Living History (60 page)

The President eventually signed this third bill into law. Even with its flaws, it was a critical first step to reforming our nation’s welfare system. I agreed that he should sign it and worked hard to round up votes for its passage―though he and the legislation were roundly criticized by some liberals, advocacy groups for immigrants and most people who worked with the welfare system. Bill vowed to fight to restore immigrant benefits and, by 1998, had made some limited progress by working with Congress to reinstate Social Security and food stamp benefits for certain classes of legal immigrants, including children, the elderly and the disabled. Block granting welfare funds was acceptable to both of us, since states, which set the benefit levels anyway, would be receiving significantly more money to help move people from welfare to work. I was most concerned with the five-year lifetime limit, because it applied whether the economy was up or down, whether jobs were available or not, but I felt, on balance, that this was a historic opportunity to change a system oriented toward dependence to one that encouraged independence.

The legislation was far from perfect, which is where pragmatic politics entered in. It was preferable to sign the measure knowing that a Democratic administration was in place to implement it humanely. If he vetoed welfare reform a third time, Bill would be handing the Republicans a potential political windfall. In the wake of the disastrous 1994

elections, he was concerned about further Democratic electoral losses that would jeopardize his leverage to protect social policies in the future.

Bill’s decision, and my endorsement of it, outraged some of our most loyal supporters, including longtime friends Marian Wright Edelman and her husband, Peter Edelman, an Assistant Secretary for Health and Human Services. Because of my history with the Children’s Defense Fund, they hoped I would oppose the measure and couldn’t understand my support. They genuinely believed the legislation was shameful, impractical and harmful to children, which Marian conveyed in “An Open Letter to the President” published in The Washington Post.

In the painful aftermath, I realized that I had crossed the line from advocate to policy maker. I hadn’t altered my beliefs, but I respectfully disagreed with the convictions and passion of the Edelmans and others who objected to the legislation. As advocates, they were not bound to compromise, and unlike Bill, they didn’t have to negotiate with Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole or worry about maintaining a political balance in Congress. I remembered all too well the defeat of our health care reform effort, which may have happened in part because of a lack of give-and-take. Principles and values in politics should not be compromised, but strategies and tactics must be flexible enough to make progress possible, especially under the difficult political conditions we faced. We wanted to pass a welfare plan that would motivate and equip women to obtain a better life for themselves and their children. We also hoped to persuade the American public, now that the old welfare system had been replaced, to address the greater problem of poverty and its consequences: one-parent and no-parent families, inadequate housing, poor schools and lack of health care. I hoped welfare reform would be the beginning, not the end, of our concern for the poor.

Weeks after Bill signed the law, Peter Edelman and Mary Jo Bane, another friend and Assistant Secretary at HHS who had worked on welfare reform, resigned in protest.

These were principled decisions, which I accepted and even admired, despite my very different view of the merits and promise of the legislation. I still saw Marian and Peter socially from time to time, and I was thrilled when Bill awarded Marian the Medal of Freedom for her lifetime commitment to civil rights and children on August 9, 2000. She was an important mentor in my life, and our rift over welfare was sad and difficult.

By the time Bill and I left the White House, welfare rolls had dropped 60 percent from 14.1 million to 5.8 million, and millions of parents had gone to work. States had supported part-time and low wage work by continuing to provide medical benefits and food stamps for these workers. By January 2001, child poverty had decreased by over 25

percent and was at its lowest rate since 1979. Welfare reform, the increase in the minimum wage, the reduction in taxes on low-income workers and the booming economy had moved almost eight million people out of poverty―one hundred times the number of people who left the poverty rolls during the Reagan years.

A significant contributor to the success of reform was the Welfare to Work Partnership, which Bill had asked one of his longtime friends, Eli Segal, to launch as a means of encouraging employers to hire former welfare recipients. Eli, a successful businessman, had worked with Bill in the McGovern campaign and served as Chief of Staff in the 1992

campaign. As an assistant to the President, he was charged with creating the National Service Corporation and AmeriCorps. Eli worked closely with Shirley Sagawa, a policy aide on my staff, to draft the legislation that set up the program, and he became the corporation’s first CEO. AmeriCorps provided community service opportunities and college scholarships to more than 200,000 young people between 1994 and 2000, working in partnerships with businesses and communities. Eli followed the same model for the Welfare to Work Partnership, which enlisted employers to hire and train former welfare recipients.

Under his leadership, the Partnership flourished, with over 20,000 businesses providing 1.1 million welfare recipients with skills, jobs and independence.

Welfare reform was implemented during good economic times. The real test will occur when the economy is down and welfare rolls rise again. The legislation is due to be reauthorized, and as a Senator, I intend to work to build on its successes and fix its deficiencies.

Benefits for legal immigrants who work and pay more than $5 billion in taxes should be restored completely. The five-year limits for lifetime benefits should be waived for people who lose jobs in a jobless economy. More money should be spent on education and training, and some education hours should count toward work requirements. And the states should be held accountable for how they spend federal welfare dollars.

As Bill gained greater support from the American people in the months preceding the 1996 election, his adversaries desperately cast about for anything that could weaken his momentum. Time magazine recognized the trend in early July, when it ran an article with the headline “The Starr Factor.” It reported, “For months Clinton has been waiting for the GOP contender who would turn the ‘96 race into a real battle. It looks as though he has found him at last―and it’s not Bob Dole. Every serious matter bedeviling the President has Kenneth Starr connected to it somewhere…. With the Dole campaign still unable to gain traction on its own, Republican hopes are riding on a presidency worn to pieces by subpoenas and indictments.”

The latest pseudo-scandal appeared to be timed for the summer convention season and hinged on the actions of two midlevel White House employees, Craig Livingstone and Anthony Marceca, in the Office of Personnel Security. In 1993, they had requested FBI background files on White House pass holders to assemble a record of everyone with a legitimate White House security pass. The Office of Personnel Security, despite its imposing title, did not perform “security checks”―that was done by the FBI. Nor was it responsible for security-that was the job of the Secret Service. I never quite figured out what else it did, but it was responsible for keeping track of present White House employees, making sure their clearances were up to date, and giving security briefings to new White House personnel. When President Bush left the White House in January 1993, his people took all the files of the Office of Personnel Security―which they were allowed to do under the Presidential Records Act-for the Bush Library. The incoming Administration thus had none of its own records (as distinct from the Secret Service’s records) of the permanent employees in the White House. Livingstone and Marceca were trying to rebuild these OPS records when they received from the FBI hundreds of files, including some from Reagan and Bush officials. They did not recognize the mistake.

When another staffer finally did, she sent the files to the archives rather than returning them to the FBI. The White House acknowledged this bureaucratic snafu and apologized for it. Nonetheless, “Filegate” was added to Kenneth Starr’s list of investigations.

Before the story was put to rest, an FBI agent told the Senate Judiciary Committee staff that his background check of Craig Livingstone suggested that Livingstone was given his job as head of White House personnel security because his mother and I had been friends. In fact, Mrs. Livingstone and I didn’t know one another, but we had been photographed together once in a large group at a White House Christmas party. I was in Bucharest at a school whose curriculum our government was helping to revamp when a traveling American reporter asked me about my relationship with the Livingstone family.

I told him that I didn’t recall meeting Craig or his mother, but if I ever did encounter her, I’d say, “Mrs. Livingstone, I presume?”

During August, I took Chelsea on a college tour through New England. Though I was dreading the moment when she would leave home for college, I was excited about visiting colleges with her. I also secretly hoped she’d fall in love with my alma mater, Wellesley, or at least choose a college on the East Coast so I could easily visit and she could come home on a whim. I worked out a deal with the Secret Service to travel from campus to campus in a nondescript van with as few agents visible as possible. We visited six campuses with relatively little notice, and I would have been thrilled if she had attended any one of them.

Chelsea, however, was eager to see Stanford, so off we went to Palo Alto. The Provost at the time, Condoleezza Rice, graciously welcomed us at the start of a daylong visit that captivated Chelsea. She loved the setting of the University amidst the foothills, the temperate weather and the Mission-style architecture. When I called Bill that night, I told him I thought Stanford was clearly her first choice―the price, I guess, of raising an independent child.

For our summer vacation, we again chose Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I had been frantically trying to finish writing It Takes a Village the year before, and now I was free to hike with Bill and Chelsea through meadows of late summer wildflowers in the Grand Tetons and explore nearby Yellowstone National Park. The sweeping grasslands and geyser basins were preserved for future generations of Americans back in 1872 when the U.S. government designated Yellowstone as the country’s―and the world’s―first national park. Since then, America’s national parks have provided a model and an inspiration for other nations to protect their natural heritage. Whenever I visit one of our national parks, I’m reminded of how our country has been blessed with such abundant natural resources. Our job goes beyond preserving the beautiful scenery; we have to be caretakers of a healthy, balanced environment. In Yellowstone, where gray wolves had been exterminated by trappers, government biologists reintroduced a small population to help restore the natural relationship between predator and prey in the park. During our visit to Yellowstone, Chelsea, Bill and I hiked up to the holding pens where a pack of wolves was being acclimated for release. There were no reporters around, just wildlife officials, us and a few astonished Secret Service agents who never expected to have to protect the First Family from a pack of real wolves.

Bill announced a historic agreement to stop a large, foreign-owned gold mine on the border of Yellowstone from threatening the pristine environment. The older I become, the more passionate I am about protecting our earth from unnecessary and irreversible damage.

A strong economy and a clean environment are not mutually exclusive goals―in fact, they go hand-in-hand, since all life and economic activity ultimately depend on our stewardship of our natural surroundings. During the White House years, I supported the “greening” of the White House, a project aimed at improving the environmental performance of the building complex through lower energy use, comprehensive recycling and other measures. Through a program I started, Save America’s Treasures, I raised money for our parks and visited many. I supported Bill and Al’s commitment to protecting more land, cleaning up the air and water, tackling global climate change and pursuing conservation and alternative energy sources. But my principal focus became the effects of environmental factors on our health. My study of the illnesses of Gulf War veterans and my work on the rising incidence of asthma among children and breast cancer among women persuaded me that environmental effects on health begged for long-term research.

The Republican Convention opened in San Diego on August 12. By tradition, the party holding its convention gets unfettered publicity while nominating its candidates and unveiling its campaign message. The other party’s candidate stays quietly on the sidelines, which was fine with me since I thought we all needed some time off. l didn’t watch the speeches on television, but I quickly heard from friends about Elizabeth Dole’s remarks to delegates on the second night of the convention. The former Reagan and Bush Cabinet Secretary had waded into the crowd, microphone in hand, and spoken lovingly about her husband, his career and his beliefs. Poised and intelligent, she was a lawyer by training and a political pro whose presence and eloquence strengthened her husband’s campaign.

And though Bob Dole was a tough opponent for us, I was glad to see a woman under pressure rise to the occasion and get the praise she deserved. It’s a strange twist of fate that we now both serve in the Senate.

Mrs. Dole’s speech inevitably provoked comparisons between us, and she had barely exited the stage before my staff was bombarded with questions about how I intended to handle my speech at the Democratic Convention. Reporters wondered whether I would stand at a podium or wander into the crowd, as she did. Tempting as it was to try something new, I felt that I was better off sticking to my own themes and style.