Bush Abandons His Own

As America’s governors gather together at the National Governors Association winter meeting, they may fondly remember the days before former Governor George W. Bush became the ubiquitous Dubya. After Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America tanked, the G.O.P. reinvented itself with a wave of moderate Republican governors at its helm—most notably Bush, George E. Pataki (New York), George H. Ryan (Illinois) and John M. Engler (Michigan). But now that the prodigal son has graduated from Texas to oversee the federal government in Washington, he seems to be putting the squeeze on his closest of ideological kin.

The 1996 welfare reform bill was hailed both by its Republican authors and former President Bill Clinton, who co-opted it as the pièce de resistance in dismantling the Great Society and replacing it with an era of so-called personal responsibility. The bill took a federal entitlement program and broke it up into 50 different allocations that the states could use for welfare purposes as they saw fit with a few provisos: for example, half of all single parents receiving welfare had to work at least 30 hours per week. Conveniently enacted in a buoyant economy, the bill has so far met with near-universal acclaim and welfare rolls have shrunk by 60 percent since it went into effect.

Naysayers at the time cautioned that the bill’s worst consequences would not be felt until the boom ended; of course, such foresight was quickly muffled by the roaring debate about how to spend a surplus that vanished before it ever materialized. The bill must be renewed this year, just when its optimistic if not utopian targets (like the requirement that 50 percent of signle parents on welfare work at least 30 hours per week) might need a little tweaking in light of the recession. Bush’s former gubernatorial colleagues are asking for wiggle room. But not only is the president spurning the governors’ request, he’s tightening the noose—and opening himself up to the same charges of excessive federal intrusion in state affairs that congressional Republicans deployed against Clinton.

In a draft statement issued last week, the governors said the bill’s definition of work activity should include more job training, education and drug abuse treatment, eliminate the requirment stipulating that 90 percent of two-parent families have one parent working and allow families whose five years on welfare are about to expire to remain on the rolls.

Sandwiched between a backdrop that read “Working Towards Independence” and an unsympathetic and largely black audience, Bush responded on Tuesday with a proposal to increase the 50 percent requirement for single parent households to 70 percent by 2007 and eliminate the credits that let states meet requirements by decreasing the total number of families receiving aid.

Predictably, Repbulican governors are complaining about federal meddling in state affairs—and not showing Washington any greater deference now that one of their own is calling the shots. “The objective here is not to substitute conservative micromanagement for liberal micromanagement,” Engler, who chairs the governors’ association, said last weekend. “The problem is micromanagement.”

It’s not surprising that the “compassionate conservative” has shown little concern for single-parents with no access to day care for their families who are trying to find work in a recession. But we might have expected him to look sympathetically on his buddies in the state houses from whence he came. The president’s compassionate touch, it seems, is being delivered via steamroller—and the real reformers are caught underneath.