Current Events > this is a fascinating interview about how Clinton landed on welfare reform

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https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-oral-histories/bruce-reed-oral-history-april-2004

To us at the DLC, welfare reform was the best opportunity to outline the new social bargain that Clinton and the New Democrats had been working on. It was the ultimate combination of opportunity and responsibility. So we set to work trying to figure out what would be the most productive next step for the country. I guess sometime in 1990 and early 91, before we knew whether Clinton was going to run, we had kicked around ideas to put it at the centerpiece of the campaign. Id made a list of ideas that we might try to inject into the campaign, including cutting 100,000 Federal workers, and community policing, and some other ideas that eventually did become part of the campaign.

I also had this idea that maybe people shouldnt be on welfare forever, that that was a failing on our part, and we should figure out some end to permanent welfare. So I filed that idea away. I didnt know enough about the subject to construct a full-blown proposal at the time.
When the campaign started, as I think we talked about a little bit before, we decided that our competitive advantage was that Bill Clinton had more ideas on more subjects and a clearer world view than anyone else, so we set up three speeches for him to give at Georgetown.

The first one was the New Covenant speech, where he laid out his social vision and laid out the new bargain of opportunity and responsibility. I cant remember if we talked about that speech before. I went off and was assigned the task of writing the speech, and I wrote the first draft of it in a hotel room outside Pittsburgh because we had to stay there for the seventh game of the playoffs. They lost the sixth and then they lost the seventh as well. That was on a Thursday. Then we drove back in the middle of the night to Washington. That Friday we had a conference call with political advisors [Stanley] Greenberg and [Frank] Greer and some others because Id sent them a copy of the draft and they reacted.

We agreed that we needed more hard news in it to make the vision concrete, that we needed something newsworthy to say in the speech. So I remembered this notion that I had and suggested, Why dont we call to an end for permanent welfare? Now of course, the other people on the phone were all political consultants, so they were not hard to convince. They thought that was an excellent idea.

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Yes. That was a way to make concrete the pledge that everybody ought to work. What we were really saying is that people ought to go to work, but we needed a dramatic way to say it. I worked on the speech some more and then the next morning, in the officeactually I think Im off by a day because the pain of the baseball situation is even more pronounced than I saidit was Saturday night that we had that call. I know because I had tickets to game one of the World Series and I would have been in Pittsburgh at game one of the World Series if the Pirates had won, instead of on a conference call with some consultants on a Saturday night.

We had the conference call on Saturday night. On Sunday I was in the office. I went down the hall to see Will Marshall and ask him if he had any ideas on how to end permanent welfare.

He pulled a paper off his desk that David Ellwood had written about ways to time-limit the receipt of welfare benefits. Ellwood had written a book called Poor Support by then, and had become known for the idea of making work pay better than welfare and expanding the EITC [Earned income Tax Credit]. He was an influential thinker in New Democrat circles, although Im not sure he would have wanted to be called a New Democrat himself. But he had outlined basically a pilot program to test what would happen if you limited welfare benefits to a period of 18 to 36 months for welfare recipients.

Will and I talked about it, and we decided that Ellwoods approach was solid but a little too nuanced for campaign purposes, and we couldnt find a way to dramatize 18 to 36 months, so we decidedhow about two years? And that turned into the essence of the speech, ending welfare as we know it.

In this speech he said its time to end welfare as we know it. Everybody who can work should go to work. We should give people all the education and training they need for up to two years, but after that everyone has to go to work. As in the Ellwood paper, it was essentially a work requirement that kicked in after two years, and the idea was to invest in peoples abilities those first two years and also to help find them work, and if they hadnt found it then actually require them to work in community service or in a private-sector job.

I tried to bold the parts that I feel are indicative of the "New Democrat" approach to policymaking and politics; notice that they're not really experts at all and that expertise isn't what drives the agenda, though they do rely on experts at a certain point after they've decided what will be a fruitful area for them to frame their political campaigns around. Also, arguably this is the beginning of our modern welfare regime of 'work requirements' as we're seeing the current administration try to expand them into new areas.

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Welfare is actually good.

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i think making people work is a good thing, provided that you help them find jobs.