WELFARE REFORM AS POLITICS. Naturally, discussions of the ten year anniversary of the 1996 welfare reform bill have tended to earnestly focus on the bill's impact on welfare recipients. It's worth recalling, however, that from the beginning the promise to "end welfare as we know it" was primarily a political gambit. And, as this TNR editorial points out, it's been a tremendously succesful one. Not just in the sense that it helped Bill Clinton win elections in 1992 and 1996, but that it accomplished what his "third way" approach is often accused of failing to do -- it vastly improved the overall prospects for progressive politics in America.
Before 1996, both the Democratic Party in particular and the general idea of the activist state were incredibly hobbled by their association with a single small program -- Aid to Families With Dependent Children -- that nobody thought was especially effective and that had become massively unpopular. Eliminating it has vastly increased the public's willingness to contemplate new programs and initiatives and it accomplished that without being nearly as harmful to the poor as opponents predicted it would be at the time. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the architects of that successful strategy have tended to underestimate how successful they were, and you tend to see them in the same kind of defensive crutch that was politically appropriate ten years ago but that has largely been rendered obsolete by their success.
--Matthew Yglesias
