Amid historic prosperity, Peter Edelman is among the small cadre reminding us that many Americans are being shafted.
“People hear that the welfare rolls have been cut in half and assume that’s the end of the story,” he said Friday. “That sounds like good news and, in significant part, it is.
“But a whole lot of people who went off the rolls did not get jobs and, now, can’t get back on welfare.”
Washington is a city where most lobbyists and special interests seek to maintain the status quo. It explains why little can get done for long stretches of time. People trying to dramatically alter things face tough sledding, especially if their constituency is low-profile and lacking much influence.
In the case of Edelman, a prominent Georgetown University professor who symbolizes why even some political allies don’t trust President Clinton, the constituency is America’s often-demonized poor.
It is a constituency that will be the subject of the National Campaign for Jobs and Income Support, a new coalition of about 80 groups from 35 states, which will hold a founding convention in Chicago on Saturday for an expected 1,000 grass-roots officials from across the nation.
The issues at the heart of the organization include revisions in the welfare “reform” law signed by Clinton in 1996; expanding health insurance, transportation aid and child care for low-income families; restoring to immigrants benefits, such as food stamps, eliminated in the welfare law; and turning aside growing state practices that ditch Medicaid, food stamps and other benefits to low-income citizens, especially those dropped from the welfare rolls.
On the surface, there is much apparently to applaud when it comes to welfare. As Edelman concedes, welfare caseloads are down 50 percent since the new law was signed by Clinton, with 7 million Americans no longer receiving assistance, including two-thirds of the families previously being helped.
Empirical data is scarce on those who have left the rolls, but it is believed that about 60 percent have jobs on a given day. That means perhaps 1 million adults, and their 2 million children, do not and have essentially left the social radar screen.
“That is a piece of the story we are not looking at,” Edelman said.
What should be unsettling involves Americans who’ve missed the boom. The approximate rate of those living in poverty is not changing, with some evidence suggesting that certain sectors, notably clusters of urban poor, are finding themselves in increasingly worse condition.
For example, figures show that the incomes of 10 percent of homes headed by single mothers have dropped 14 percent since the 1996 law was signed. Virtually every other group in the society has seen its income rise during the technology-fueled expansion.
In addition, the number getting food stamps and Medicaid has dropped like a stone, even though it is crystal clear that the size of the group eligible for such assistance hasn’t really changed.
What also hasn’t really changed is the tendency of states to occasionally circumvent apparent obligations, especially when tons of cash are staring their elected leaders in the face.
Under the 1996 law, big sums of welfare aid go to the states in the form of five-year, fixed, block grants, in no small measure to presumably help with the many difficulties in moving citizens off welfare and into work.
But as much as $7 billion in such funds sit in state treasuries, unused rather than being funneled into child care, transportation and other programs. Even worse, some states, including New York, Wisconsin and Texas, are diverting large sums into either paying for tax cuts or for local programs for those who clearly are not poor.
The states’ often unconvincing responses involve the Catch-22 of their supposedly having lots of “extra” money because those five years’ worth of payments are fixed at high, pre-reform levels while their welfare rolls have gone down.
So, the notion goes, they have all these extra bucks they can use to replace portions of previously state-financed programs.
But the fact that somebody is no longer on the rolls has not meant they are doing any better, only that, well, officially they’re not on the rolls. Followup generally is abysmal and, no surprise, the poor do not have terribly large political megaphones to get our attention.
For sure, some states deserve praise, including 12 which have expanded health care for the working poor, and some others which have used their federal dollars to increase education and transportation opportunities for the poor. Most states, however, have done little, except get tough.
That’s all well known to Edelman, 62, who is part of one of the more notable capital duos.
Raised in Minneapolis, he attended Harvard University and Law School, served as a Supreme Court clerk for Chicago-raised Justice Arthur Goldberg and then became a top aide to Robert Kennedy, first at the Department of Justice, then in the Senate.
Edelman, who is white and Jewish, married Marian Wright, who is black and Baptist, after they met during a Kennedy tour of poverty in the Mississippi delta region. Marian Wright Edelman gained renown as founder of the Children’s Defense Fund and was a mentor at the fund for a young Yale Law School graduate, Hillary Rodham.
Over the years, the Edelmans, Rodham and the man she married, an aspiring Arkansas politician, became close friends. Hillary occasionally was a houseguest of the Edelmans and their three super-achieving sons, all of whom attended Yale or Harvard and have done impressively.
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But in 1995 Marian Edelman wrote a stinging op-ed piece, in the form of an open letter to the Clintons, excoriating pending welfare reform bills as morally indefensible by violating New and Old Testament urgings on God’s mandate “to protect the poor and the weak and the young.”
Peter Edelman, similarly dismayed with Clinton on welfare reform, subsequently quit a top job at the Department of Health and Human Services, a move reported on the front page of The New York Times.
Peter Edelman returned to teaching law full-time, setting his sights on a federal judgeship. Clinton nominated him but once again caved, as conservatives (including columnist George Will) deemed him a dangerous, liberal apostle of big government, prompting spineless Clinton to yank the nomination.
Edelman has, certainly for public consumption, taken a high road and kept his criticism, albeit harsh, of Clinton on the policy level. Thus, you won’t get him to say much other than that the administration has been “very timid” in trying to assure some sort of safety net for the nation’s poorest citizens.
For Clinton to focus attention on those Americans, he believes, “would be to cut against the basic line,” he said, “that this thing [welfare reform] is a big success. When people go to the welfare office, then get turned away, and then don’t find jobs, that cuts against the basic story the administration wants to tell.”
And, no surprise, the fate of those people who left the rolls, good or bad, is not an issue in the presidential campaign. The silence is rather deafening.
At a time in life when he might be kicking back, Edelman is finishing a book on 30 years of U.S. welfare policy. It will underscore the distinction we’ve always made between the “deserving” and “undeserving” pool and how the drumbeat against welfare was premised on the notion that withdraw it and, bingo, people will do what they have to do to survive.
Edelman, as much as anyone in our public life, knows it’s all a bit more complicated and involves the state of an economy, housing, child care, racial discrimination and assuring jobs bring decent pay, among other matters.
And, throughout his dissection for me, he maintained the same air of passioned equanimity he’s known for. The guy would have made a good judge.
I called the top gun on welfare reform at the White House to seek response to Edelman’s critique but he did not call back.
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James Warren and Michael Tackett of the Tribune’s Washington bureau are hosts of “Unconventional Wisdom” at 7:05 p.m. Sundays on WGN-AM 720.