We know why President Clinton works so hard to make sure no one has a clue where he stands on anything. He figures, if it works for Colin Powell . . .
After a brief appearance on the Senate floor, Bob Dole’s welfare-reform bill was prudently pulled. It was vulnerable to attack from all sides, but especially the Right. More than twenty senators had rallied to a conservative alternative championed by Phil Gramm— with good reason. The block grants in the Dole bill retained a tangle of strings and sops to the Health and Human Services bureaucracy (the job-training block grant was some 110 pages long and wouldn’t have taken effect until July 1998). Its work provisions would have been entirely meaningless if Dole hadn’t at the last minute added “pay for performance” provisions pushed by Gramm, and they would still have allowed states to count bogus training programs as “work.” And the bill lacked crucial provisions to keep federal funds from subsidizing unwed motherhood. (Sen. Packwood reportedly said such restrictions would be a violation of women’s reproductive rights.) If the bill had gone forward this month, it seemed likely only to get worse, with Dole promising new child-care measures and GOP moderates angling for a “maintenance of effort” requirement to keep state welfare spending at current levels. Better to wait until September, when perhaps the Senate leadership will have embraced welfare reform worthy of the name.
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