When it comes to dealing with Congress, President-elect Clinton is no blank slate. In 1987-88, Clinton often traveled to Capitol Hill, where he helped steer to enactment the Family Support Act, an overhaul of the nation's welfare system.
While in Washington, Clinton was many things to many people: a pest, a policy wonk, a cheerleader, a compromiser, a conciliator and an agenda-setter.Not surprisingly, candidate Clinton did not talk much during the campaign about his involvement with the welfare bill. This was not the year to brag about familiarity with Congress, and the Family Support Act's effectiveness has been limited by inadequate funding.
Nevertheless, the law was an important first step, and most of those involved say that without Clinton, who spearheaded the lobbying campaign of the National Governors' Association, it would not have passed.
Without the governors' efforts, "there would be no legislation," said Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., the lead congressional sponsor of the measure, in 1988. And without Clinton pushing them, the governors would have contributed considerably less.
The welfare measure embodied much of what Clinton talked about on the stump this year. It required that states provide work, education and training programs to help welfare recipients become self-sufficient. And it increased federal efforts to get absent parents to pay child support.
Significantly, Clinton forged successful working relationships during debate over the measure with many of the very people - primarily members of the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance committees - who will have to move his economic stimulus and health bills in the coming year.
Of course, the relationship between President Clinton and the 103rd Congress will differ from the one between Gov. Clinton and the 100th Congress. But the welfare saga provides some clues to both the president-elect's policy penchants and his lobbying skills.
Clinton was hardly the first to note the emerging consensus in 1986 between liberals and conservatives on the welfare issue. As liberals embraced the notion that able-bodied welfare recipients should be required to work, conservatives tentatively agreed that government ought to provide assistance in moving welfare recipients into permanent jobs. President Ronald Reagan started the ball rolling legislatively, calling for welfare reform in his 1986 State of the Union address.
But Clinton took a major risk in taking Reagan at his word and making welfare reform a key issue during his year as chairman of the governors' association. Under Clinton's watch, governors overwhelmingly approved a proposal that he helped devise just as Congress prepared to plunge headlong into the issue in 1987. And bill sponsors, particularly Moynihan, used the bipartisan governors' blueprint as political cover.
Clinton says that he wants to work with Republicans, and his track record bears that out. Throughout consideration of the welfare bill, Clinton seemed virtually joined at the hip to Republican Gov. Michael Castle of Delaware, who was just elected to the House.
When conservative Republican governors, led by New Hampshire's John Sununu, balked at parts of the initial proposal, Castle helped bring them around. When the Senate bogged down in early 1988, Clinton enlisted the aid of Sununu and New Jersey Republican Gov. Thomas Kean.
And during final negotiations, Clinton himself helped keep Reagan White House staff members on board.
In his zeal to get a bill, Clinton sometimes seemed willing to jettison major parts of the proposal and abandon some underlying principles - a charge often leveled against him by Arkansas legislators. To win over conservative governors, he agreed to make future increases in welfare benefits contingent on savings gained as people left the welfare rolls.
And in a controversial compromise that threatened the loss of key liberal support, Clinton and Democratic sponsors agreed to Senate Republicans' demands that a certain percentage of welfare recipients be required to do unpaid work to continue receiving benefits.
Clinton and even many Republican governors had originally opposed the first-ever federal "workfare" requirement. They were concerned that expensive work programs would outstrip their states' ability to provide the training programs that studies had shown were more likely to get recipients permanently off public assistance. But in the end Clinton agreed that accepting the workfare proposal was the price of getting a bill.
Clinton's biggest achievement was not what the bill said, but that it emerged at all. In his trademark style, Clinton combined encyclopedic knowledge, one-on-one personal lobbying skills and dogged persistence to keep the measure moving.
In late 1987, when the bill appeared to be dying in the House, Clinton worked over a dozen key Southern Democrats at a lunch in the Capitol and followed up with phone calls to keep them on board until the bill's approval later that month.
In early 1988, when the Senate dragged its feet, Clinton gave it a shove. Along with Castle, Sununu and Kean, Clinton trudged from Senate office to Senate office, variously cajoling and giving pep talks to key players, including Finance Committee Chairman Lloyd Bentsen, D-Texas.
And when the House-Senate conference appeared to stall later that year, Clinton kept up the pressure. House Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski, D-Ill., reportedly said a key motivator for him to complete work was his desire to get Clinton to "stop chewing on my leg."
Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service