Javits Convention Center on election night. Clinton underperformed in Michigan Losing three and nearly four of those states locked her out of the presidency. She also underperformed in Minnesota The 20 percent exception will help as well.
But there will be suffering. Some of the damage will be obvious—more homelessness, for example, with more demand on already strapped shelters and soup kitchens. The ensuing problems will also appear as increases in the incidence of other problems, directly but perhaps not provably owing to the impact of the welfare bill.
There will be more malnutrition and more crime, increased infant mortality, and increased drug and alcohol abuse.
There will be increased family violence and abuse against children and women, and a consequent significant spillover of the problem into the already overloaded child-welfare system and battered-women's shelters.
I am amazed by the number of people who have bought the line that the bill was some little set of adjustments that could easily be done away with.
Congress and the President have dynamited a structure that was in place for six decades. A solid bipartisan majority of Congress and the President himself have a stake in what they have already done. Fundamental change in the bill is therefore not possible this year. So the answer to the question is no, not in any fundamental way. One possible area for adjustment is in the immigrant and food-stamp provisions.
These occasioned the most hand-wringing from the President and some of the people who voted for the bill. They could be changed without redoing everything. The President has made some proposals for limited change on these items. The bigger question is welfare. If there is going to be a short-term fix of the new law, it will be not in the fundamentals of the new structure but rather in some of the details.
It might possibly include the following, although I hasten to say that even this list stretches credulity. If reliable and affordable health care and child care were added to this list, and were available beyond a transitional period, it would help a lot. However, my crystal ball tells me that whatever is enacted in these areas will be modest at best, and the new structure will remain substantially in place.
And of course not even these adjustments would solve the fundamental problems created when the previous structure was dynamited: the disappearance of the national definition of eligibility and of the guarantee that federal funds will be available for all eligible children.
A real fix would involve, first, jobs, jobs, jobs—preferably and as a first priority in the private sector, but also in the public sector, where there is real work to be done. And then everything that enables people to be productive citizens. Schools that teach every child as well as they teach every other child. Safe neighborhoods. Healthy communities. Continuing health-care and day-care coverage, so that people can not only go to work but also keep on working.
Ending the racial and ethnic discrimination that plagues too many young people who try to enter the job market for the first time. When we discuss jobs, we need to be talking about opportunities for men and women both. That may seem obvious, but the welfare bill skews our focus. By allocating to long-term welfare recipients such a large share of the limited resources available for jobs and training, we may be draining funds and attention from others who deserve to be a higher priority.
Inner-city young men come particularly to mind. We need to be promoting responsible fatherhood, marriage, and two-parent families. If young men cannot find work, they are far less likely to marry.
They may have children, but economics and low self-esteem may defeat responsibility. Tough child-support enforcement is part of the solution, but genuine opportunity and clear pathways to opportunity are vital. The outside world tends to believe that the inner city is hopeless. I do not mean to neglect strategies to reduce rural poverty.
That is not the case. In the toughest neighborhoods, with all the dangers and pitfalls of street life, there are young people who beat the odds, stay in school and graduate, and go to college or get a job.
These young people have exceptional strength and resiliency. But there are many more who could make it with a little extra support and attention. It is enormously important that we increase the number of young people who make it. We give a lot of lip service to prevention, whether of crime or drug abuse or teen pregnancy. But we will never prevent these negative outcomes as well as we could until we pursue a general strategy of creating opportunity and clear pathways to opportunity—a positive youth-development strategy.
Many of the jobs that welfare recipients and other low-income people get do not pay enough to pull them out of poverty. Continuing attention to the minimum wage and the Earned Income Tax Credit will be necessary.
States should insist, as the city of Baltimore has, that all their contractors pay all their workers a sufficient wage to keep them out of poverty or at least approximately enough to keep a family of four out of poverty , and should fund their contracts accordingly. Current child-care and health-care policies are insufficient to allow low-wage workers to stay out of poverty even if transitional subsidies let them escape temporarily when they leave the welfare rolls.
Federal and state child-care subsidies should help all workers who would otherwise be poor, not just those who have recently left the welfare rolls. And at the end of the day we still have 40 million Americans, including 10 million children, who do not have health coverage.
We still have to deal with that as part of a real antipoverty strategy. We have been reduced to the politics of the waitress mom. A real fix would help the waitress mom as well as those a rung below her on the income ladder. We are not just talking policy; we are talking values. We are talking people, especially young people growing up, who understand that they have to take responsibility for themselves, both as earners and as parents.
Personal responsibility and community responsibility need to intersect. The community has a responsibility to help instill and nurture values. The community has a responsibility to offer support, especially to children and youths, so that everyone has an opportunity to acquire the tools necessary to achieve the personal responsibility that is such a vital element in the equation. The community has a responsibility to help parents do their job.
And community means something different from programs, something larger, although programs are part of the equation. Liberals have tended to think in terms of programs.
The community's taking responsibility is a much larger idea. But communities cannot succeed in isolation. National leadership and policy are essential as well. Welfare is what we do when everything else fails. It is what we do for people who can't make it after a genuine attempt has been mounted to help the maximum possible number of people to make it.
In fact, much of what we do in the name of welfare is more appropriately a subject for disability policy. The debate over welfare misses the point when all it seeks to do is tinker with welfare eligibility, requirements, and sanctions.
The welfare law misses the point. To do what needs to be done is going to take a lot of work—organizing, engaging in public education, broadening the base of people who believe that real action to reduce poverty and promote self-sufficiency in America is important and possible. We need to watch very carefully, and we need to document and publicize, the impact of the welfare legislation on children and families across America.
We need to do everything we can to influence the choices the states have to make under the new law. We can ultimately come out in a better place. We should not want to go back to what we had. It was not good social policy. We want people to be able to hold up their heads and raise their children in dignity.
The best that can be said about this terrible legislation is that perhaps we will learn from it and eventually arrive at a better approach. I am afraid, though, that along the way we will do some serious injury to American children, who should not have had to suffer from our national backlash.
Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe. Instead Clinton promised to end welfare as we know it and to institute what sounded like a two-year time limit.
This was bumper-sticker politics—oversimplification to win votes. Polls during the campaign showed that it was very popular, and a salient item in garnering votes.
Clinton's slogans were also cleverly ambiguous. On the one hand, as President, Clinton could take a relatively liberal path that was nonetheless consistent with his campaign rhetoric. In he proposed legislation that required everyone to be working by the time he or she had been on the rolls for two years. But it also said, more or less in the fine print, that people who played by the rules and couldn't find work could continue to get benefits within the same federal-state framework that had existed since The President didn't say so, but he was building—quite incrementally and on the whole responsibly—on the framework of the Family Support Act.
On the other hand, candidate Clinton had let his listeners infer that he intended radical reform with real fall-off-the-cliff time limits. He never said so explicitly, though, so his liberal flank had nothing definitive to criticize. President Clinton's actual proposal was based on a responsible interpretation of what candidate Clinton had said. Before I begin my critique, I need to say something about the motivations of those who genuinely support this new approach.
Some of them, anyway, had in my estimation gotten impatient with the chronicity of a significant part of the welfare caseload and the apparent intractability of the problem.
I believe they had essentially decided that handing everything over to the states was the only thing left to try that didn't cost a huge amount of money. They may well understand that there will be a certain amount of suffering, and may believe that the bucket of ice-cold water being thrown on poor people now will result in a future generation that will take much more personal responsibility for itself and its children.
I think they have made a terrible mistake, as I will try to show, but I respect the frustration that motivated at least some of them.
How bad, then, is it? Very bad. The story has never been fully told, because so many of those who would have shouted their opposition from the rooftops if a Republican President had done this were boxed in by their desire to see the President re-elected and in some cases by their own votes for the bill of which, many in the Senate had been foreordained by the President's squeeze play in September of Congress could make extra funds available to the states for job creation, wage subsidies, training, placement, support and retention services, and so on.
As campaign rhetoric, this was pure spin. The President has also proposed a modest additional tax credit for hiring welfare recipients. This, too, will have little practical effect. The Democrats tried very hard to create a voucher covering basic necessities for children in families that had run up against the time limit.
The idea failed by a narrow margin in the Senate, and is worth pursuing. Another item worth advocating would be raising the 20 percent exception to the time limit to 25 or even 30 percent. The states are chafing under the requirements about the percentage of the caseload that has to be participating in work or related activities. It would help a little if people were permitted to receive vocational training for longer than the twelve months the law allows.
The law is excessively flexible on what the states can do with the block-grant funds. A number of possible changes would be helpful: reducing the percentage that can be transferred out of the block; raising the requirement for states' contributions of their own funds; requiring states to comply with the plans they adopt; requiring states to process applications for assistance expeditiously; and clarifying the procedural protections for people denied or cut off from assistance.
It is vitally important that adequate data be gathered and reported on what happens under the new legislation. The new law contains some funding for research and some instructions about data to be gathered, but additional funds and specification would be helpful. Through a task force headed by First Lady Hillary, Clinton endorsed a massive health care reform act that was designed to provide universal coverage.
The bill failed to move through Congress, however, and became a massive political disaster, leading to Republicans regaining control of both houses of Congress in In an impressive political comeback, President Clinton again embraced centrist policies and rhetoric to restore his popularity in advance of the election.
In , he signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, a law that added , policemen and instituted harsher punishments for a variety of crimes. In , he signed a law increasing the national minimum wage. He also emerged favorably from a budget dispute with House Republicans that resulted in a pair of government shutdowns in , the second of which lasted three weeks.
Clinton's greatest accomplishment in his two terms as president was leading the nation to a period of strong economic prosperity. While Clinton was in office, the nation enjoyed the lowest unemployment rates in decades, as well as a surge in median income and a rise in home-ownership rates.
Clinton's foreign policy achievements included presiding over the signing of the Oslo Accord between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, during which the famous handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat occurred, stabilizing war-torn Bosnia through the Dayton Peace Accords and helping to end Serbia's ethnic cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo.
However the failure of the American military mission in Somalia and subsequent inaction in the face of genocide in Rwanda, both from Clinton's first term, stand out as major blemishes on his foreign policy record. In Clinton handily defeated Republican challenger Bob Dole to secure a second term in office.
Clinton's second term in the White House was dominated by the Lewinsky scandal. The president at first denied, and then later admitted, that he had sexual relations with Lewinsky, his White House intern. A panel-appointed prosecutor, Kenneth Starr , exposed the affair after expanding an initial investigation of Clinton's Whitewater investments as Arkansas governor.
In , Starr produced an explicit report with salacious details, known as the Starr Report, which outlined a case for impeachment. Twenty years later, the MeToo movement sparked a reexamination of the Clinton-Lewinsky saga, with many of the president's former supporters now questioning his handling of the affair. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand said that Clinton should have resigned, and Lewinsky wrote that their relations were marked by "inappropriate abuse of authority, station and privilege.
Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives but not the Senate, which meant that he remained in office through both of his two terms. In December , the Republican-dominated House of Representatives voted to impeach the president for perjury and obstruction of justice for his actions in the Lewinsky affair. However, in February , following a five-week trial, the Senate voted to acquit Clinton on both articles of impeachment. In the years since his presidency concluded in , Clinton has remained active on the global stage.
Despite facing an enormous backlash from the Lewinsky scandal, Clinton rejuvenated his image and remained popular among Democratic supporters. Clinton himself offered his own preliminary evaluation of his presidency in his memoirs: "I judge my presidency primarily in terms of its impact on people's lives. That is how I kept score: all the millions of people with new jobs, new homes and college aid; the kids with health insurance and after-school programs; the people who left welfare for work; the families helped by the family leave law; the people living in safer neighborhoods — all those people have stories, and they're better ones now.
Through the William J. Clinton Foundation founded in and later renamed the Clinton Foundation , he created the Clinton Climate Initiative, dedicated to supporting research to combat climate change; the Clinton Global Initiative, which connects entrepreneurs and world leaders to foster new ideas and action; and the Haiti Fund, dedicated to rebuilding Haiti in the aftermath of its devastating earthquake. According to Clinton, the foundation's mission is "to alleviate poverty, improve global health, strengthen economies and protect the environment, by fostering partnerships among governments, businesses, nongovernmental organizations and private citizens.
Clinton has continued to be a force behind his foundation, which has overseen the distribution of hundreds of millions of dollars from corporations, governments and individuals to global-minded charitable works. Having published his first book, Between Hope and History , prior to the election, the former president in followed with a best-selling autobiography, My Life. Clinton has since published three more books, Giving , Back to Work and The President Is Missing , a political thriller co-authored with James Patterson.
During a promotional tour for The President Is Missing , Clinton raised eyebrows with his analysis of special counsel Robert Mueller 's investigation into possible collusion between Donald Trump and Russian agents, saying that a Democratic president in an identical situation would already be facing impeachment. Clinton played an active role in Hillary's failed presidential bid and, afterward, in Barack Obama 's successful presidential campaign.
In his speech at the convention, Clinton said that he wanted Obama to be the standard-bearer of the Democratic Party, calling him a president who's "cool on the outside, but who burns for America on the inside. In November , Clinton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor awarded to civilians. The former president has made other special appearances including administering the oath of office in to New York City mayor Bill de Blasio and eulogizing boxing legend Muhammad Ali in Having previously served as secretary of state under the Obama administration, Hillary eventually launched a new campaign to be elected commander-in-chief.
In July , she became the official Democratic nominee for the American presidency, becoming the first woman in the U. During the Democratic National Convention, Clinton, who had previously campaigned on behalf of his wife, spoke at length about the history of their dating and marriage, her civil rights work, her work on behalf of children, her commitment to diversity and the disenfranchised, her professional dedication as a public servant and her overall tenacity.
After one of the most contentious presidential races in U. Trump's stunning victory defied pre-election polls and was considered a resounding rejection of establishment politics by blue-collar and working-class Americans.
The day following the election, Clinton, daughter Chelsea and her husband, along with vice presidential running mate Tim Kaine and his wife, stood behind Hillary as she delivered an emotional concession speech. We have seen that our nation is more deeply divided than we thought. But I still believe in America, and I always will. And if you do, then we must accept this result and then look to the future.
Donald Trump is going to be our president.
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