Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton rode into office with the promise to “end welfare as we know it.” Now, a decade and a half later, the first complete, non-partisan review of his efforts — and those of opposing party leader Newt Gingrich, whose Contract with America offered his own party‘s version of welfare reform — has appeared in Jason DeParle’s American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation’s Drive to End Welfare.

DeParle, a senior writer for The New York Times who reported extensively on welfare in the 1990s, takes readers on a whirlwind tour of the evolution of welfare at the federal level, beginning with President Franklin Roosevelt’s original initiative to provide benefits for poor (and, implicitly, white) widows to care for their children and racing up through the 1980s, when welfare was viewed as a national apology for the abysmal conditions of 1960s housing projects and the social maelstroms they had created. By 1996, when Clinton, himself a lower-income success story, and Gingrich were in power, public approbation for “ending welfare” (a phrase whose genealogy DeParle also traces) was at an all-time high, and Congress sought a solution that would empower states to cleanse their own rolls. While Clinton”s plan emphasized federal job creation as a way to cushion the transition from welfare to work, Gingrich’s placed the burden of planning on individual states to decide how they would reform their own programs.

In the end, the country ended up with an amalgam of the two plans and DeParle’s book follows three different women from Milwaukee who found themselves on the welfare rolls in the early 1990s. The choice of Wisconsin was not accidental; Republican Governor Tommy Thompson, a nearly unknown candidate for public office, emerged in the late 1980s using an anti-welfare platform to end decades of Democratic governance in the state, and was held up by Clinton as a leading light of welfare reform.

Wisconsin was the site of an early skirmish over welfare in the 1990s after a wave of Chicago recipients moved to Milwaukee, where the benefits (under the then-Democratic government) were better and the cost of living was lower. Three of those Chicagoans — Angie, Jewell, and Opal, all cousins — form the meat of DeParle’s narrative, and provide a narrow but useful portrait of the welfare system as it stood when Clinton took office. All of the women came from families who, within the space of a few generations, migrated north from sharecropping farms in the Mississippi Delta. DeParle wisely steers away from comparing the patronage system of Jim Crow farming and the mechanics of the welfare state, emphasizing instead the drive of Angie’s grandmother and her siblings to make a better life on Chicago’s South Side. It is that same spirit that drives Angie, Jewell, and Opal to Milwaukee, where they find a house with a forgetful landlord and, with their welfare checks, settle in with their children — until the state’s W-2 Welfare to Work plan disrupts their comfortable lives.

Or that’s how conservative critics might have pictured it. The most surprising finding of DeParle’s book is that, while the three women continued to draw welfare checks until the state directly cut them off, they were often employed part-time, if not full-time, on the side in order to make up the difference between their check and their family’s needs. When job-oriented counseling started to take the place of classical check calculations, recipients would often omit jobs from state-reported forms — but would continue to work instead of just relying on their benefits. Angie, for example, was enrolled by the state in the employment-search program JOBS (Job Opportunities and Basic Skills), where she diligently recorded businesses she called and job contacts she made, without divulging her temporary nursing work.

In Jewell’s case, only five months passed before the state “found her second job” (thanks to better software), but her enrollment in the JOBS program wouldn’t have provided a stable welfare check for long anyway; the specific classes she was required to take were continually cancelled, making it impossible for her to matriculate into an actual job with this state-mandated training hanging over her head. All three women rejected the “community service jobs” — wageless work designed by Wisconsin administrators to give welfare recipients the impression of working for their benefits as, not surprisingly, a waste of time better spent at a job with take-home pay.

The book’s last third describes the welfare bureaucracy in Milwaukee as it existed in the late 1990s, focusing on the for-profit administrator Maximus, whose financial malfeasance would later make headlines. These private agencies were responsible for the implementation of Wisconsins welfare reforms, for better or (usually) for worse. Maximus represented a triumph of bureaucracy over positive individual change: Opal, for example, was asked about her “employability plan,” not about whether she had a job. Case workers, who were often more adept at paperwork management software than at real-life advice, felt no pressure from the state to cut welfare rolls once they had already fallen some 90 percent, and would frequently cut their clients a check rather than pursue them individually to make sure they were following through on their job search objectives. Ironically, this is just the kind of abuse W-2 was designed to prevent. With five private welfare-implementation organizations in the metro Milwaukee area in the late 1990s, graft and mismanagement of funds were easy to hide even as case workers couldn’t get equipment and training for their clients.

Woven through the women’s stories are those of their boyfriends and husbands, whose instability often contributed to financial insecurity. Angie’s boyfriend was in jail awaiting trial when she moved to Chicago, and Jewell’s drug-dealing boyfriends were unwilling to commit to her except when serving short prison terms. In Opal’s case, her spiraling addiction to crack cocaine was aided and abetted by a sometime boyfriend and dealer. DeParle notes that while almost 75 percent of women leaving the welfare rolls worked at some point in the next year, by the end of the 1990s, only half of lower-income black men were similarly employed. The booming economy may have lifted Angie’s and Jewell’s boats but it left behind the men they loved, creating an ironic commentary on the original intention of welfare.

Yet just getting a job — the effect of “ending welfare as we know it” — didn’t necessarily change these womens lives as people might have expected. Gingrich conservatives who tout marriage as a social stabilizer would be disappointed to discover that of the three women, only Jewell saw getting married as a solution to her financial problems, and continued to manage alone when a nuptial opportunity never arose. And Opal, whose drug problems seemed evident to everyone except her case worker, drifted in and out of jobs, staying just long enough to make a little money and then disappearing on two- or three-day drug binges. Even Angie, a nursing assistant and the longest employed, didn’t see herself as a champion of the W-2 system. She might have seemed like “that American hero, a working-class stiff to proclaimers that welfare reform had worked” — Angie did leave the rolls, after all — but she tells DeParle, “I never think about shit like that! It means I be a broke motherfucker for the rest of my life!”’

DeParle makes it clear that welfare neither solved the women’s problems, nor exacerbated them with its absence. But the margin by which it improved the lives of Angie and Jewell is an important one for policymakers to take note. It’s hard to challenge DeParle’s math when he figures that, because of payroll taxes and food stamps, Angie only made $3,400 more off welfare than on, even though she was earning almost $10,000 more per year. And that measurement didn’t take into account work-related expenses like uniforms and transportation, or the loss of her health insurance (although her children were allowed to stay on Medicaid).

As Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed exposed, the minimum wage in most states can’t realistically keep a single-income family above the poverty level. As a piece of social engineering, then, the minimum wage can be a great upward mobilizer; as a viable “minimum on which to live” it makes a mockery of women like Angie who, without their GEDs, can’t expect to get a higher-paying job. When Clinton said, “People who work shouldn’t be poor,”’ he made a promise that has yet to be fulfilled by state help.

American Dream is so crammed with history and narrative that DeParle leaves little space to offer a full prescription for remedying what welfare reform has wrought. But the federal and state systems of aid that have “replaced welfare have never lacked for prescribers” — only for a complete description of symptoms. In the end, policy wonks from both sides of the aisle should find in DeParle’s reportage lessons which may be applied to any aid implementation, from how to quell the furor over the new Medicare prescription plans to the joint federal and state efforts it will take to rebuild the Gulf Coast after last year’s hurricane season. “

In The Fray Contributor