The General Welfare:Consequences and lessons of reform.

Only one incident provoked any resignations of conscience from the Clinton administration, and it had nothing to do with the Lewinsky scandal. For liberals, President Clinton's greatest dishonor was his signing of welfare reform on August 22, 1996. The Washington Post and New York Times ran outraged editorial after outraged editorial. Three of Clinton's appointees resigned from the Department of Health and Human Services. One of them, Peter Edelman-whose wife, Marian Wright Edelman, had led the fight against the reform in her role as president of the Children's Defense Fund-later wrote an article for The Atlantic calling welfare reform "The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done."

Now that five years have passed, one of Peter Edelman's colleagues in resignation, Wendell Primus, has a different view. "In many ways welfare reform is working better than I thought it would. . . . The sky isn't falling anymore. Whatever we have been doing over the last five years, we ought to keep going," he told the Times in August.

What accounts for this astonishing reversal? An even more astonishing success. Welfare reform has worked about as well as any public policy ever does. Nobody expected the welfare rolls to drop by 8.5 million people. Yet that's what happened from January 1994 to mid 2000. (The decline began before the reform bill was enacted, both because states were implementing their own reforms and because the culture was turning sharply against welfare dependency.) If critics had predicted such a rapid decline, they would have assumed it would be accomplished only by abandoning the poor to destitution and starvation.

As it was, the critics predicted that the reform would increase poverty. When he was in the Clinton administration, Primus commissioned an Urban Institute study that projected that the welfare-reform bill would push the families of 1 million children into poverty. For this reason, Ted Kennedy called the bill "legislative child abuse." Daniel Patrick Moynihan called reform "the most brutal act of social policy since Reconstruction" and predicted that there would be "a third of a million children in the streets."

Instead, poverty rates have fallen. The Census reports that the black child-poverty rate has dropped a third, from 43.8 percent in the mid '90s to 33.1 percent in 1999. That's the lowest rate in history. During the same period, the percentage of children of single mothers living in poverty has fallen from 44 to 35.7-also an all-time low. The Department of Agriculture reports that the number of children who are chronically hungry has dropped by nearly half.

The opponents of welfare reform said that no jobs would be available to people leaving the rolls. Most of them were said to be unemployable. But according to a recent paper by June O'Neill and Anne Hill for the Manhattan Institute, it is precisely the groups considered the least employable who are joining the work force at the fastest rate. Employment of never-married mothers is up 50 percent since 1992. For young single mothers (between the ages of 18 and 24), it's up 58 percent. For single mothers who are high-school dropouts, it's up 61 percent.

Perhaps the most surprising post-reform trend has been that the illegitimacy ratio has stopped rising. For 30 years, it had risen relentlessly. Every year, it ticked up another point. Now it appears to have stabilized, albeit at a high level (about one-third of babies are born to unmarried women).

The welfare-reform law does not do much to combat illegitimacy directly. All it does is fund abstinence education and provide some money to states that reduce their out-of-wedlock birthrates. But requiring single mothers to work may indirectly have discouraged them from bearing children out of wedlock. The anti-illegitimacy rhetoric that suffused the welfare-reform debate may also have changed the culture somewhat.

It is worth noting that the decline in illegitimacy occurred in tandem with a decline in abortion. One reason the law did not attack illegitimacy directly is that a strange-bedfellows coalition of pro- lifers and abortion-rights activists successfully fought off measures to do so. They argued that if benefits for single mothers were cut, they would be forced to get abortions. But to the extent welfare reform discouraged illegitimacy, it does not appear to have done so by encouraging abortion.

Liberals who remain skeptical of welfare reform cannot deny all the good things that have happened since reform was passed; but they insist that it is just a coincidence, that the real engine of progress has been the astonishingly robust economy of the late 1990s. That theory may sound plausible, but in the past, economic growth has not reduced the welfare rolls. The number of people on welfare increased during the booms of the '60s and the '80s. The paper by O'Neill and Hill uses a regression analysis to try to see how much of the caseload decline should be attributed to reform, how much to the economy. They conclude that reform was responsible for more than half of the improvement, while the economy accounted for less than 20 percent.

Because welfare reform passed and succeeded, it is quickly becoming uncontroversial among politicians. As a result, we tend to forget what a close-run thing it was. Half of the Democrats in the House and the Senate voted against it, including the Democratic leadership. If the Democrats had kept Congress in 1994, welfare reform would have taken a very different form, if it had passed at all. If Republicans had chosen to keep welfare alive as a political issue rather than enact a law-by sending Clinton a bill he would have felt obliged to veto, for example- the opportunity would have slipped away. Ron Haskins, who was a key aide to the House Republicans, says, "I still get up in the morning and say, 'Damn, I can't believe we passed that thing.'"

The success of welfare reform suggests a few lessons that may have application to other policy disputes:

nGovernors, far from being bold reformers, are often defenders of the status quo. The nation's governors are often depicted in rosy hues: While legislators in Washington bicker unproductively, the governors roll up their sleeves and get things done. But the governors, by and large, did not make welfare recipients work. (Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin was a notable exception.) The National Governors Association lobbied to keep work-requirement and anti-illegitimacy provisions out of the welfare-reform bill. They wanted federal money with no strings attached, or at least no strings that their bureaucracies disliked. The policy that worked-work requirements-had to be imposed from Washington.

nChanging policies that substantially affect millions of people-even very destructive policies-takes time. It took decades of conservative railing against the futility and immorality of the welfare system to make any headway. Laying the groundwork was critical. Ronald Reagan tried to impose work requirements and failed. The 1988 welfare-reform bill paid the idea lip service but didn't really make anyone work. Bill Clinton's end-welfare-as-we-know-it rhetoric was a cover for more of the same. But the 1988 bill and Clinton's rhetoric changed the politics of reform for the better: Liberals were no longer calling work requirements a form of slavery. Once work requirements were considered uncontroversial, conservatives were poised to win the argument for real work requirements. By the mid '90s, conservative assumptions were so firmly entrenched that even Edelman wrote, in the first words of his piece in The Atlantic, "I hate welfare," i.e., the system that existed before reform.

Conservatives eager to transform Social Security should keep in mind this history. Reform of that program isn't likely to happen next year. But even if the law doesn't change, it doesn't mean that the administration's efforts will have been for nought.

nA policy intended to promote deeply felt values is unlikely to be abandoned simply because of its cost. Many voters sympathized with conservative complaints about the cost of welfare. But those complaints also made conservatives look too uncaring to be trusted to reform the program. Only when conservatives shifted their focus to how welfare hurt the very people it was intended to help-trapping them in a cycle of dysfunction and dependence-did they succeed. Similarly, conservatives are unlikely to achieve progress on environmental policy until they get people to see not only that regulations are burdensome but that they are often not the best way to protect nature.

A case could be made that the success of welfare reform hurt conservatives. By accomplishing some of their goals, they lost one of their most powerful issues. Welfare was both unpopular in itself and discrediting of government activism in general. Neo-liberal journalist Mickey Kaus-himself a tireless advocate of welfare reform-argues that welfare reform was a prerequisite for a revival of liberalism.

And so it may be. But it is possible for conservatives to take a more hopeful view. Welfare may have symbolized everything objectionable about big-government liberalism; but it also symbolized everything intractable about it. The success of welfare reform demonstrates that failed liberal policies, and the destructive liberal social trends to which they are linked, need not be passively accepted as inevitable features of modern life. Some of those policies, and those trends, can be reversed.

That fact has implications for the future of welfare reform-which should by no means be over. The Bush administration believes that the next step of reform should be to let small, and often religious, groups provide benefits to the poor. But at best this policy will improve the efficiency with which government does the same old things. A bolder step would be to revisit those policies that discourage marriage and encourage illegitimacy, while launching a rhetorical campaign for stable two-parent families.

A lot of clever people will say that this effort could never work. But that's what they said about welfare reform, too.