Word: reformer
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...original self. Ideally, assume he keeps the Congress in 1994, but it is really close, so that he has to deal with the Republicans and doesn't have a liberal majority. He responds to the pressures for a balanced budget with versions of that, and of welfare reform, that are less harsh, and there's no impeachment. Once the budget is balanced and the economy is prosperous, then his liberal instincts come back to the fore, and it's he who gets to spend the surplus on education, health care and Social Security. Then he would have had a brilliant...
...Bill Clinton did what no other Democratic President would have done: he signed historic welfare reform into law. It made welfare recipients work to get paid and required that they leave the rolls in five years. For a liberal Democrat to sign such a law was akin to a staunch anticommunist like Nixon going to China or a President from Texas like Johnson signing the 1964 civil rights law. It was a day that changed America...
...years, welfare mothers had been the favorite political football of Democrats and Republicans alike. With welfare reform, he took away the football. In the 2000 election, race and welfare were nonissues. The President's signature set in motion a process that has led to 2.1 million welfare families leaving a brutalizing, inhumane system, most for good jobs at good pay. Contrary to the fears of many of his own Democrats, in each of the past four years the percentage of children living in poverty has dropped, and black and Hispanic incomes have risen...
...defining moment was his welfare reform. Now he's a smart guy; he knows social policy well. He knows everything I could tell him about what would happen to poor kids under his bill. If you had a President who just didn't get it, that's one thing. But his willingness to sign a welfare bill that he knew was high-stakes gambling with the lives and futures of our poorest children showed that the moral compass wasn't there. And that's linked to the other defining moment, dragging us through Monica, which also happened because the moral...
...enough Federalists to go to Jefferson--"I trust," he said, "the Federalists will not finally be so mad as to vote for Burr"--that the House at last elected Jefferson on the 36th ballot. (Four years later, Burr killed Hamilton in a duel.) The crisis of 1800 led to reform: the 12th Amendment required that the Electoral College must thereafter vote separately for President and Vice President...