a question as to why the Family Support Act, to which Clinton contributed with apparent pride, failed politically. Indeed, by the presidential primary season in 1992, FSA had become in Clinton’s rhetoric evidence of the kind of old-fashioned Democratic Party thinking against which he defined himself.13
Contrary to prior accounts that have emphasized the degree to which President Clinton was pressured in the middle 1990s by Republican governors and a Republican Congress to sign the 1996 welfare bill into law, we find that, long before he was president, Bill Clinton developed his political persona and built the national dimensions of his career around welfare reform.14 Welfare was the central issue to which he devoted his efforts within the National Governors Association. The “New Democrat” wing of the party articulated its politics as maverick and innovative, committed to fiscal responsibility instead of a “tax and spend” approach. This was effective branding but deceptive politics and policy. The newness of Bill Clinton’s version of New Democratic politics implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) rested on a willingness to offend African American and feminist constituency groups along with liberals who believed the best way to reduce inequality was to tax those with excess wealth and assist those with too little. Despite the fact that Clinton was a leading state-level advocate for FSA, welfare reform continued to be an emblematic and defining issue for Clinton and other New Democrats as they took power within the Democratic Party.
E.T., Phone Home
Before the Family Support Act became an object of political vitriol, national politics briefly focused on “E.T.,” the Massachusetts Employment and Training program. E.T. was the heart of Governor Michael Dukakis’s social policy portfolio and part of his bid for the presidency in 1988. Initiated in the early 1980s, E.T. was one of several local and state-level “get-tough” welfare policies, which promised to turn the unpopular Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program from one of maternal and child support into one that moved women into the waged labor market. The major difference between E.T. and both the Family Support Act and PRWORA was that participation in E.T. was voluntary.15 Massachusetts officials and the social science evaluators of the program found that there was sufficient interest among parents who received AFDC benefits to fill a completely voluntary program of employment and training. A mandatory program would have overwhelmed the state bureaucracy and swamped the portion of the labor market to which people with limited educations had access. Evaluators discovered, moreover, that the most expensive and bureaucratically challenging aspect of the program was fulfilling its pledge to provide child care for parents who participated. If Dukakis’s administration followed the mandate in the state statute that created E.T., to ensure that children received care, then it could not afford to accommodate more participants than the number who volunteered. Moreover, given the costs of child care, training, and assistance in finding employment, the program did not save the state as much money as political leaders had hoped it would. Administrators of the California welfare-to-work program similarly found that education and literacy levels were so low among many AFDC parents that the costs of adult education and pinched employment options limited (or, in certain counties, apparently erased) the savings from welfare reform.16 For welfare reformers who wanted to improve recipients’ earnings potential, E.T. and other welfare-to-work policies held promise. But they did not do much to help state administrations plug gaps in their budgets. They required unpopular spending to help a disdained population.17
Politicians such as Moynihan, Reagan, and Clinton did not debate the social scientists who found that E.T. and similar programs could work if properly funded but also found most states unwilling to make the investment. Regardless of the research, anti-welfare politicians continued to argue that there was an unsolved welfare crisis that only new leadership could adequately address. Indeed, the anti-welfare discourse of the late 1980s and early 1990s proceeded in apparent ignorance of the findings derived from E.T. and other local experiments—much as they proceeded irrespective of the government-funded Panel Study of Income Dynamics.
The Democrats’ defeat in the 1988 presidential election presented a growing community of anti-welfare Democrats with an opportunity to commandeer the party’s agenda. The Democratic presidential nominee, Michael Dukakis, was the governor of Massachusetts, home of E.T. Candidate Dukakis represented a version of northern, white, intellectual liberalism that was mocked by many in the Democratic center-right and deemed out of touch by cynical political insiders. By the end of the 1988 campaign, Dukakis had become a Democratic untouchable. Not only did he lose the presidential election to a relatively weak Republican candidate, but he also allowed himself and the party to be derided as inadequately masculine, even effeminate, and weak on the race- and gender-coded issue of criminal justice. What captured attention during the 1988 campaign was the image of the diminutive candidate Dukakis swallowed up in a military helmet when he mistakenly tried to prove his bone fides by driving a tank. Even more sensationalized was the “Willie Horton” television advertisement, which Republicans used to associate the governor’s parole policies with racialized and sexualized crime. A third touchstone in memories of the Dukakis campaign is the moment during a presidential debate when the candidate muffed a question about whether he would support the death penalty if his own wife were raped.18 These flashpoints were products of the gendered and racialized politics of the period. They also concretized and enhanced those politics, making everything related to Dukakis, especially policies that directly implicated gender and race, seem toxic for ambitious Democrats.
New Democrats defined themselves against what they characterized as the trademarks of traditional, liberal Democracy.19 Dukakis served as a synecdoche for what they found problematic about the whole party, which formed the rationale for their “new” departure. It is easy to see how “new” Democratic politics set the stage for Bill Clinton’s rise to national prominence and shaped his agenda: New Democrats, contra Dukakis, were not from the traditional party strongholds of the urban Northeast and West; they were not ambivalent about policies on crime, welfare, or immigration that might offend advocates of color; and they were not beholden to familiar Democratic allies such as labor unions, feminist organizations, and civil rights lobbies. With the help of these positions and a “tough” foreign policy, New Democrats sought to project an image of mainstream white heterosexual masculinity.20 Clinton’s embrace of welfare reform as an issue and his persistent unwillingness to credit Dukakis’s welfare reform model or recognize the data derived from it was consistent with the emergent terms of New Democratic politics.21
President Reagan signed the Family Support Act in October 1988, on the eve of the Dukakis-Bush election. The FSA differed from Dukakis’s state-level E.T. program: it reflected a greater concern with policing masculine behavior, in the form of enforced financial child support, and was premised on racialized stereotypes of welfare recipients as lazy and therefore in need of work mandates rather than a voluntary program.22 But FSA, like E.T. and other local welfare-to-work experiments, did not settle the debate over welfare. In fact, in the years immediately following what Moynihan described as policy to “turn the welfare program upside down,” the debate seemed to rage even more loudly and intensively than it had before.23 As political scientist Hugh Heclo has argued, “welfare reform became much more than an isolated campaign issue after 1988. It became a central focus in the strategic maneuvers of party warfare,” a “wedge issue” with which conservatives hoped to separate voters from the Democratic Party and a matter of identity to New Democrats such as Bill Clinton.24
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