The Bill Clinton Rationale for Welfare Reform: Examining Implications of Race,Class,and Gender Using Documents

Introduction

In 1996, President Bill Clinton, a Democrat and a son of a widowed mother ¹ signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), which ended the sixty-year-old Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Hence, AFDC was replaced by Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), which dictated time limits, work requirements, and block grants for the states. ² In other words, President Bill Clinton ended Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), a small program which provided cash assistance for needy families and their children, and had been in effect since passage of the Social Security Act of 1935 during the New Deal, the cornerstone of the American welfare state. ³ Americans criticized welfare because its clients were believed to be irresponsible unmarried “mothers of color” and their illegitimate children who lived “high on the hog.” ⁴ These assumptions about AFDC recipients have shaped the policies related to welfare. There is a large body of literature on implications of social divisions such as race, gender, and class in the structure and the evolution of the U.S. welfare state. Many scholars believe that race, ⁵ gender, ⁶ and class ⁷ had shaped the formal structure as well as the development of the American welfare state since the Progressive Era ⁸ and during the New Deal ⁹ and they mattered also during the legislation of welfare reform in 1996. ¹⁰ The term “welfare state” ¹¹ refers generally to a comprehensive system whereby the state undertakes to protect the health and well-being of its citizens, by providing pensions, hospitals, sickness, and unemployment benefit. ¹² Scholars define the American welfare state as the set of direct expenditure program such as Social Security and AFDC. ¹³ For others, the American welfare state is a combination of direct and indirect spending such as loans, loans guarantees, as well as tax expenditures (indirect spending forms the so-called the “hidden welfare state”). ¹⁴ Some scholars refer to the experience of the welfare state in the United States as the evolution of “the New Deal Order” or merely “liberalism.” ¹⁵ The term “welfare” generally means “well-being.” ¹⁶ The word welfare appeared in U.S. Constitution: “the general welfare” and it referred to providing well-being by the government (national or local) for all citizens, “The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.” ¹⁷ The meaning of “welfare” has changed in the contemporary United States. For Premilla Nadasen and her co-authors, welfare is “virtually synonymous with federal cash aid to poor single mothers and their children: Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) before 1996 . . .” ¹⁸ Linda Gordon expertly notes the following:

In two generations, the meaning of “welfare” has reversed itself. What once meant prosperity, good health, and good spirits now implies poverty, bad health, and fatalism. A word that once evoked images of pastoral contentment now connotes slums, depressed single mothers, and neglected children, and even crime. Today “welfare” means grudging aid to the poor, when once it referred to a vision of a good life. ¹⁹

Michael Katz affirms that “Welfare had lost (its) inclusive and positive meaning . . . now it signif (ies) only public assistance programs- to most people meant Aid to Dependent Children.” ²⁰ In the present paper, when we refer to “welfare,” we refer to the public assistance program AFDC. Joel Handler states also that “Although there are many assistance programs for the poor, when people say ‘welfare,’ they mean Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)—the program essentially for single mothers and their children.” ²¹

The attack against welfare has a long story in the United States. ²² In the mid-1970s, this attack became more and more harsh and both conservatives and liberals attacked it. ²³ The American welfare state has been criticized by conservative, liberal, and radical theorists. ²⁴ For conservatives, generous welfare benefits during the 1960s encouraged crime, drug addiction, school dropout, out-of-wedlock births, and joblessness among adult men and led to the emergence of the “urban underclass.” ²⁵ Thus, the welfare state contributed to poverty and moral decay: laziness, dependence, corruption, illegitimacy, and divorce. Charles Murray, an American political scientist, sociologist, and conservative commentator pointed out, “We tried to provide more for the poor and produced more poor instead”; he claimed also, “We tried to remove the barriers to escape from poverty, and inadvertently built a trap.” From Charles Murray’s perspective, welfare or AFDC enables “the poor to behave in the short term in ways that . . . [are] destructive in the long term.” ²⁶ On the other hand, liberals tend to believe that the government must provide “equal opportunity” for all citizens to access to free education, health care, employment, as well as income and that the state must not intervene in poor peoples’ private lives. ²⁷ Put it in the simplest of the words, liberals ask that the government treat all citizens as “equals” and preserve the “human dignity” for poor people. ²⁸

Bill Clinton was born and raised in the South, in Arkansas. His political experience as the governor of Arkansas equipped him with the essential strategies to prepare the groundwork for presidency. ²⁹ He played a central role in the design of welfare reform as he was its principal architect. ³⁰ He succeeded to tackle the issue of welfare that had been attacked for centuries by Republicans through signing PRWORA. By doing so, he made a turning point in the American welfare policy. Many scholars have tried to explain Bill Clinton’s objectives vis-à-vis welfare reform. According to Mimi Abramovitz, welfare reform was not accidental but a part of the “neo-liberal” attack against the welfare state. ³¹ Bill Clinton exploited “racial animus” to fulfill his political ambitions and play the race card by merely referring to “welfare.” ³² For Martin Carcasson, there were three main interpretations concerning Bill Clinton’s welfare rhetoric against welfare: the institutional weakness of his presidency because of congressional opposition; his opportunist strategy to win the elections in 1992 and 1996; and finally his law which transformed the “anti-welfare culture” by pushing people on welfare to work. ³³ Michael Nelson uses oral history to explain Bill Clinton’s objectives behind reforming welfare. He believes that President Bill Clinton did not sign welfare reform legislation in 1996 for immediate political considerations but for long-term ones. ³⁴ For him, there were two important facts about Bill Clinton’s concern about welfare policy: first, that welfare reform had deep roots in his life and career; second, that his political considerations were long term and not immediate mainly because he wanted to restore the Democratic party competitiveness in presidential elections by getting rid of the long-damaging issue of welfare from the national political agenda. ³⁵ From ancient times to modern times, political leaders have managed to leave some record on their deeds (res gestae) that would make future generations remember their names and accomplishments. ³⁶ Written records are important in interpreting events and important matters which took place in the past. Political memoirs, in which history and politics are narrated in personalized version, have attracted across many centuries. ³⁷ Initially, historians viewed post–World War II American Presidents’ memoirs as “mediocre.” ³⁸ However, this claim was challenged after the establishment of presidential libraries. Presidential libraries provide historians with the necessary tools to deeply analyze, explain, as well as interpret what is declared in political memoirs. ³⁹ This study investigates different written records and it throws more light on Bill Clinton’s memoir My Life. In 1994, President Bill Clinton published his autobiographical memoir My Life in which he tells the story of his life from childhood to his presidential days. Bill Clinton’s memoir is useful because it provides us with interesting details and pieces of information that we cannot find in other written or oral records. His memoir may serve us in our inquiry, seeking answers for questions related to the issue of welfare reform. The main question that arises at the heart of this research paper is the following: How far were such issues as race, gender, and class implicated in Bill Clinton’s support of welfare reform? In other words were his arguments to substitute AFDC (i.e., welfare) by TANF influenced by any racist, classist, sexist ideas, or opinions? In this paper, we attempt to elucidate the impact of gender, class, and race on Bill Clinton’s position vis-à-vis welfare. Simply put, we try to identify implications of racist, classist, or sexist biases on the way and the manner through which he tackled the issue of welfare reform. We will do this by analyzing a set of bodies of texts from his speeches, public remarks, press releases, and memoirs such as My Life. We attempt to interpret the messages he conveyed concerning welfare and welfare recipients and if there was a presence of any type of stigmatization against a particular group, or minorities who benefited from welfare. We try to see whether he was influenced by the ideas of other people in the political or private environment—by other candidates from the Republican Party, conservative, neo-conservative, as well as neo-liberal commentators. The method of analysis is to locate expressions where linguistic choices have been used to convey messages related to race, class, or gender biases in Bill Clinton’s political speeches. Document analysis is a social research method, an important tool per se, and a very useful part of all schemes of triangulation, the combination of different methodologies in the study of the same phenomenon. ⁴⁰ Documents are invaluable because they can provide supplementary data and background information, contain data that cannot be observed, provide details that informants have forgotten, provide a means of tracking change and development, and can be analyzed as a way to verify findings from other data sources. ⁴¹ It should be noted, however, that this work is not concerned with the architecture of the American welfare state and its function as well as its historical development. By and large, this study is focused on the main arguments advanced by the New Democratic President Bill Clinton for welfare reform and implications of race, gender, and class issues in his decision to sign PRWORA. This paper does not provide a complete analysis of Bill Clinton’s speeches and literary works. It does not include an exhaustive list of his speeches, books, and radio talks. Our choice of written material is based on the relevance of the latter to the subject matter of our research paper.

A Brief Overview of the Historical Evolution of the Attack against Welfare before the 1990s

Relief policies existed since the colonial period. Two important elements were emphasized by authorities to assist the poor: work and family ethics. ⁴² Since colonial times, the woman’s ideal place was seen in the home. Settlers brought with them conceptions about masculinity and femininity from Europe, and based on these conceptions, they founded their families. ⁴³ The main objective of young women was marriage; it was their “raison d’être.” ⁴⁴ Thus, colonial authorities honored a woman who maintained her traditional work and family roles and dishonored the one who chose singleness and idleness. America’s society was agricultural at the time, and since the labor force was limited, women were expected to work inside and outside the home. Simply put, they were supposed to be “productive” and “reproductive” at the same time, during that period. ⁴⁵ Relief was provided for the poor by taking into consideration their behavior and their good will to improve their living conditions through work. Hence, the deserving poor were distinguished from the undeserving poor and the way and the manner through which they were treated by the local authorities differed. Poor people who did not make efforts to escape poverty were exposed to severe supervision and punishment. These relief practices were exposed to alterations through time. Conceptions about poverty and the role played by the poor themselves to fight poverty had not changed radically. Family and work ethics were maintained from the colonial period to twentieth century in the attack against relief, or what had become known as welfare. Hostility against “outdoor relief” activities helping the poor, especially those which targeted poor women and their children, began in the 1820s, before the Civil War. ⁴⁶ That attack against “outdoor relief” was justified as follows: “most of those on relief do not need help.” ⁴⁷ In other words, they were believed to be “undeserving” poor. In 1935, the U.S. Congress enacted the Social Security Act which included both universal insurance and means-tested public assistance programs. That landmark legislation was characterized by the intervention of the federal government in promoting welfare for some categories in the U.S. society. The welfare state expanded rapidly during the post–World War II period in the United States. ⁴⁸ This expansion of the welfare system took place as a result of the following factors: the growth of population, postwar economic prosperity, the liberalization of the Social Security Act, a greater sense of public responsibility for social problems, and demands for greater economic security from both the trade union and civil rights movements. ⁴⁹ Meanwhile, the attack against social welfare programs (mainly ADC) intensified during the post–World War II era. After World War II, “women of color” and their young children became the main and principal recipients of ADC. ⁵⁰ In the 1950s, states began legislating punitive measures in order to reduce the number of welfare recipients and discourage others from applying. For instance, state residency requirements were reinforced so as to ban migrants (especially African Americans who moved from the South to the North) from receiving assistance. Besides, other restrictive administrative policies were introduced such as “suitable home” and “man-in-the-house” policies. ⁵¹ In 1977, Time magazine signaled the rise of a threatening “underclass” in America’s inner cities whose members were familiar with drug use, crime, violence, teenage pregnancy, a higher rate of unemployment and hence poverty. ⁵² This is also called “contemporary poverty” which is characterized by the feeling of “hopelessness.” The world’s most leading political thinker, linguist, and critic and the author of the best selling Who Rules the World? Noam Chomsky provides a description of modern poverty in the American slums as compared to the poverty he witnessed during his childhood during the 1930s economic recession and he states the following in one of his outstanding lectures:

Well, the Thirties were an exciting time—it was deep economic depression, everybody was out of a job, but the funny thing about it was, it was hopeful. It’s very different today. When you go into the slums today, it’s nothing like what it was: it’s desolate, there is no hope. Anybody who’s my age or more will remember, there was a sense of hopefulness back then: maybe there was no food, but there were possibilities, there were things that could be done. You take a walk through East Harlem today, there was nothing like that at the depths of the Depression—this sense that there’s nothing you can do, it’s hopeless, your grandmother has to stay up at night to keep you from being eaten by a rat. That kind of thing didn’t exist at the depths of the Depression; I don’t even think it existed out in rural areas. Kids didn’t come into school without food; teachers didn’t have to worry that when they walked out into the hall, they might get killed by some guy high on drugs—it wasn’t that bad. There’s really something qualitatively different about contemporary poverty, I think. Some of you must share these experiences. I mean, I was a kid back then, so maybe my perspective was different. But I remember when I would go into the apartment of my cousins—you know, broken family, no job, twenty people living in a tiny apartment—somehow it was hopeful. It was intellectually alive, it was exciting, it was just very different from today somehow. ⁵³

There is a split among sociologists about whether the widespread poverty among people who formed the underclass originated from a culture of poverty or an economic failure. Structuralists, like Gunnar Myrdal, believe that poverty was a consequence of economic obstacles stemming from economic and social “exclusion.” He stated in 1964 that

“Something like a caste line, is drawn between the people in the urban and rural slums, and the majority of Americans who live in a virtual full-employment economy . . . There is an under-class of people in the poverty pockets who live an ever more precarious life and are increasingly excluded from any jobs worth having, or who do not find any jobs at all.” ⁵⁴

Scholars and historians believe that there is a relationship between welfare, poverty, as well as the rise of the urban underclass in the United States. They emphasize the important role of race, gender, and culture in reinforcing the correlation between them. ⁵⁵ The politics of race and gender played a central role in tracing both the origins of welfare as well as its evolution through time in the U.S. Premilla Nadasen and her co-authors state that

The politics of race and gender not only shaped the development of AFDC, but also produced a cultural logic that kept it stigmatized and miserly, almost from its origins. In its early history, Aid to Dependent Children, as it was known prior to 1962, was a relatively minor program serving primarily white widows. Racially discriminatory practices denied assistance to most needy African American mothers. When African American women began to claim assistance in the 1950s and 1960s, the goals of the program shifted from supporting women in their work as mothers to requiring them to take paid employment outside the home. ⁵⁶

The attack on welfare started when its recipients became single “mothers of color” and their children; Michael Katz reveals that: “In the 1950s, as the recipients of ADC . . . increasingly became unmarried and black, public attitudes shifted. Race and sexuality fused with the usual stigma attached to welfare, and African –American women raising children by themselves became the new undeserving poor.” ⁵⁷

Therefore, AFDC had been attacked because it was believed to benefit single “mothers of color” and their children whose behavior was conceived as deviated and unconventional. This category became the “new undeserving poor.” ⁵⁸ This new category of the undeserving poor formed what historians and social scientists call the “urban underclass.” ⁵⁹ By the early 1960s, eligibility criteria to access to public assistance programs were “liberalized” and this made African American women (who were not previously included in the program) eligible. ⁶⁰ Therefore, the typical clients of AFDC were unmarried mothers with little education or ability to secure employment. ⁶¹ The main purpose behind creating ADC (previously known as Widows’ Pensions) was to encourage Anglo-Saxon widows to stay at home and care for their children. When the welfare population included other categories (“black” women and immigrants), tough rules were employed to exclude them. ⁶² Some social science theories consider poverty as an individualistic problem caused by the values and behavior of the poor. Hence, it had become clear for reformers that social problems originated from a “culture of poverty.” ⁶³ This term was first used by the anthropologist Oscar Lewis, in the early 1960s. Initially, welfare was a public program which benefited a small group of widows and their children and it carried no stigma. ⁶⁴ Unlike the other public assistance programs, welfare has been stigmatized since its creation. ⁶⁵ All Americans, with different political ideologies, and from different social and cultural backgrounds, have attacked welfare as Michael Katz puts it:

“Nobody likes welfare. Conservatives worry that it erodes the work ethic, retards productivity, and rewards the lazy. Liberals view the American welfare system as incomplete, inadequate, and punitive. Poor people, who rely on it, find it degrading, demoralizing and mean.” ⁶⁶

Many scholars have tried to explain the attack against welfare and its clients in the United States. The noted scholar of welfare policy David T. Ellwood reveals that the American public disliked welfare by referring to data provided by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) in 1984. According to the NORC 1984 survey, 41 percent of Americans thought that the government was spending too much on welfare, and 25 percent thought that is spent too little. ⁶⁷ The distinguished historian Martin Gilens, in his book titled, Why Americans Hate Welfare, tries to figure out the nature and the reasons of public opposition against welfare. ⁶⁸ Gilens believes that “racial stereotypes” have played a crucial role in generating opposition to welfare. “White” Americans viewed welfare as a program that rewards “black” able-bodied who were “undeserving poor.” ⁶⁹ Simply put, they attacked welfare because its recipients were lazy and shiftless. In this respect, he states that:

“For most white Americans, race-based opposition to welfare is not fed by ill will toward blacks, nor is it based on whites’ desire to maintain their economic advantages over African Americans. Instead, race-based opposition to welfare stems from the specific perception that, as a group, African Americans are not committed to the work ethic.” ⁷⁰

Gilens reveals that the racist and negative images about poverty and welfare provided by the mass media in the United States played a central role in fueling the public’s opposition against welfare. ⁷¹ Despite the fact that both “white” and “black” ⁷² people were on welfare, the public has perceived welfare as a program that had benefited “people of color.” Simply put, welfare had become “code word” for race. ⁷³ Welfare had been stigmatized because it is associated with “black” people, as Mary Poole puts it:

“From the beginning, welfare has carried a stigma: those who receive it have failed as individuals and are a burden on society. And that stigma has a color. The welfare state is literally colored by the “black, welfare- dependent underclass,” which serves as a pillar of the American cultural imagination.” ⁷⁴

Another major attack on welfare during the twentieth century took place by the late 1960s. ⁷⁵ AFDC faced what was called a “welfare crisis” when the number of its clients increased and became exclusively single or never-married “mothers of color”: divorced, never-married, and “black.” In 1960, 8.1 percent of “white” households and 20.9 of “black” households were headed by a woman. ⁷⁶ Hence, poverty had been again “feminized” during this period. ⁷⁷ The number of welfare recipients rose significantly throughout this decade in urban areas in the North as well as the West. ⁷⁸ The number of AFDC clients raised from 7.1 million in 1960 to 7.8 million in 1965, then jumped from 11.1 million in 1969 to 14.4 million in 1974. ⁷⁹

The explosion of welfare led to hostility among all Americans (ordinary people, politicians, and academics) against welfare clients. Consequently, Congress passed a series of amendments in 1967 to Title IV of the Social Security Act of 1935. These amendments encouraged women on welfare to work through the Work Incentive Program (WIN) which required labor for impoverished husbandless women to receive AFDC. ⁸⁰ In order to limit the growing number of out-of-wedlock births, Congress passed a “freeze” on the funds provided by the federal government to states which contained a significant rate of poor dependent children whose mothers were single and whose fathers were absent.

In 1967, Governor of California Ronald Reagan announced in his first inaugural address that “We are not going to perpetuate poverty by substituting a permanent dole for a paycheck. There is no humanity or charity in destroying self-reliance, dignity, and self- respect . . . the very substance of moral fiber.” After being elected, Regan emphasized the importance of controlling welfare budget because, according to him, welfare contributes more and more to poverty. In 1987, the Reagan Administration had claimed that “the easy availability of welfare in all of its forms has become a powerful force for the destruction of family life through the perpetuation of a welfare culture” that discourages work and marriage, creates an unhealthy sense of entitlement, promotes dependence, and encourages people to challenge authority.

Nine months after his election as president of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, delivered a speech on welfare and poverty policy in which he criticized FDR’s New Deal and “big government” policies. ⁸¹ He pointed out,

“My purpose tonight . . . is . . . to present a new set of reforms . . . a new and drastically different approach to the way in which Government cares for those in need, and to the way the responsibilities are shared between the state and Federal governments.” ⁸²

He proposed ending AFDC and substituting it with Family Assistance Plan (FAP), a guaranteed annual income for poor working families with children under eighteen. ⁸³ Nixon’s plan sought to stimulated work through market incentives rather than through enforced working requirements. ⁸⁴ This plan was crafted by Daniel Patrick Moynihan who was the Chief Urban Affairs Council during his administration. However, this plan failed because it supported big business as well as endorsed labor movement and proved also that class struggle between labor and capital shaped social policy in the United States. ⁸⁵ During the presidential elections of 1968, the issue of welfare reform was at the heart of both parties’ campaigns. ⁸⁶ In addition to this, congressional complaints against the rising cost of AFDC rolls made the attack against welfare more and more violent. In 1976, the Republican President Ronald Reagan introduced the term “welfare queen” to the public lexicon during his presidential campaign to refer to fraud in welfare. He sought to gain more public support and show his political will to limit the role of government in promoting social welfare. ⁸⁷ By “welfare queen,” Reagan meant Lynda Taylor, a resident from Chicago whose alleged misdeeds were reported by the Chicago Tribune. Taylor was accused of welfare fraud in 1974. According to the Tribune reports, that woman owned three cars (a Chevrolet, a Lincoln, and a Cadillac limousine, the car that Ronald Reagan used in his speeches several times) and had twenty-seven names, thirty-one different addresses, twenty-five telephone numbers, three Social Security cards, stocks and bonds, and many dead husbands. His claims were, however, recognized by historians as exaggerating because this story was a myth. ⁸⁸ The story of the “welfare queen” was invented to fuel the attack against welfare. Politicians sought to convince the American public that it is the right time to cut welfare spending and end welfare programs which supported undeserving poor families. It should be noted, however, that the costs of welfare that were claimed in that period were too exaggerated as well. In other words, the size of welfare was a myth. ⁸⁹ Mimi Abramovitz states that

The Administration’s (The Reagan Administration) budget cutters argued that AFDC wasted funds on undeserving women and bloated bureaucracies; that it drained the treasury and fueled the deficit. They also insisted that women on welfare live “hig on the hog.” Yet the facts suggest otherwise. The average benefit rose from $178 a month in 1970, to $275 in 1980. During the same time, however, due to inflation, its real purchasing power fell more than 40 percent. ⁹⁰

By the 1980s, it was clear that the evolution of the American welfare state stagnated: 35.1 million Americans had no health insurance and 40 percent of the poor had received no cash assistance. ⁹¹ The public’s perception of welfare and welfare recipients was unjustified as it was totally controlled by the media. ⁹² Kent clarifies the point by stating the following:

“Most Americans do not know any welfare recipients personally or have any direct contact with the welfare system. Their views of welfare, and of welfare recipients, are likely to be shaped by what they see on television and what they read in newspapers and magazines. If they put an individual face on welfare at all as the United States debated and then carried out welfare reform . . .” ⁹³

In sum, the attack against public aid began since the 1820s. Welfare reform was not accidental but it was part of Ronald Reagan’s recovery strategy. ⁹⁴ During the period that preceded the passage of the PRWORA, the American public and politicians discussed the limitations of welfare. Congress and the media focused more attention on the comments of welfare administrators, politicians, business lobbyists, academics, and pundits; however, they neglected completely the arguments of welfare activists and welfare recipients. ⁹⁵

Racism, Classism, Sexism, and Welfare Reform: Explaining Bill Clinton’s Rationale for Welfare Reform Using Documents

Before the passage of PRWORA, public discussions on the failure of the welfare system, its drawbacks, and the inability of policymakers to come up with constructive solutions filled airwaves and multiple public communication stations in the United States. ⁹⁶ The voices that were almost heard were those of administrators, politicians, business lobbyists, academics, and pundits. Welfare recipients themselves and welfare activists, however, were absent from that debate. ⁹⁷ During the Regan-Bush era, political commentators, politicians, as well as ministers used such terms as “self-help,” “self-reliance,” or “individual responsibility” to indicate that “black” people’s problems originated from their community. ⁹⁸ Hence, “black” people were considered as responsible for the woes in the midst of their community and were asked to find solutions by themselves without depending on the state’s aid. ⁹⁹ In the absence of welfare recipients whose opinions were completely rejected, some commentators used racist and gendered stereotypes: the “welfare queens” practising fraud and bearing out-of-wedlock children. ¹⁰⁰ The only public successful intervention of welfare recipients in this welfare debate was their stories of “welfare to work success.” ¹⁰¹ Bill Clinton signed the PRWORA to end the financial assistance of the federal to poor families with dependent children. ¹⁰² That is, he made an end to AFDC, the most criticized welfare program by Americans. Race, class, and gender issues have shaped the formal structure and the development of the American welfare state since its inception. Bill Clinton promised Americans to end welfare, to strengthen the military system, and to end crime, social injustice, and segregation in the United States, and according to historians, his aim was to gain bipartisan support. ¹⁰³ He declared that “the era of big government is over,” that is to say, to reduce the size of government by cutting federal spending on the poor. President Bill Clinton played a central role in the design of the welfare reform legislation because he was the principal architect of welfare reform. ¹⁰⁴ It should be noted, however, that Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a welfare expert, played an important role too in writing and passing the final version of welfare reform. ¹⁰⁵ Moynihan was initially a New Deal Democrat, then a neo-conservative who advocated Nixon’s welfare reform bill, and then he worked on the liberal welfare reform bill. ¹⁰⁶ The core components of welfare reform are the following: work enforcement, marriage promotion, as well as a limited intervention of the federal government for the promotion of social welfare, and they aimed at changing women’s negative behavior. ¹⁰⁷ The first major objective of welfare reform was to push more women on welfare to work. Its main provision was “work first.” Welfare reform targeted women’s behavior and intensified the program’s already existing strict work requirements. It added other stiffer work rules on women whose main income was based on welfare rolls. ¹⁰⁸ In other words, the aim of welfare reform was replacing “welfare” by “workfare.” That is to say, welfare reform encouraged work, and it aimed at excluding individuals from welfare rolls except those who had a will to find a job or a job training. ¹⁰⁹ The second goal of welfare reform was to promote marriage which formed the basis of society and eradicate the single motherhood phenomenon which had been recognized, for centuries, the main cause of social woes in the United States. ¹¹⁰ The third goal of welfare reform was to reduce federal responsibility for social welfare. ¹¹¹ PRWORA sought to limit the role of the national government in social service programs and give more power to the states (which is a purely conservative view) to design as well as manage their own assistance programs. ¹¹² Before dealing with Bill Clinton’s rationale for welfare legislation, we need inevitably to briefly define such terms as racism, classism, and sexism. Racism stands for the

enduring, salient aspect of social and global structures. It is based on demonstrably false theories of racial differences appropriated by a culture in order to deny or unjustly distribute social privileges, economic opportunities and political rights to the racially stigmatized groups. ¹¹³

Racism is “the system of ignorance, exploitation, and power used to oppress African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Pacific Americans, Native Americans, and other people on the basis of ethnicity, culture, mannerisms, and color.” ¹¹⁴ Classism refers to the number of attitudes, beliefs, behavior, assumptions, and institutional practices that maintain class-based power differences, favor upper and middle classes, and neglect the poor and working classes. ¹¹⁵ Sexism refers to the belief that the person’s ability, intelligence, as well as character are shaped by biology and not external forces. Males are therefore naturally superior to women because they possess certain desired traits and which make women inferior, and hence they are legitimately denied equal rights and opportunities. ¹¹⁶ Lindhorst and Mancoske state that “Assumptions about women’s characters based on racial, gender and class-based stereotypes have permeated decisions related to public welfare for decades. Sometimes these presumptions have been stated overtly.” ¹¹⁷ Welfare reform law was based on racist attitudes because welfare recipients were disproportionately African Americans. ¹¹⁸ Nevertheless, race did not matter alone, there were other issues related to gender and class. ¹¹⁹ Indeed, gender issues, class-, and race-based stereotypes were explicitly significant in legislating 1996 welfare reform law. President Bill Clinton and Republican representatives (who formed the majority in Congress) in Congress have reformed welfare along race, class, and gender-based lines. ¹²⁰ Our explanation of Bill Clinton’s rationale for welfare reform is based upon an analysis and interpretation of different written records. First of all, we will study the following work: Putting People First: How we can all Change America. Second, we will deal with President Bill Clinton’s autobiographical memoir My Life. Then, we will deal with different political speeches in which he addressed the American citizens concerning the welfare reform issue.

“Putting People First”: Welfare and Work (1992)

One of the written records that helps us have a look at the way and the manner through which Bill Clinton conceived welfare and the poor is Putting People First. He wrote this book in collaboration with Senator Al Gore from Tennessee, and it was published in 1992. The authors open the part of their book entitled “Welfare and Work” by criticizing Republican presidents who presided the United States during the preceding twelve years and failed to honor successfully and concretely hard-working American citizens and to restore family values. According to Clinton and Al Gore, initiatives to reform welfare failed. Bill Clinton and Al Gore point out:

For twelve years the Republicans in Washington have praised the virtue of hard work, but they have hurt hard-working Americans. They have talked about “family values, “but their policies show they don’t really value families. They have pledged to reform welfare, but they have no plan to put people back to work. They have put their elections first—and people last. Millions of Americans have paid the price. Wages are flat, good jobs are scarce, and poverty has exploded. Today almost one of every five people who work full-time doesn’t earn enough to keep his or her family above the poverty level. Almost one of every five children lives in poverty—a million more than ten years ago. And because of deadbeat spouses, more than one of every five single parents doesn’t get adequate child support. ¹²¹

Bill Clinton and his co-author believe that the previous Republican president’s attempts to improve the American economy and find solutions for the social instability failed. Their policies were inadequate and they failed to honor and reward hard-working citizens who play by the rules by encouraging work, not by punishing or preaching the poor. ¹²² For them, Republican president’s attempts to restore family values and to help people on welfare find real jobs failed. The “welfare and work” measures that Bill Clinton proposed in Putting People First are as follows: ending Welfare as we know it, guaranteeing a working wage, helping low-income Americans build savings, stimulate investment in inner city and rural areas, educating children, and cracking down on deadbeat parents. ¹²³ The first measure which tackles welfare titled, “End Welfare as We Know it”; Bill Clinton and his co-author promised to

Hence, his initiative for welfare reform encompassed different measures which targeted not only the behavior of welfare clients. But he aimed at making long-term changes in the American society by providing work opportunities for the poor through education and job training and also child care, promoting health care for all Americans, and signing into law the Family and Medical Leave Act. In sum, it is worth saying that in their Putting People First Bill Clinton and his co-author have not shown any clear “racist,” “gendered,” or “classist” biases. They devoted a part of their work for women’s issues, in which they encourage women to work and propose solutions for working women such as providing assistance to care for their children during their absence. Thus, this book serves us to reveal that Bill Clinton had not shown any ideas based on race, gender, or class divisions. The most important point that we can grasp from his book with the Republican Senator Al Gore is that his plans for the presidency were neither Democratic nor Republican but a mixture of the two as they mention it at the beginning of their books. Besides, Bill Clinton and his co-author devote a section to deal with women’s issues and abortion. To conclude, we do not detect any explicit exclusion of any group with regard of its ethnicity, sex, or class.

Bill Clinton’s Memoir “My Life” and Welfare Reform (1994)

From ancient times to modern times, political leaders have managed to leave some record on their deeds that would enable future generations remember their names and accomplishments. ¹²⁵ Written records are important in interpreting events and important matters which took place in the past. Political memoirs, in which history and politics are narrated in personalized version, have attracted across many centuries. ¹²⁶ An autobiography is defined as follows by Philippe Lejeune: “nous appelons autobiographie le récit rétrospectif en prose que quelqu’un fait de sa propre existence, quand il met l’accent principal sur sa vie individuelle, en particulier sur la vie de sa personnalité.” ¹²⁷ According to Lejeune, the autobiography consists of certain elements, unlike the other literary genres which are similar to it such as memoirs, novels, autobiographical poems, and diaries. These elements are the following: (1) the form of the language: (a) story, (b) in prose; (2) the subject: individual life, history of a personality; (3) the situation of the writer (the author): (a) identity of the author, the narrator, and characters. ¹²⁸ In 1994, President Bill Clinton published his autobiography My Life in which he told the story of his life from childhood to his presidential days. Bill Clinton’s memoir is useful because it provides us with interesting details and pieces of information that we cannot find in other written or oral records. ¹²⁹ His memoir may serve us in our inquiry, seeking answers for questions related to the issue of welfare reform. The book provides details about his political life and the story of America in the last half of the twentieth century. Hence, we use this book as a source in our analysis of his political philosophy for welfare reform. In the epilogue, he stated the following about the purpose of his book:

I wrote this book to tell my story, and to tell the story of America in the last half of the twentieth century; to describe as fairly as I could the forces competing for the country’s heart and mind; to explain the challenges of the new world in which we live and how I believe our government and our citizens should respond to them; and to give people who have never been involved in public life a sense of what it is like to hold office, and especially what it is like to be President. ¹³⁰

The author of My life is a politician from South America, a President and more importantly a Democratic candidate. President Bill Clinton as an autobiographer showed through his memoir his status as a “poster child” of the 1960s in the 1990s. ¹³¹ And hence, his presidential rhetoric was driven by the controversies of past decades: the Sixties. ¹³² In his memoir, Bill Clinton revealed his observations of his state’s politicians in Arkansas, and how the political climate in his home state enabled him to become an ambitious political governor and a candidate for presidency later on. ¹³³ After his birth, Bill Clinton and his mother went to his grandparents’ house in metropolis Hope and he stayed there until the age of four. ¹³⁴ He was very influenced by his grandparents, particularly by his grandfather. His grandfather’s attitude toward African Americans and the poor marked his childhood as well as his entire life: “I adored my grandfather, the first male influence in my life, and felt pride that I was born in his birthday.” ¹³⁵ Bill Clinton’s grandfather played a crucial role in shaping his view on race as well as poverty. This passage clarifies the point:

[. . .] a lot of my grandfather’s (grocery store) customers were black. Though the South was completely segregated back then, some level of racial interaction was inevitable in small towns, just as it had always been in the rural South. However, it was rare to find an uneducated rural southerner without a racist bone in his body. That’s exactly what my grandfather was. I could see that black people looked different, but because he treated them like he did with everybody else, asking after their children and about their work, I thought they were just like me. Occasionally, black kids would come into the store and we would play. It took me years to learn about segregation and prejudice and the meaning of poverty, years to learn that most white people weren’t like my grandfather and my grandmother, whose views on race were among the few things she had in common with her husband. ¹³⁶ (Italics added)

In the passage above, Bill Clinton demonstrated the shift in his conception of “blacks” in the segregated south. When he was child, he thought that they were just like him because he is “white.” However, the expression “just like me” might have different interpretations. We provide two interpretations of this statement. The first interpretation is clearly and explicitly stated. The second one is implicit, and it engages Bill Clinton’s presence as a conscious character and an experienced politician.

The first interpretation suggests that Bill Clinton was not aware of racial segregation in the South when he was a child. He played with “black” kids of his age and his grandfather served “black” and “white” customers alike. Yet that was not a common practice during the late 1940s and the late 1950s due to segregation. ¹³⁷ However, according to the second interpretation, Bill Clinton has become obviously aware of the differences between “white” and “black” people. Simply put, Bill Clinton realized that those differences were not biological but social when he said, “I could see that black people looked different, but because he treated them like he did with everybody else,” then “I thought they were just like me.” Bill Clinton did not discover the concept of racial segregation at his early age because his grandparents were not so racist that he could understand them, he wrote, “It took me years to learn about segregation and prejudice and the meaning of poverty, years to learn that most ‘white’ people weren’t like my grandfather and my grandmother . . .” Bill Clinton provided in his memoir a firsthand account of his conception of “Food Stamps” since his childhood. He showed his support of Food Stamps and not ADC. During the period in which he was writing his memoir My Life (he spent two years writing it and published it in 1994), the term “welfare” in the United States had become synonymous with such public assistance programs as AFDC and Food Stamps. However, Bill Clinton did not demonstrate any disagreement with Food Stamps provisions. The following passage clarifies the point:

“My mother told me that after papaw died, she found some of his old account books from the grocery store with lots of unpaid bills from his customers, most of them black. She recalled that he had told her that good people who were doing the best they could deserved to be able to feed their families . . . Maybe that’s why I’ve always believed in Food Stamps.” ¹³⁸ (Italics added)

Bill Clinton demonstrated in his memoir that he sought to modernize the Democratic Party by making of welfare reform and crime legislation the core of its future political ambitions. ¹³⁹ Berman clarifies the point by stating the following:

“Although foreign policy issues mattered greatly in his (Bill Clinton) White House, domestic political and economic matters mostly absorbed Clinton himself. He sought to create a “dynamic center” in American politics which required that the Democratic party endorse tough crime legislation and welfare reform if it were to compete successfully with the Republicans.” ¹⁴⁰

Bill Clinton revealed details about his first experience in welfare reform in 1979 by referring first of all to Hillary’s activity as a Chair of the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families. He stated that Arkansans was among the states that were chosen during the Carter Administration to give an example of “workfare” practice in which able-bodied food-stamp recipients were asked to register for work to stop demanding stamps. Besides, he showed the importance of this event in his future decisions concerning welfare reform issues. Bill Clinton focused on “work-oriented approaches” as a solution to help poor people improve their living conditions. He pointed out the following:

Nineteen seventy-nine was the International Year of the Child. Hillary, who was serving as chair of the Arkansas Advocates of Children and Families, an organization she had helped to found, took the lead in pushing some meaningful changes, including passing a uniform Child Custody Act to eliminate custody problems for families moving in and out of our state; reducing the average daily population of our youth-service detention centers by 25 percent; developing better inpatient and community-based treatment for severely disturbed children; and placing 35 percent more children with special needs in adoptive homes. Finally, I got involved in welfare reform for the first time. The Carter administration named Arkansas one of a handful states to participate in “workfare” experiment, in which able-bodied food-stamp recipients were required to register for work in order to keep getting the stamps. The experience sparked my abiding interest in moving toward a more empowering, work-oriented approach to helping poor people, one that carried with me all the way to the White House and the signing of the welfare reform bill of 1996. ¹⁴¹ (Italics added)

In his autobiographical memoir, Bill Clinton provided many details related the welfare reform legislation, he pointed out that

My . . . major interest was welfare reform. I asked the legislature to require recipients with children three- years old or over to sign a contract committing themselves to a course of independence, through literacy, job training, and work. In February, I went to Washington with several other governors to testify before the House Ways and Means Committee on welfare prevention and reforms. We asked Congress to give us the tools to “promote work, not welfare; independence not dependence.” We argued that more should be done to keep people off welfare in the first place, by reducing adult illiteracy, teen pregnancy, the school dropout rate, and alcohol and drug abuse. On welfare reform, we advocated a binding contract between the recipient and the government; setting out the rights and responsibilities of both parties. Recipients would commit to strive for independence in return for the benefits, and the government would commit to help them, with education and training, medical care, and job placement. We also asked that welfare recipients with children age three or older be required to participate in a work program designed by the states, that each welfare recipient have a caseworker committed to a successful transition to self-sufficiency, that efforts to collect child- support payments be intensified, and that a new formula for cash assistance be established consistent with each state’s cost of living. Federal law allowed states to set monthly benefits wherever they chose as long as they weren’t lower than they had been in the early seventies, and they were all over the place. ¹⁴²

A quick glance at Bill Clinton’s statement helps us figure out many facts with interesting details. Our interpretation is as follows:

Bill Clinton explained his motivation for entering the race for presidency during the late 1980s by stating three main reasons. He noted,

Although I was only forty in the spring of 1987, I was interested in making the race, for three reasons. First, by historical standards the Democrats had an excellent chance to recapture the White House. It seemed clear that Vice President Bush would be the nominee of the Republican Party, and up until then only vice president to win the presidency directly from that office had been Martin Van Buren, in 1836, who succeeded Andrew Jackson in the last election in which there was no effective opposition to the Democratic Party. Second, I felt very strongly that the country had to change direction. Our growth was fueled primarily by big increases in defense spending and large tax cuts that disproportionately benefited the wealthiest Americans and drove up the deficit. The big deficits led to high interest rates, as the government competed with private borrowers for money, and that in turn drove up the value of the dollar, making imports cheaper and American exports more expensive. At a time when Americans were beginning to improve their productivity and competitive position, we were still losing manufacturing jobs and farms. Moreover, because of the budget deficit, we weren’t investing enough in the education, training, and research required to maintain high wages and low unemployment in the global economy. That’s why 40 percent of the American people had suffered a decline in real income since the mid-1970s. ¹⁴³

Bill Clinton referred to his motivations to become President of the United States. He focused on the hot issues related to welfare reform, budget deficit, crime, and the collapse of the economic system. The failure of previous Republican presidents to address those problems encouraged him to prepare the ground for his presidency. Bill Clinton had come up with real and tangible solutions to the burning issue of welfare. As a Governor of Arkansas, he invested much of his time and energy dealing directly with welfare clients and caseworkers to bring about concrete solutions to help poor families on welfare. By doing so, he recognized that “work” had been at the bottom of welfare recipients’ demands who sought eagerly to improve their living conditions. He involved himself in welfare recipients’ everyday life to understand them more and help them express themselves about their efforts to get rid of dependence on welfare. He stated,

I had spent enough time talking to welfare recipients and caseworkers in Arkansas to know that the vast majority of them wanted to work and support their families. But they faced formidable barriers, beyond the obvious ones of low skills, lack of work experience, and inability to pay for child care. Many of the people I met had no cars or access to public transportation. If they took a low- wage job, they would lose food stamps and medical coverage under Medicaid. Finally, many of them just didn’t believe they could make it in the world of work and had no idea where to begin. ¹⁴⁴

Bill Clinton demonstrated that people on welfare wanted to work. He provided details of a meeting he organized to discuss the issue of welfare reform with other governors. He referred to two women he brought with him to that meeting from Arkansas. Those women preferred finding a job than depending on welfare as they were convinced that able-bodied poor on welfare should work to support themselves as well as their children. Bill Clinton’s initiative to enable poor people on welfare express themselves about their disagreement about welfare was a smart one. Their arguments were taken for granted and supported his efforts to substitute welfare by work. He stated the following:

At one of our governors’ meetings in Washington, along with my welfare reform co-chair, Governor Mike Castle of Delaware, I organized a meeting for other governors on welfare reform. I brought two women from Arkansas ho had left welfare for work to testify. One young woman from Pine Bluff had never been on an airplane or an escalator before the trip. She was restrained but convincing about the potential of poor people to support themselves and their children. The other witness was in her mid to late thirties. Her name was Lillie Hardin, and she had recently found work as a cook. I asked her if she thought able-bodied people on welfare should be forced to take jobs if they were available. “I sure do,” she answered. “Otherwise we’ll just lay around watching the soaps all day.” Then I asked Lillie what was the best thing being out of welfare. Without hesitation, she replied, “When my boy goes to school and they ask him, ‘what does your mama do for a living?’ he can give an answer.” It was the best argument I’ve ever heard for welfare reform. After the hearing, the governors treated her like a rock star. ¹⁴⁵

Bill Clinton used the word “able-bodied poor” which has been widely used since the colonial period to refer to people who were poor because they made no effort to support themselves and their families. That category of the poor are called also “undeserving poor” and they were seen as lazy, unproductive, and they were highly controlled as well as supervised by local authorities. ¹⁴⁶ Bill Clinton focused on the importance of encouraging people on welfare to work by giving them a chance through providing real job opportunities, training when necessary to enhance their skills, or equip them with fundamental tools to guarantee a minimum wage. Hence, he aimed to enable them to live decently without depending permanently on welfare. A deeper analysis of Bill Clinton’s words helps us see the reality about welfare clients that they were overwhelmingly women and single with children. This supports to some extent conservatives’ stereotyped arguments against welfare recipients who were considered as “single mothers of color and their young children.” The two women were single mothers and “black” and referring to them crystallizes idea of the “Welfare Queen” which formed the core of the urban underclass. Even though Bill Clinton was neither a conservative nor a Republican, his initiatives concerning the welfare reform reflected, to some extent, the impact of racist and sexist biases on politics and social policy in the United States. However, Bill Clinton focused on the idea of “honoring work,” first and foremost. Bill Clinton revealed in his memoir that he worked on welfare reform for about fifty years and valuing work was at the heart of his endeavor for reform. For him, welfare reform is not a Republican issue (or conservative) nor a Democratic but it is concerned about poor mothers and their children (and he gives the example of Lillie and her child). The following excerpt clarifies the point:

When I tackled welfare reform as a President, I was always somewhat amused to hear some members of the press characterize it as a Republican issue, as if valuing work was something only conservatives did. By 1996, when Congress passed a bill I could sign, I had been working on welfare reform for more than fifteen years. But I didn’t consider it a Democratic issue. Or even a governors’ issue. Welfare reform was about Lillie Hardin and her boy. ¹⁴⁷

Bill Clinton explained that liberals were against his plans for welfare reform. He distinguishes, however, his plans from Republicans’. He initiated new ideas to his party to give it a chance to survive in political life. His ideas stemmed from the plans that Republicans failed to deal with—their exaggerated tax cuts and big deficits, their rejection of the Family as well as Medical Leave bill and the Bradly bill, as well as their failure to fund education and honor work. He pointed out,

[. . .] Some liberals honestly disagreed with us on welfare reform, trade, fiscal responsibility, and national defense. But our differences with the Republicans were clear. We were against their unfair tax cuts and big deficits; their opposition to the Family and Medical Leave bill and the Bradly bill; their failure to adequately fund education or push proven reforms, instead of vouchers; their divisive tactics or racial and gays issues; their unwillingness to protect the environment; their anti-choice stance; and much more. ¹⁴⁸

According to Bill Clinton, Senator Pat Moynihan of New York, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee during his administration had knowledge of welfare. He stated, “[. . .] Pat Moynihan who knew more about the history of welfare than anyone else . . .” ¹⁴⁹ Pat Moynihan recommended to deal initially with welfare reform and leaving health care plan later on. Hence, Moynihan urged to give more importance to the legislation of welfare reform before health care reform. Bill Clinton stated in this respect the following: “Moynihan recommended that we first do welfare reform, and spend the next two years developing a health-care proposal.” ¹⁵⁰ President Bill Clinton vetoed the Republican welfare reform bill because it lacked some interesting criteria to be a successful one. He argued,

“. . . I vetoed the Republican welfare reform bill, because it did too little to move people from welfare to work and too much to hurt poor people and their children. The first time I vetoed the Republican welfare reform proposal, it had been a part of their budget. Now a number of their budget cuts were simply put in a bill with the label “welfare reform” in it.” ¹⁵¹

Bill Clinton concluded his memoir by stating the main achievements of his first term as president of the United States: first, restoring economic growth by replacing supply-side economics with more disciplined “invest and grow” economy; second, changing the perception of the role of the federal government in the United States; that is, the national government should provide the necessary tools for citizens to help them improve their living conditions; third, confirming the homogeneity of the American community and rejecting all kinds of social divisions such as race, class, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and political philosophy; fourth, replacing rhetoric with reality through government actions in such areas as crime and welfare; finally, using government action to reestablish family values in the American society. Such measures had been introduced: as family leave law, the Earned Income Tax Credit, the minimum wage increase, the V-chip, the anti-teen smoking initiative, measures to increase adoption, and new reforms in health and education systems, and finally making of America the leading international power during the post-Cold War to preserve peace, democracy in the whole world, and deal with the contemporary issues related to the threats of terror, weapons of mass destruction, organized crime, nacro-trafficking, and racial as well as religious conflicts. ¹⁵²

In short, President Bill Clinton was not the sole architect of welfare reform as Pat Moynihan played also a crucial role in the design of the final version of welfare reform legislation. President Bill Clinton stressed the importance of the states in assisting concretely people on welfare to be financially independent through providing them with the necessary tools such as training, education, and health care, in order to push them find real job opportunities and consequently limit their reliance on welfare.

Speeches, Radio Addresses, and Press Releases

In this section, we attempt to analyze Bill Clinton’s speeches, radio addresses, and press releases related to welfare reform issue. Our aim is to demonstrate to what extent his arguments were influenced by racist, classist, or sexist stereotypes. Before we deal with this, we need initially to have a brief look at the definition of the term “speech.” A speech is a formal address delivered to an audience. Speeches are written to inform, persuade, or entertain. The power of persuading others through speech had become very important since ancient times especially after the fall of the Roman Republic. ¹⁵³ According to Oxford Dictionary, a press release is “an official statement made to journalists by a large organization, a political party or a government department.” ¹⁵⁴ A radio address is the weekly speech delivered by the Presidents of the United States to the nation. The aim of this section is to show to what extent race, class, and gender have influenced Bill Clinton’s arguments on welfare reform. We will do this by dealing with different official documents available online or through consulting the archives available in the Clinton Library. In a Radio Address of the President to the Nation delivered on August 17, 1996, Bill Clinton declared the following:

This week I will sign into law an increase in the minimum wage. For those who work hard to stay off welfare, but can’t live on $4.25 an hour, this is a very important act. It will truly honor work and family. The same bill also provides help to small businesses to help them increase investment in job creation, and to increase their ability to save for retirement. Next we should give Americans a tax cut. We’ve already cut taxes for 15 million American working families through our dramatic expansion of the earned income tax credit. This year that tax reduction will be worth about $1,000 to a family of four with an income of $28,000 a year or less. Now we can, and we should, do more. In going forward I have proposed a program of tax cuts for working families that focus on education and child rearing, and are clearly within our ability to balance the budget so we can continue to keep those interest rates down and the economy growing. That’s very important if we want our families to be strong and successful. On the tax cut front I think, first, we should give tax cuts to pay for a college education. I have proposed giving individuals a $1,500 tax credit each year to pay for two years of college tuition; a Hope Scholarship that will entirely pay for tuition at a typical community college. We have to make two years of education after high school as universal as a high school education is now. And, going beyond that, I proposed giving families a tax deduction for up to $10,000 a year for the tuition of all college costs, going beyond just the first two years. Over and above that, I have proposed collapsing all the federal training programs into a G.I. Bill for America’s workers, so that those who are unemployed or under-employed can get a skills grant worth up to $2,600 a year to pursue their education. This is a good, good foundation on building a network of lifetime learning that all American families will need to succeed in the global economy. ¹⁵⁵

President Bill Clinton signed PRWORA to increase the minimum wage and enable people living on welfare improve their living conditions. According to him, the main purpose of welfare reform was to honor work and family. He proposed also to provide “tax cuts” to working families who focused on the education of their children. He believed that tax cuts would promote economic stability for working families, in particular, and balance the national economic budget in general terms. According to the extract above, taken from his Radio Address, Bill Clinton did not show any class, race, or gender biases. He showed clearly that the aim of welfare reform was to honor work and restore family values. Honoring work and preserving family values have been the centerpiece of all social welfare legislations since the colonial period. ¹⁵⁶ Families that did not cope with requirements established by authorities related to family and work ethics had been denied their rights to benefit from relief. Other American presidents such as John F. Kennedy—who had so much influence on Bill Clinton’s ideas since his childhood as it is clearly stated in his autobiographical memory My Life—stressed also on the importance of work and the morality of poor people, who were almost welfare beneficiaries. What President Bill Clinton reached in 1996 was the result of what other politicians have started working on years ago. In the same radio address, Bill Clinton referred to women’s involvement in business; he stated, “we have hundreds of thousands of businesses owned by women; in fact, now, one in three businesses are owned by a woman.” ¹⁵⁷ President Bill Clinton demonstrated his awareness about the economic role of some American women and their contribution in the United States. He did not discriminate against women’s participation in business. In another radio address, President Bill Clinton used the words “for all Americans,” in which he stressed the importance of ensuring opportunity, responsibility, and community for all American citizens. He declared the following:

“This is a very hopeful time for our country. Our nation’s enduring mission is to give every American opportunity, to demand responsibility from all of our citizens, and to come together as a community. We must go forward into this new century together. One of the things that helps us is a growing economy. A growing economy helps makes all those values—opportunity, responsibility and community—real for our families, our children, for all Americans.” ¹⁵⁸ (Italics added)

In August 22, 1996, President Bill Clinton claimed the following:

“We all know that the typical family on welfare today is very different from the one that welfare was designed to deal with 60 years ago. We all know that there are a lot of good people on welfare who just get off of it in the ordinary course of business, but that a significant number of people are trapped on welfare for a very long time, exiling them from the entire community of work that gives structure to our lives.” ¹⁵⁹

In this passage, President Bill Clinton refers to families living on welfare. For him, the composition of welfare clients had changed because people on welfare during the 1990s were no longer the same as during the 1930s. The common perception of AFDC’s clients had changed dramatically: welfare recipients had become mainly “single mothers of color and their children.” Even though Bill Clinton does not state and clearly that he is referring to “husbandless women of color and their children,” the racial stereotype used at the time to refer to welfare clients, one can deduce that President Bill Clinton’s intention was to convey a message to the American people: the typical family on welfare had completely changed. Bill Clinton referred also to “good people” on welfare. Even though he did not mention details about who were the “bad people” on welfare, one can understand that President Bill Clinton referred to people who had been melted in the seamy side of the urban American society: the ghetto life or the inner city life. Put it in the simplest of words, he referred to African Americans who had been always blamed for the failure of the American welfare system because of their negative behavior by conservatives. Hence, from our point of view, implicitly saying, Bill Clinton is using racial stereotypes to justify the legislation of PRWORA. Those racial biases were not justified, and they were based on the myth of the welfare queen initiated by conservative politicians, policy makers, as well as commentators.

Conclusion

Many scholars share the assumption that race, class, and gender have shaped the formal structure and the historical development of the American welfare state. ¹⁶⁰ Welfare, which has a positive meaning in theory, has acquired a pejorative connotation in the United States. Indeed, when Americans refer to welfare, they mean “Aid to Families with Dependent Children” (AFDC), the most disliked public assistance program, whose main clients were single “mothers of color” and their illegitimate children since the 1960s. Stereotypes and pejorative ideas about clients living on welfare are not a new issue in the United States. Since the colonial period, people living on the dole were highly supervised and severely punished by local authorities when they do not cope with the work and family norms in society. ¹⁶¹ It is generally assumed that since the colonial period, relief programs were designed to help the most vulnerable people in society merely because they could not guarantee for themselves a fixed and permanent income: widows and their young children, the aged, the disabled, and the mentally sick. Counties were responsible to provide help through private charities. This practice was brought from the Old World. Colonists brought with them to the New World their language, their traditions, and practices to deal with poor people known as Poor Laws. These laws made a distinction between two main types of poor: the deserving poor and the undeserving poor. Welfare reform is about reestablishing the “work ethic” and the “family values” that had been stressed by authorities since the colonial period. ¹⁶² This paper demonstrates that Bill Clinton defended welfare reform because he firmly believed that Republicans failed to deal with it. He focused on the idea of assisting families with modest income through “tax cuts” and he considered them as a key solution. Thus, his purpose was to help people on welfare find real job opportunities by providing them with some tools such as training and education in order to preserve the family ethic. He used authentic and positive strategies for welfare reform to restore the position of the Democratic Party in the U.S. political life through involving welfare reform recipients themselves in his attack against welfare. Bill Clinton defended Civil Rights and supported African Americans. His childhood in the South and his grand grandfather’s tolerant attitude toward “blacks” influenced his opinions about African Americans. Indeed, his connections with African Americans since his childhood had shaped some of his political views toward poor people and namely African Americans, who were almost poor. For instance, he supported Food Stamps. Throughout this paper, one is made to know that Bill Clinton stressed the importance of providing real job opportunities for welfare recipients. He used in his discourse some stereotyped labels such as “the undeserving poor” (who were mainly single “mothers of color” and their children). However, he focused on the idea that the states should be active to help poor families find jobs, supporting them through training, helping them educate their children, and ensuring their access to health care. Hence, according to the analysis and the interpretation of the written material that we have used in our work, we conclude the following: