The exchange was a preview of a crucial intellectual tug of war about to take place among the poverty wonks in the Clinton administration: individual responsibility versus group entitlement. When the euphemisms are stripped away, it’s a debate about America’s most persistent and vexing agony-race, and the existence of a chronic, welfare-dependent and amoral underclass. Most liberals aren’t comfortable talking about such things. They imagine poverty a consequence of injustice and consider any attempt to criticize the morality of the poor “blaming the victim.” Their solutions tend toward the collective: income redistribution, massive aid to cities and racial-preference programs. Conservatives, by contrast, have emphasized immorality-out-of-wedlock births, drug abuse, crime-a “culture of poverty” at the heart of chronic dependency. Their solutions, such as they were, have tended to be punitive.
Neither approach suffices, and, for years, Clinton has looked for a synthesis. In essence, he’s bought the conservative emphasis on individual responsibility but added the activist notion that government could create programs that encouraged people to take control of their lives. He hasn’t been alone, of course: moderate Democrats (like those at the Progressive Policy Institute) and the Jack Kemp wing of the GOP were investigating similar turf. Nor was Clinton the most adventurous of the new breed-he continued to favor some group entitlements, like racial preferences, and maintained close ties to liberal activists like Edelman through his wife, Hillary (whose positions on these issues are as nuanced as her husband’s, and not nearly the left-wing idiocy caricatured by some commentators).
Will Clinton do anything more now than ask provocative questions? There are ominous signs of squishiness. “Clinton’s ideology is empathy,” says Jim Pinkerton, the domestic-policy aide ignored by George Bush for the past four years. Empathy is admirable but not very rigorous.
Clinton does seem to have a weakness for compelling, if muddled, tracts like Jonathan Kozol’s “Savage Inequalities,” which compares conditions in urban and suburban school districts and argues for equalization of funding. Kozol has a point. The state of many city schools is disgraceful; more money wouldn’t hurt. But even if the asphalt jungle were paved with gold and each school given the facilities of, say, Sidwell Friends, it wouldn’t make much difference: 25 years of education research says that spending levels have little effect on success in school. The key variable is family structure and stability.
Another ominous sign: last month Clinton went out of his way to disparage Wisconsin’s Learnfare program, which docks welfare mothers if their kids are truant. He based his evaluation on a University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee study, which said Learnfare was a failure because only a third of the children in the program improved their attendance records. This is a strange conclusion: given the marginal impact of most antipoverty programs (including Head Start) a 33 percent success rate is spectacular. If anything, Learnfare is evidence that demanding responsibility from welfare recipients-as Clinton says he wants to do-works.
Worst of all, though, was the way Clinton selected his cabinet. Diversity is a fine thing. But mandating that the attorney general be a woman and that there be two Hispanics in the cabinet isn’t diversity. It’s a quota system. It perpetuates dependency, emphasizing the aggrieved status of the “protected” groups, rather than individual achievement or creativity. Clinton caved in to the bean counters and seemed weak in the process, opening the door to pressure from all sorts of future grievance junkies.
Further, he sent a mixed message to the poor kids Marian Wright Edelman champions: what you are matters as much as who you are. This runs against the grain of a nation where, polls show, a majority of women refuse to call themselves feminists, blacks are split down the middle on the value of racial preferences and most Spanish-surnamed people are probably too busy assimilating to worry if they’re called Hispanics or Latinos. No doubt, tigers will emerge from Clinton’s collection of tokens and technocrats, but the initial impression is, ironically, of colorless uniformity-a reminder that, in America, true diversity is wild, untamed and defiantly unplanned.
