My life

When I became President, I secured congressional approval for a national loan program modeled on the Grameen Bank, and featured some of our success stories at a White House event. The U.S. Agency for International Development also funded two million micro-credit loans a year in poor villages in Africa, Latin America, and East Asia. In 1999, when I went to South Asia, I visited Muhammad Yunus and some of the people he’d set up in business, including women who’d used the loans to buy cell phones, which they charged villagers to use to call their relatives and friends in America and Europe. Muhammad Yunus should have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics years ago. My other major interest was welfare reform. I asked the legislature to require recipients with children three years old or over to sign a contract committing themselves to a course of independence, through literacy, job training, and work. In February, I went to Washington with several other governors to testify before the House Ways and Means Committee on welfare prevention and reforms. We asked Congress to give us the tools to “promote work, not welfare; independence, not dependence.” We argued that more should be done to keep people off welfare in the first place, by reducing adult illiteracy, teen pregnancy, the school dropout rate, and alcohol and drug abuse. On welfare reform, we advocated a binding contract between the recipient and the government, setting out the rights and responsibilities of both parties. Recipients would commit to strive for independence in return for the benefits, and the government would commit to help them, with education and training, medical care, child care, and job placement. We also asked that all welfare recipients with children age three or older be required to participate in a work program designed by the states, that each welfare recipient have a caseworker committed to a successful transition to self-sufficiency, that efforts to collect child-support payments be intensified, and that a new formula for cash assistance be established consistent with each state’s cost of living. Federal law allowed states to set monthly benefits wherever they chose as long as they weren’t lower than they had been in the early seventies, and they were all over the place. I had spent enough time talking to welfare recipients and caseworkers in Arkansas to know that the vast majority of them wanted to work and support their families. But they faced formidable barriers, beyond the obvious ones of low skills, lack of work experience, and inability to pay for child care. Many of the people I met had no cars or access to public transportation. If they took a low-wage job, they would lose food stamps and medical coverage under Medicaid. Finally, many of them just didn’t believe they could make it in the world of work and had no idea where to begin.

At one of our governors’ meetings in Washington, along with my welfare reform co-chair, Governor Mike Castle of Delaware, I organized a meeting for other governors on welfare reform. I brought two women from Arkansas who had left welfare for work to testify. One young woman from Pine Bluff had never been on an airplane or an escalator before the trip. She was restrained but convincing about the potential of poor people to support themselves and their children. The other witness was in her mid to late thirties. Her name was Lillie Hardin, and she had recently found work as a cook. I asked her if she thought able-bodied people on welfare should be forced to take jobs if they were available. “I sure do,”

she answered. “Otherwise we’ll just lay around watching the soaps all day.” Then I asked Lillie what was the best thing about being off welfare. Without hesitation, she replied, “When my boy goes to school and they ask him, ‘What does your mama do for a living?’ he can give an answer.” It was the best argument I’ve ever heard for welfare reform. After the hearing, the governors treated her like a rock star. When I tackled welfare reform as President, I was always somewhat amused to hear some members of the press characterize it as a Republican issue, as if valuing work was something only conservatives did. By 1996, when Congress passed a bill I could sign, I had been working on welfare reform for more than fifteen years. But I didn’t consider it a Democratic issue. Or even a governors’ issue. Welfare reform was about Lillie Hardin and her boy.

TWENTY-FOUR

T hanks to the four-year term, the dedication and ability of my staff and cabinet, a good working relationship with the legislature, and the strength of my political organization, I also had the space to move into the national political arena.