The welfare and healthcare reform debate - 2 August 1996

Question: why is there always a man from West Texas on the House military affairs committee? Answer: West Texas is rough, hilly country where the bare Davis Mountains rumble over a westward plain and pile up into the Rockies. Wind and little rain are its just deserts, no lush pasture, no cattle, really nothing much for sheep. But no land is ever too bare for goats, and West Texas is goat country and goats produce mohair, and mohair produces army uniforms. Q.E.D.

A great deal can be learned about this continental country, its needs and its livelihoods, just by looking over the membership of congressional committees. Particularly of the House because its members are mostly concerned about their own neck of the woods.

They're elected for only two years and this November the country will vote in a totally new House. Of course many of the incumbents will be running again. But at this time of the year, the beginning of August, they're all going home for the summer recess and they'd better have an answer to the constituents' never failing question: what have you done for me lately? If there's nothing to show the home folks, this could be their last time in Washington.

And this week of the calendar is usually an exciting time for the president in a presidential election year, because this is his last chance to sum up what he's done for you and for his opponents to recite all the things he hasn't done.

Well it has to be said that on Wednesday, in a superb bit of political timing, President Clinton on the very eve of the summer recess suddenly decided to endorse a bill which has been drafted and redrafted and retold and brought up again and again for over two years. Something everybody has wanted: a radical reform of the federal welfare system. Once he announced his endorsement, promptly within the hour, the House voted by 328 to 101 in his favour.

So in the end, after all the hollering and protesting by the young Turk Republicans that welfare payments were ruining the country and the whole obligation ought to go back to the states, the president has, in the main, done that. He has protected the federal control of Medicare for the old and much Medicaid for the very poor, he has reduced the time during which you must find work or go off welfare.

Historically this bill abolishes a sixty year old system created by Roosevelt's New Deal in the depths of the Depression. One programme it abolishes is called Aid to Families with Dependent Children. And that sounds cruel indeed because such families are mainly single mothers with a child or two – and too often more to come – to an unemployed mother. Old-line Democrats and labour unions and many Catholics have protested that this cut alone will throw another million children into poverty.

It's true literally, as well as rhetorically, that the federal government will abandon them, but it returns the obligation of their care to the states, which the Republicans have been screaming for two years. There are at this moment 42 states now vigourously engaged in running their own, new, help-to-the-poor systems, and we shall have to see if this casts a burden on the big cities, they can't handle or afford. And if they find they can't, then the big city vote could register as shock in November. But against whom? Mr Dole supports the bill.

So Mr Dole goes on otherwise almost apologetically campaigning. Not really, of course not really, but I sense almost a feeling of relief in Mr Dole, a sort of secret admission that he's not made for this role, that he's not going to make it and that he's acutely uncomfortable having to pretend to be a world saviour.

When you think of the great politicians of this century, how they could be moving when they were sincere and how they could be moving when they were manufacturing shock, outrage and a whole raft of artificial emotions – Lloyd George, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan – they very often did mean what they said, but being in a game which requires you to express emotions the public want you to express, they were also great hams. President Clinton is no slouch at hamming. Mr Dole is not a ham.

A week or more ago, somebody on his team came up with a slogan tailored to the feeling they want to leave with the voters, that what's needed in the presidency is a man of good character and that there are doubts on that score about Mr Clinton. The slogan was: "Bob Dole – A Better Man for a Better America." Very good. Did Mr Dole use it? Yes. The only time he used it, he got it wrong, saying: "A better plan, a man for a better America," whatever that slogan is they're working on.

Granting that it's only August and that I, having twice in fifty odd years, taken for granted the result of a presidential election and having twice been wrong, I know that in American politics anything can happen at the last minute, and often does. But if, as we all now expect, Mr Dole loses, the loss will be America's loss of a fine legislator. The Senate was perfect for his considerable parliamentary talents. A pity he left.

I said earlier that usually, once every four years, this midsummer week is an exciting time and there should be lots to talk about - issues, the things that are going to make or break the next administration.

Over and above a reformed and workable welfare system, there has to be a new immigration bill that deals fairly first with legal immigrants who want to become citizens, then with ones who don't. But also – and this is the horrendous and immensely expensive catch – to deal justly with illegals and their children, with the many thousands of them who come over the border of California and Texas mainly, and almost at once throw themselves on the federal welfare system and the state or city health systems.

And then as a permanent, and so far largely ignored issue, is the continuing impoverishment of the inner cities. For a quarter of a century or more, the whites have fled to the suburbs and many ambitious, hardworking blacks too, and nobody returns to the centre to restore it from its status as a sink of drugs and crime and poverty.

There is also an actual revolution going on in healthcare systems that has happened since the unseemly collapse of Mrs Clinton's bureaucratic healthcare empire three years ago.

All these things and more are what we should be talking about now, but I have to tell you, I don't remember a time, a fortnight ever, when a dozen news networks – now available nationally – routinely every evening, skipped most domestic issues, stuffed everything happening abroad into the last few minutes of the programme and devoted 90 per cent of the news of the world to two never-ending stories: the continuing story of the investigation of the crash off Long Island of TWA's Flight 800, and the explosion of that wretched pipe bomb in the Centennial Olympic Park at Atlanta.

Some of you may recall, I said that to comment on a natural tragedy or disaster is uncalled for unless you can help. So all I talked about – I think it was last time – was about the prurience, the nagging coverage of the media from all countries, badgering the two top investigators, one from the FBI, the other from the National Transportation Safety Board, badgering them to go beyond the effort of their night and day labours and state a conclusion, hoping in the main they would say, a bomb.

They're still at it and those two men and their teams are not helped by the complaining presence of so many families and relatives of the dead, encamped there in motels in an unfamiliar part of the country, increasingly saying, where's the body of my boy? Why aren't they bringing up and identifying my husband?

Well this is, I suppose, as inevitable as it is pitiable. The true heroes soldier on and under: the divers who take dreadful risks at a hundred and twenty feet below, who have to swim in pairs so as to see that one of them doesn't get entangled in the monstrous, broken, twisted metal and plastic.

I suppose it's a sad lack of imagination in the complainers who must assume that whole bodies are laid out on the ocean floor aside a whole mangled airplane. But as I speak, they've recovered, after fifteen days and nights, only about a quarter of the plane – a figure to be reached only after they have, with miraculous patience and skill, assembled hundreds of large and tiny and twisted and burnt bits and pieces. To put together the whole gigantic puzzle will be an incredible performance.

Unfortunately, everybody saw on television a month ago the miraculous job they did in Florida, on recovering all those bodies of the dead from a twenty mile wide, thirty feet deep swamp. Nothing but sludge and mud and dense undergrowth. So now everybody expects a miracle every time.

Meanwhile, the divers float along the ocean floor looking for a shoe, half an arm, a matching hand or skull, while another submariner is helping the navy rescue ship haul up bits and pieces of mangled steel, plastic clothing, window frames, consoles, bits of the gearbox and so on. Hundreds of fragments scattered over a watery bed half a mile wide. Yet every evening there rises the cry of a mother: what is keeping them? Where is my boy?

By chance the other night, I was reading about the Battle of the Somme in the First World War and came on the day, one day when between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. the British lost sixty thousand men. We didn't know about that for a long time, for years. We never saw the dreadful battlefield. Nobody banged at the War Office door demanding the body of their boy, of sixty thousand boys. Way back then, eighty years ago, just, there was no television. Our expectations were modest.

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