Will Hillary Clinton Run Against Her Husband’s Welfare Legacy?

In a campaign focused on inequality, Bill Clinton's famous pledge to "end welfare as we know it" is liable to be a central focus.

Melinda Henneberger
May 26, 2015 6:00 AM EDT

Almost 20 years ago, when Bill Clinton made good on his campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it,’’ some of his oldest friends were beside themselves. The plan, as originally conceived, had been to pump significantly more money into programs designed to move poor single mothers off of assistance and into jobs, which couldn’t be done on the cheap. Yes, Clinton had proposed a strict time limit on benefits, but he had also pledged to “make work pay.” As it turned out, only one of those two things happened.

On August 22, 1996, Clinton proudly signed a Republican bill that pushed recipients out of the program after five years and ended an entitlement in place since the New Deal. “In a sweeping reversal of Federal policy, the New York Times story on the event began, “President Clinton today ended six decades of guaranteed help to the nation's poorest children.”

“You can put wings on a pig, but you can’t make it an eagle.”
Bill Clinton

The bill wasn’t the solo handiwork of then House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who had proposed sending poor children to orphanages. Rather, a Democratic president with political capital to spare was freely approving what many in his party saw as a baldly punitive bill. And Hillary Clinton, who in this early phase of her campaign has made "the-deck-is-stacked" inequality a central focus, was fully in support.

Clinton's signing of the bill was a source of near-physical pain to someone like Peter Edelman, then Clinton’s assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, who as a speechwriter for Robert Kennedy had penned one of the earliest liberal critiques of welfare’s shortcomings, in 1967. RFK’s proposed antidote, however, had been a massive jobs program. Edelman had known Hillary Clinton since 1969, when he’d put her in touch with his wife, Marian Wright Edelman, who became her mentor and employer at the anti-poverty organization she'd just founded, the Children’s Defense Fund.

After Clinton signed the legislation, Edelman and his Health and Human Services colleague Mary Jo Bane, both of whom had been brought into the administration as advocates of a very different brand of welfare reform, did what few in Washington ever do—they resigned in protest. In an “Open Letter to the President’’ published in the Washington Post, Marian Wright Edelman called it a “moment of shame” for her old friends and their party.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-05-26/will-hillary-clinton-run-against-her-husband-s-welfare-legacy-