of welfare families must find work within two years or face the loss of federal aid, and established a five-year lifetime limit on the length of time that most recipients might receive federal money. The law also restricted the eligibility of legal, non-citizen immigrants for a range of social programs, including food stamps and Medicaid. Senator Moynihan of New York called the law the “most brutal act of social policy since Reconstruction.” E. J. Dionne, a syndicated columnist, branded the act “a horror.” He added: “The bill’s premise is that if we kick poor people and their kids around a little more, maybe they’ll go to work. Then again, maybe they won’t. We have no idea. But, hey, maybe the savings from this bill can pay for a little election-year tax cut.”
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Long after passage of this landmark law, many liberals continued to rage at it. The historian Michael Katz wrote in 2001 that it revealed a “mean-spirited and truncated conception of obligation and citizenship.”
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The new system, these critics said, was all but forcing women off welfare, generally into low-paying, “dead-end” jobs. The costs of child care, transportation, and clothing, they added, often canceled out earnings from these jobs. Conservatives, however, retorted that AFDC for far too many years had subsidized out-of-wedlock pregnancies and trapped recipients in “welfare as a way of life.” In the late 1990s and early 2000s, they cited statistics showing that TANF, aided substantially by the vibrant economy, and supplemented by increased funding for the working poor that Congress had approved in 1993 for the Earned Income Tax Credit, was rapidly moving onetime welfare recipients into jobs.
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The higher minimum wage further benefited some of these workers.

By 2001, the number of Americans on cash public assistance had dropped considerably—from 12.2 million in 1996 to 5.3 million. Even between 2001 and 2003, years of economic sluggishness, the rolls continued to decline. In 2003, TANF supported only 2 million families, less than half the number (4.8 million) that had received AFDC in 1995. By then, welfare—long a highly divisive program—was fading as a campaign issue in America. A conservative government official went so far as to exclaim delightedly in early 2004 that onetime welfare recipients, having gained experience at job-seeking and working, had become relatively “recession-proof.”
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Dramatic numbers such as these suggested that the welfare law of 1996, bolstered by other social policies, was probably less horrible in its consequences than many liberals had predicted. These numbers, however, would have seemed unimaginable to most people in 1996. What was clear at that time was that “ending welfare as we know it” strengthened Clinton’s political appeal to centrists—many of whom shared his sense that America’s system of public assistance needed reforming—and to voters further on the right. Polls after passage of the bill showed him widening his margin over Dole.

Still, Clinton took no chances. Energetically crisscrossing the country, he claimed credit for the surging economy: In 1996, as in 1992, this was the key issue of the campaign. He made sure to remind people of the help that he had directed their way in the previous three years. As earlier, television cameras featured him hugging and consoling people who had endured one calamity or another. In that election year he issued a record-high seventy-five orders designating communities as deserving of emergency federal aid. The TV correspondent Brit Hume concluded at the time that Clinton had become “almost the national chaplain to those in distress.”
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Clinton proved a wonder at raising money. As one historian later pointed out, he turned the Lincoln bedroom at the White House, where big spenders might stay for a night or two, into a “combination casino and tourist attraction for well-heeled donors.”
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Democrats also succeeded in acquiring donations of questionable legality from people close to foreign governments, notably Indonesia and China. Morris and others were especially adept at taking advantage of loopholes in campaign finance regulations that opened the way for use of “soft money.” Though these contributions were supposedly earmarked for party-building activities, not for direct assignment to the Clinton-Gore ticket, they were controlled by the White House and found their way into the president’s reelection campaign.

Clinton complained sometimes about all the hustling for money that he had to undertake. He told Morris: “I can’t think. I can’t act. . . . I can’t focus on a thing but the next fund raiser. Hillary can’t. Al [Gore] can’t—we’re all getting sick and crazy because of it.”
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Worse, he had to confront scathing criticism of his money-raising activities, especially from Perot, who once again ran as a third-party candidate, this time as leader of the Reform Party. But the president knew that he had to hustle, for the GOP was equally clever at collecting soft money for Dole. He was truly skillful: Thanks to his tireless efforts, the Democrats raised nearly as much cash as the Republicans in 1996, greatly lessening the huge advantage that the GOP had enjoyed in fund-raising during the 1980s.
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Though Clinton’s lead narrowed a little toward the end of the campaign, he continued to benefit from the health of the economy and perhaps from his appeals to centrist and conservative voters. In November, he won with ease in a contest that featured the lowest turnout since 1948. He captured 49.2 percent of the vote—6.2 percent more than he had in 1992. Dole received only 40.7 percent. Perot, whose luster had dimmed since 1992, took 9 percent, considerably less than the 19 percent that he had won four years earlier. The president triumphed in the electoral college, 379 to 159. (In 1992 he had beaten Bush by 370 to 168.) Women, many of whom apparently backed Clinton’s stands in favor of choice, gun control, safe neighborhoods, and federal educational and social programs, voted overwhelmingly for him, 54 percent to 38 percent. So did voters in most areas of the urban Northeast and Midwest. Dole failed to carry a single congressional district in New England or New York. Not for the first time, the election demonstrated the president’s extraordinary agility as a political fighter. It was a highly satisfying comeback for a man who had reeled on the ropes after the near-knockout Republican victories of 1994.

Republicans, though downcast in defeat, did not despair. They noted that among men voters, Dole fared slightly better than Clinton, winning by a margin of 44 percent to 43 percent.
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Carrying forward GOP gains in the South, he took seven of eleven southern states. Dole fared even better in Rocky Mountain and Plains areas, losing only Nevada and New Mexico among the thirteen states in these regions. Even more than in previous contests, the contest exposed the sharp regional cleavages that were becoming predictable features of America’s electoral maps.