Mickey Kaus says I’m wrong and lazy for saying Clinton signed welfare reform out of political expendiency. That’s at least a little at odds with what Mickey said before.

But I will concede to the core of Mickey’s basic objection — Clinton did have an independent desire to reform welfare. I think that is a fair point and I may have been too broad in invoking political opportunism as Clinton’s sole motive on the issue. However, I think Mickey — who knows a lot more about welfare than I do (though I spent a lot of time on the subject at AEI) — would be disingenuous to suggest that political calculation hadn’t played an enormous role in the form welfare reform took. If I remember correctly, Clinton vetoed two less dramatic reforms in the hope of passing his own more generous proposals which included increased spending and a new jobs program. He was pulled dramatically to the right by the Republican Congress (and by RNC ads which zinged him on his commitment to welfare reform going into the presidential election) and he ended up signing a bill he surely would have vetoed in, say, 1994.

Regardless, whether Mickey’s objection is 100% correct or not doesn’t detract from the larger point of my column — that liberals had no monopoly on “empiricism” in those days, or now.