PARADIGM SHIFT AUGUST 1, 1996 TRANSCRIPT

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President Clinton will soon sign a bill that in effect ends welfare entitlements as we know them. The legislation removes the safety net initiated by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal of the 1930s. The NewsHour's historians put this important moment in perspective by exploring two fundamentally different views of the federal government's role.

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Browse the NewsHour's Welfare Files.

JIM LEHRER: Now, four additional perspectives on this welfare reform legislation. They are those of NewsHour regulars presidential historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and Michael Beschloss, author and journalist Haynes Johnson, joined tonight by William Kristol, editor and publisher of The Weekly Standard. Doris, in historical importance, how does this rate?

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN, Presidential Historian: Well, I think no doubt that it's a landmark changes. When you think about it, America as a country was so slow to come to the idea that the federal government had a responsibility for poverty and for welfare. All through the 19th century, all through the 18th century, the idea was that if you were poor, somehow you had a morally defective character and paupers were actually put in jail. People were imprisoned for debt. So it took really the Great Depression when one out of three people were out of work to shift those attitudes away from that moral look and to say that maybe the economy, itself, Is in fault, and as a result, we, as the federal government have a responsibility to help people who've fallen as a result of a bad economy. So that's when AFDC started. It's when so many of these other programs began. When the 1960's came along, there was a beginning to understand that we have to reach even further than we did during the Depression, and a lot of good things happened. We look on the failure of the war on poverty, but it really had legal aid, it had so many things that we look back on now that were successful like Head Start. And now what's happening is we're taking away that federal responsibility, and I fear we're going back to some of those attitudes to save these kids who are born to the wrong parents are somehow going to be penalized because they were born in the wrong place, in the wrong race, and I think we're really turning backward, both in our attitude toward governments and our attitudes toward poor people themselves.

JIM LEHRER: Is that what has happened, Bill Kristol?

WILLIAM KRISTOL, The Weekly Standard: No. And I think the evidence is in, and the current welfare system doesn't work. There's a lot of consensus on this. You know, what the federal government has done, and in a way courageously and unusually is say, we don't quite know what to do here, but we will be better off to let states experiment, but with certain guidelines, then to pretend that the federal government knows right now how to break the cycle of dependency that's been created. The National Center for Health Statistics released the statistics in 1994 on illegitimacy. One in three children in the U.S. born in 1994 was born out of wedlock, and that is the damning statistic about the current welfare system. Bill Clinton, I think, realized it, realized that the system had to be changed when he ran for President. The election in 1994 happened, and now we do have a big change in public policy but not simply because people suddenly became mean-spirited, or even because Republicans won Congress, but because the evidence is in, and the welfare system hasn't worked.

JIM LEHRER: So it's historical reform not historical reversal, in your opinion?

WILLIAM KRISTOL: Yeah, that's right. I mean, I don't think we're going back to the 1880's or even the 1920's. But it is an important moment. I mean, the key--modern liberalism stands or falls by the notion that the federal government can intervene in social problems and make things better. And it has made lots of things better over the last 60 years, but the majority of the American people and the majority of Congress and a majority of Democrats in Congress and the Democratic President of the United States no longer think that the federal government's intervention in the welfare system is making things better.

JIM LEHRER: Michael, is it correct to say that this has never happened before, that the federal government has actually given up something and given--and turned it back to where the power it took it returned?

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS, Presidential Historian: I think it's probably not fair to say that it's never happened before, and it's another sign of the kind of things that I think that we're really seeing in the 1990's, which show the advent of a conservative period and the collapse of the kind of consensus that Doris was talking about just a moment ago. Really from the mid 1930's until the late 60's, early 70's, it would have been impossible to come up with a kind of bill to get it passed, get a President to sign it, as we are seeing this week. Even in 1970, Richard Nixon, a Republican President who is thought of as a great conservative, he suggested the family assistance plan. That involved a direct cash payment to bring families above the poverty level in exchange for promises of going to work and training. If Jimmy Carter in 1980 had agreed to sign a bill such as the one that Bill Clinton is going to be signing at this moment, he probably would have been burned at the stake, or at least at the Democratic Convention in New York, he would have seen an enormous spontaneous uprising perhaps against his nomination. So I think it shows really how much things have changed that you've got a President who is the steward of the Democratic Party with these liberal traditions that reach all the way back to Franklin Roosevelt, that he can not only sign this bill but do so with a relatively small amount of opposition from within his own party.

JIM LEHRER: But speaking of Franklin Roosevelt, Haynes, a lot of people would argue that the programs of the Depression were intended to be stop gap. They came out because we were in a Depression. And the stop gap period is over.

HAYNES JOHNSON, Journalist/Author: That's right. And as matter of fact, it's a fascinating discussion here. You have the mayors disagreeing with the governors, and here we're having these, oh, totally different kind of views. Doris's view about, in effect, Horatio Alger, the self-made man in American life, we'd say the self-made person today, but you lift yourself up by your boot straps and you can sink or swim, and if you don't make it, it's your fault, and then you have the federal government in a crisis coming in, and then there was the role of the federal government and Bill is right, that was the lynchpin of liberal America that the federal government had a responsibility across-the-board to impose standards to help those in need of help. And, in fact, now that's broken. Whether it's a good thing or bad thing, it is clearly broken. This is a big moment, Jim. This is not just a little change in the law, or a change in, in sociology, or even politics. It's a big moment. We don't know what's going to happen. You listen to those governors, and mayors, they don't know what's going to happen.

JIM LEHRER: They don't know what's going to happen.

HAYNES JOHNSON: And I don't think we do either, really.

JIM LEHRER: Yeah.

HAYNES JOHNSON: But--although we have great wisdom here.

JIM LEHRER: Yeah. Well, speaking of great wisdom, what do you think is going to happen, Doris.

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: Well, the worry that I have is that even during the Depression, for example, Roosevelt wanted workfare rather than welfare, but he realized that public jobs were not going to be enough for everybody, so you had to have that guarantee, that safety net underneath. What hasn't happened in this bill--Clinton's original thought was going to cost $10 billion more because he was going to have public service jobs. He was going to have job training. He was going to have child care. This bill has cut the amount of what we're going to assist. You're going to have people cut off welfare without that movement up to work, which everybody agrees is necessary.

JIM LEHRER: Yeah.

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: So I think it's a really scary thought of what we're going into in this unknown world.

JIM LEHRER: Do you have scary thoughts about this, Bill Kristol?

WILLIAM KRISTOL: Well, it's a change, and change, as always, can be scary, but I think the current system is awfully broken.

JIM LEHRER: So it couldn't get any worse?

WILLIAM KRISTOL: Well, it could get worse, but I think most states will experiment, and I think states will watch what other states do, and those states that do better will then set the model. It is the progressive experiment that happened at the beginning of liberalism in this century in reverse. It's evolution apparent to the states. The current system is broken. Just in the nineteen--teens and twenties people thought the capitalist system was broken, and more intervention was needed. And now there's a chance for states and localities and the private sector to experiment to see whether you can help people in need without creating dependency, without destroying families, without undercutting personal responsibility. So in that respect, I'm personally hopeful. I think that Bill Clinton is happy, since I think his chances for reelection increased an awful lot--

JIM LEHRER: That's another story.

WILLIAM KRISTOL: --yesterday. That's another story.

JIM LEHRER: We don't talk politics here. (laughter among group)

WILLIAM KRISTOL: Forgive me. We're only in Washington, D.C. We shouldn't talk about that.

JIM LEHRER: Right. Michael, what do you see when you look down the road on this?

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Well, it reminds me of what Howard Baker as the Senate Republican leader in 1981 said about Ronald Reagan's economic program--it was a river boat gamble, and one couldn't know really how it would finally result. But the thing that is wonderful about our system is that it's enormously resilient. If people begin to feel that this shift of power to the states and localities is beginning to fail, you're going to see a big, new liberal movement in this country. You'll probably see someone running for the Democratic Presidential nomination in the year 2000 saying--

JIM LEHRER: Hey, I told you so.

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: --Bill Clinton was wrong, he took us to the right, this was disastrous. And he could do very well if it proves to be a failure.

JIM LEHRER: So the, the monkey is really on the states now to deliver, is it not?

HAYNES JOHNSON: It is, Jim, and I think that's the important part here. The--ideally--I mean, it ought to work from the bottom up. The reason the government got in is because all the states were not equally helping their own citizens, and there was a disparity across-the-board. That's where the federal government opened the door and went in.

JIM LEHRER: That's what started all of this.

HAYNES JOHNSON: Absolutely. And so now the question is: If they do--if we listened to the governors tonight, it's going to be wonderful. And we all hope that's the case. But we don't know that, and the record of in the past at least is not reassuring that all states are going to do as well for all of their citizens. That's where the federal role came in, so there is this debate that Bill was raising earlier, and Doris too, and Michael, all of us.

JIM LEHRER: As a practical matter, does it diminish the power of the federal government, Bill?

WILLIAM KRISTOL: Sure.

JIM LEHRER: I mean, in a real sense?

WILLIAM KRISTOL: Yeah. I don't think the change is going to be as drastic as some people are saying. I think if we have, if we have this discussion two years from now, most welfare systems and most states will be recognizably similar to what they are today. Most governors are not going to change the system overnight. They know how little they know. They're going to be cautious. But I think you will see a faster pace of reform state by state, and an awful lot of attempts by each--by one state to learn from another state.

JIM LEHRER: And when you say scary, Doris, what do you mean? What scares you?

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: Well, I think the worry is that we're in a situation now where lots of low income jobs are not available to people who don't have a lot of education, where kids coming in school--you look at who these women are on welfare. 85 percent of them are in poverty. They don't get pregnant and then go into bad dependency. The fact is the reason they get pregnant is they have a poor educational experience, they fail out of school, or they drop out, and that cause the depression that leads to the pregnancy. How are we going to intervene in that cycle? It seems to me what we're not doing here is even talking about that, which is really what we should be talking about if we want social justice.

JIM LEHRER: But your point is that the states can't do that, only the federal government can do that?

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: It's very hard to imagine that the states that are hard pressed with funds are going to be able to do what the common good of the country should be doing. What is the federal government, after all, but it's all of us saying, in a time like this, when we have an economy of plenty, are we going to allow people to be under such poverty, and I think that should be our common goal, that we won't allow that, not put up to the states. Look, in the old days, the states used to have a suitable home rule where you could only get welfare if you had a suitable home, and every southern state said blacks didn't have a suitable home. That's what we have to worry about, that kind of discrimination that could still go on.

JIM LEHRER: You don't see that happening, do you, Michael?

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: No. And I think it's very hard to get people to make sacrifices when they think that the federal government is not doing something terribly well. If this is turned to the states and the states do a bad job, they may in some cases long for the days of federal centralized power. If that happens, I think Doris's view will become predominant particularly within the Democratic Party.

JIM LEHRER: And the pendulum will swing the other way. And we have to go. Thank you all very much.

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Thanks, Jim.

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