The debate over welfare had come to this:
“Presumably,” said William F. Buckley Jr., “if Einstein impregnated Elizabeth Taylor, we would have an anomaly.”
Buckley, perhaps our most engaging unreconstructed preppy, was facing off with Charles Rangel, the Harlem congressman, and winning points for theatrics, if not persuasion.
Buckley, 68, envisioned an out-of-wedlock Einstein-Taylor coupling as an exception to what he deems a direct link between illegitimacy and most of society’s ills, including crime, drug abuse and homelessness. Rangel, no oratorical slouch, was having none of the Buckley thesis, which also included the conservative icon’s asserting that Taylor’s many marriages have been a bad influence.
“I don’t think little black girls care about what Liz Taylor does,” said the congressman with well-practiced disdain.
This constituted one of the few vibrant exchanges in a two-hour attempt to shed light on the mess that is welfare. The proposition at hand was, “Welfare Has Done More Harm Than Good.”
For sure, theatrics were appropriate since the purpose of last Tuesday’s exercise at George Washington University was to tape a debate, namely the latest episode of Buckley’s “Firing Line” series for public television (10 p.m. Monday, WTTW-Ch. 11). Time flies. The series began April 8, 1966.
But the ennui-hey, should one use a word as simple as “fatigue” with Buckley involved?-that characterizes the issue in the nearby U.S. Congress seemed to meet the issue here. The crowd was small and the level of anticipation perhaps underscored by an overheard pre-debate conversation involving two university types.
“There’s a certain arrogance to the agnostic and atheist,” said a man. “He doesn’t just say he believes this. He says he knows this.”
“Yes, yes,” said the woman.
In the auditorium’s well, Buckley sat at a table with his squad of the proposition’s supporters: Charles Murray, a well-known welfare basher and social theorist; Robert Woodson, a black businessman; and Wayne Bryant, a New Jersey state legislator, who wrote a new law that penalizes welfare moms for having kids while on welfare.
On the other side, to offer a strong, if not unequivocal, rebuttal were Rangel; Eleanor Holmes Norton, the congressional delegate for the District of Columbia; Robert Greenstein, founder of a social policy think tank; and academic and social analyst Frances Fox Piven.
Michael Kinsley, the New Republic writer and CNN host, was an understated and often bemused moderator.
No surprise, nothing was resolved, though Rangel’s side did reflect how the welfare debate has dramatically changed over the last decade. Each member agreed that welfare has huge problems and conceded certain matters, such as the need for self-discipline, once the exclusive province of supposedly meanie conservatives.
The gulf between the parties was this: One side called for demolition, the other for reform. Within the breech, tough-mindedness and meanness of spirit seemed to meld.
If a woman works at a minimum wage job, Piven asked Murray, and that still put her below the poverty line, would one really bar her from getting food stamps to be used to feed her children.
“Yes, I would,” said Murray.
One suspects that an Einstein, even in the throes of passion with Liz Taylor, could devise a better way.
Retooling the machine
Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, a king of Congress, returned here from his primary triumph last week, but not before the New York Times exhibited atypical, and gross, ignorance in evaluating his victory back in Chicago.
“Whatever is left of the fearsome Democratic machine built by Mayor Richard J. Daley, its parts were reassembled for perhaps the last great battle of its influential but beleaguered native son, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Commmittee and possible savior of the Clinton health care plan,” a Chicago-based reporter informed the paper’s readers Thursday.
Where does one start? How about leaving it at this: Daley not only didn’t build the machine, he oversaw the initial fracturing of it. It was built over many previous decades by Anton Cermak, Patrick Nash, Ed Kelly and Jake Arvey, among others. Its days of greatest power were over before Daley became mayor.
Pundits on the make
Cesspool sweep: A few weeks back, I noted that Washington social doyenne Cokie Roberts, who works for both ABC News and National Public Radio, spoke here to a big HMO group for money (she typically receives $20,000 a speech), insisting that C-Span’s camera be turned off.
Especially since she is a political reporter in a year in which health care is a hot topic, this shouldn’t have been a close call. Outside the ethical morass of Washington’s pundit class, where even the rankest mediocrities parlay regular TV exposure into $5,000 and $10,000 gigs, this would be deemed an out-and-out conflict.
Last week, USA Today reported that Roberts has canceled an address to the American Health Systems. ABC News now says that “the purest thing possible is not giving speeches at all to health care groups,” though Roberts still insists that she doesn’t see a conflict.
But here’s another one for you. This time, it’s Lesley Stahl of CBS News.
Cigna Corp., a $19 billion a year insurer, confirmed Thursday that it paid Stahl to serve as moderator for a March 9 video conference on health care (figure her in the $10,000 to $20,000 range). The conference was done in a Washington studio and broadcast via satellite to a variety of sites nationwide, including Chamber of Commerce facilities.
The discussion was held under the auspices of the Healthcare Leadership Council, a group of more than 50 health care companies, including hospitals and medical equipment manufacturers. Its members include Humana Inc., Abbott Laboratories, Prudential Insurance Co., Baxter Healthcare Corp., the Travelers Companies, Upjohn Co., Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. and Evanston Hospital Corp.
The council and Cigna are proponents of “managed competition” and a bill sponsored by Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), which is favored by big insurers.
“Among the various health care proposals introduced in Congress, the Managed Competition Act of 1993 is the only bill that has all the elements necessary for health care reform,” according to a Cigna invitation to the affair.
That means, for example, that it’s against a key part of the Clinton plan, namely price controls, and would allow tax subsidies only for standard benefits packages offered to workers by companies. If your company offers you a plan richer than the standard package, it would be taxable.
Cigna underwrote an event that featured a Stanford University professor who is an apostle of managed competition, the head of the Godfather’s Pizza chain (small employer), an executive of Pepsico (big employer) and Reps. Pete Peterson (D-Fla.), Nancy Johnson (R-Conn.) and Dave McCurdy (D-Okla.). Forget the group’s merits or specifics of its desires. A reporter shouldn’t be taking money from them.
But health care “reform” is providing a cottage industry for moonlighting pundits, unable to resist the lures of a world in which there are no price controls. A CBS spokesman indicated Friday that its medical reporter, Dr. Bob Arnot, was offered, and spurned, a $37,000 fee from a medical group for a one-hour appearance.
As for Stahl, a CBS spokesman said that when she accepted, “she didn’t believe it was a conflict. She regrets if there is that appearance.” The spokesman said that CBS reiterates its written policy that employees should be aware of “their own perception of a potential conflict of interest…but also the potential perception of others.”
