Ed Kilgore's history of the welfare reform debate is a useful corrective to all the Republican triumphalism over the bill. As he notes, Clinton rejected its first two incarnations, the first which would have excluded unmarried women, the second which would've made the program into a useless block grant. But you know what? Welfare reform was a Republican win. Democrats had the basic insight that folks need help to get ahead, conservatives chimed in to argue that you could use that help to encourage behavior that would make the getting ahead more likely. That they were too cruel to be trusted to do it alone is to their lasting shame, but so it goes.
The problem for Republicans is that Democrats have captured that insight and made it their own. Now it's the left that wants to make work pay, that wants to create the conditions to ensure smart economic choices yield real financial benefits. The Republicans, unable to overcome their thinly-veiled racism and cultural regressivism, have decided to focus instead on gays. Unable to make the transition from leveraging work punitively to approaching it positively, they lost control of their own agenda and Democrats turned it into a policy of economic uplift.
That's why I'm so unimpressed by the Joe Klein's of the world who worry about a return to "the party's stupid excesses of the '70s and '80s." This isn't 1996, with an overstretched Bill Clinton straining to hold Democrats behind his heterodox opinions. The value of work and dangers of dependency are consensus within the party, and those insights will be reflected in future Democratic administrations. What's been a shame has been the Republican Party's abandonment of any positive agenda on mobility and poverty policy. Now in power, they're no longer able to even contribute constructively to the debate, much less set the agenda. The Medicare Bill was a mess, they didn't fund their own faith-based initiatives, and NCLB was Bush's capitulation to liberal ideas on education. So today, on the tenth anniversary of welfare reform, maybe the right should stop crowing about a decade old victory and begin examining why it's been ten years since they said anything worth hearing about social policy.
