Month: January 2003

As the five-year clock runs down on welfare in California (and elsewhere), welfare rights groups are advising recipients on the loopholes that they can exploit to collect benefits instead of working. The best of these is to cry “domestic abuse”; you’re automatically taken seriously, and the checks keep coming.

Carla Rivera reports on this program in the LA Times: (Recipients Scramble to Retain Welfare Benefits)

“Each month a victim suffered domestic abuse potentially means an extra month of aid,” said Quinn, who added that the county will try to verify such claims but mostly will rely on the word of victims. “We will also try to find counseling services for them after the fact. Domestic violence is not the only clock-stopper, but it’s one we’re extremely sensitive to and we want to bend over backward and take people at their word.”

There’s a long history of abusing the abuse exception to keep welfare coming, going back at least to the arguments welfare rights groups made against the reform back in 1996. One of their tools was a collection of studies, published by the Taylor Institute (now called the Project for Research on Welfare, Work, and Domestic Violence), in which welfare recipients were push-polled into crying abuse after they were told about the loophole.

With so much deliberate distortion going on, we’re unlikely ever to know what the overlap between domestic violence, child abuse, and welfare really is.

Some of the most bizarre (and hilarious) comments ever posted to this blog came in over the last few days in response to Glenn Reynolds’ Carville denial. The facts of the story are pretty straightforward, and supported by Kausfiles and NRO: Lott sucked-up to Strom Thurmond for years about his failed presidential bid, but it wasn’t news until Sid Blumenthal, James Carville, Josh Marshall, and Gene Lyons (Clinton operatives one and all) made it news through an e-mail and CNN campaign. So the bloggers who made the Lott Pandergate story a big deal in Blogistan were in fact doing Carville’s bidding, although, as I’ve already said, they didn’t know it at the time. Nobody wants to be made out to be an unwitting dupe of a clever cabal of operatives, so Reynolds wants to position this revelation as something odd. This is really silly, of course.

The only interesting questions about Carville’s Pandergate fiasco have to do with what the hoped-for goal was, and whether it’s really backfired. The obvious theory is that he was shooting for Lott’s resignation from the Senate, which would have created a 50/50 split once again. According to this scenario, the episode backfired, because Lottt didn’t step down and the Reeps reacted with honor, etc, etc. But Carville is a devious bastard, and he’s got a history of reaching out to the racist, Southern voter in creative ways: during Clinton’s ’92 campaign, the KKK outreach took the form of the infamous Sistah Souljah speech, the shunning of long-time Clinton bud Jesse Jackson, and highlighting welfare reform as a central campaign issue.

Alongside Poppa Bush, this strategy made him the more Klan-friendly candidate. Now that Lott has been badly treated by his party, according this scenario, KKK and CCC-oriented voters will once again return to the Democratic Party fold.

If this sounds totally paranoid to you, you don’t know how campaign managers think. One such person of my personal acquaintance once managed to secure an NRA endorsement for a candidate in a race in a very touchy-feely district in order to drive voters to her opponent; this sort of reverse-dunk thinking is actually commonplace. All it takes to pull it off is a few naifs who believe politics is about principle rather than counting votes, and Blogistan is full of such characters.

In future campaigns, the ability to manipulate Blogistan will become an important predictor of political success.