“Mr. Warren, you are heading for disaster!” the Washington icon thundered.
Cokie Roberts?
No, it was Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) assuring me Friday that Chicago will not be well-served by the welfare repeal, oops, reform bill that became law Oct. 1.
“In 1993, the portion of kids getting AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) at any given time in Chicago was 36 percent. In the course of the year, 46 percent received benefits.”
It’s no great surprise that Moynihan, tagged by the Almanac of American Politics as “the nation’s best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and best politician among thinkers since Jefferson,” is deeply troubled by the new law and other matters, President Clinton not the least among them.
He has, after all, been studying, writing and warning about the breakup of the family for more than three decades. He knows the topic cold and, despite being a tough-minded, old-fashioned liberal of the sort who’d probably love Chicago’s Mayor Daley II, firmly believes the Republicans, and many Democrats, have erred.
As he put it on the Senate floor, “We will have fashioned our own coffin. There will be no flowers.”
Moynihan believes that fellow Democrats encountered “a certain kind of liberal failure of nerve on a massive scale” on welfare. Denying the issue’s complexity, especially as it involves finding work for welfare recipients, they caved. They now must resort to crossing their fingers that the states won’t screw up things too badly, and that private industry will happily employ armies of the undertrained.
“If you think Chicago will live with that without consequences, you’re kidding yourself,” he said.
I’d thought about chatting with Moynihan after reading what’s at least his 16th book, “Miles to Go,” a look at social policy in the U.S. and troubles of modern liberalism. It’s somewhat esoteric, and a tad self-absorbed (he’s not at all adverse to quoting himself), but the author clearly was appreciative that someone had taken the time.
Moynihan was ostracized by some liberals 30 years ago when he pilloried the welfare system, focusing on the horrendous growth of illegitimacy and its inherent corruption of values. History proves him correct in perceiving the system’s failings and possibly will prove him correct in predicting that a huge error was made via the brutish attempt to correct it.
“There are three groups on AFDC,” Moynihan said, with professorial empiricism.
“There’s the mature woman whose marriage breaks up. Don’t need your advice or help; just a check. In 15 months they’re off. So it’s unemployment insurance for them.
“Then there’s the group that goes on and off, in and out, all their lives, half in the work force, half out. They are in no sense people whom you can’t help.
“Then there’s the group on welfare from the beginnings of their reproductive lives. The median stay on welfare, remember, is 13 years. So when your two years are up (under the new law), what do you do?
“We are already getting a deadly atomization of households. Society becomes a dust of individuals. Really, really bad stuff.
“Of course, I could be wrong. But it was conservative social scientists who spoke out against this legislation: `In the name of God, what made you (Congress) dream that you could do this?’ “
Even if government knew how to deal with the “restoration of individual character and moral instruction in everyday life,” it now faces a “disabling fiscal stricture,” namely the impending insolvency of Social Security.
Here demography is destiny, he writes in the new book, “and we are destined to be fighting about this subject for a generation. The present situation is unsustainable.”
Moynihan, 69, is unique. Raised in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen, he became one of New York’s senators in 1976 and has hefty academic credentials as well as a vast array of government experience in four different administrations (Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford), including the posts of assistant secretary of labor, chief domestic adviser, ambassador to India and ambassador to the United Nations.
An interesting take on him comes from Bill Kristol, publisher of a new conservative weekly, The Standard, and son of an old Moynihan chum, neo-conservative guru Irving Kristol. In 1965 the father founded with Moynihan a public policy quarterly, the Public Interest, dedicated to a more skeptical, social science-oriented approach to problems.
These were New York liberals wary of ideologues of the Left and Right. Several, notably Irving Kristol, would later take a distinctly right turn, finding shelter with a philosophical species they created called “neo-cons” (a neo-conservative, Irving Kristol declared, was a “liberal mugged by reality”).
Moynihan remained a defender (a bit nostalgically at times) of government and an older Democratic Party, whose bedrock was ethnics, Catholics and the unions. He admired reformers but also the effective, legendary political machines and bosses, such as Chicago’s Mayor Daley I.
Moynihan used to show up and play poker at the Kristol apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side when Bill was a tot.
“Politically and intellectually, he was an old-fashioned Kennedy-Truman-Richard Daley Democrat, who believes in government but early on saw a lot of liberal programs going off the rail,” said Bill Kristol, calling from O’Hare International Airport after a paid breakfast address to DuPage County Republicans. (Cokie can’t do all the moonlighting herself, not to mention how the DuPage GOP would not be her cup of tea).
Moynihan, indeed, finds ” `liberal’ an honorable term. Its roots are liberty. Why should anybody get excited about that?”
He thus finds the bashing of Clinton as liberal by Bob Dole a rather contorted exercise. “Campaign for us because we’re not something he (Clinton) is” he said with ridicule, but appreciation for its genesis.
“It is a judgment as to where the country is at this moment. It would not be there if we (Democrats) had paid attention to what government can do and what it cannot do. I have been writing about this for quite a long time.”
Moynihan knows Dole well, likes and admires him. He knows Clinton well, and one can infer that he seems to fall short of admiration. In the 1992 Democratic presidential primary, he was a supporter of Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey.
While proving a Democratic loyalist and supporting Clinton, Moynihan said, the Dole “I am seeing is a different person. The setting of the Senate is perhaps so special and, there, he didn’t have people around him telling him what to say.
“Oh, yes, he’s very different (in the campaign). Make it go away fast. I really wish he wouldn’t say that Clinton is a liberal. What if he is?
“I am surprised Dole is not doing better because of who he is and what he stands for. To pick up this damned 15 percent tax cut, which we can’t possibly afford and don’t need, is an example of letting pollsters design your campaign. He is too authentic a figure to have let this happen.”
Bring on Rush Limbaugh
Jim Lehrer of PBS is a lovely, insightful and gracious man. He’s also author of pretty fair novels.
As for his moderating the presidential debates, is the country best served by such an aggressively civil 90 minutes, a sort of extended “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer”?
Lehrer moderated the first debate and will do likewise Wednesday. He did the vice presidential debate, a total snooze, too.
If true to form, he will insist, as he did to the first debate audience (before the cameras rolled) that they be quiet and non-partisan. The debate wasn’t for them, he said, it was for the TV audience.
And it was all so dull.
Next time, bring on Morton Downey Jr. or Rush Limbaugh to dish the questions. And maybe bring in some passionate souls from the bleachers at Yankee Stadium to serve as a peanut gallery.
