Ensuring Poverty. Felicia Kornbluh

from E.T. and other local experiments—much as they proceeded irrespective of the government-funded Panel Study of Income Dynamics.

      The Democrats’ defeat in the 1988 presidential election presented a growing community of anti-welfare Democrats with an opportunity to commandeer the party’s agenda. The Democratic presidential nominee, Michael Dukakis, was the governor of Massachusetts, home of E.T. Candidate Dukakis represented a version of northern, white, intellectual liberalism that was mocked by many in the Democratic center-right and deemed out of touch by cynical political insiders. By the end of the 1988 campaign, Dukakis had become a Democratic untouchable. Not only did he lose the presidential election to a relatively weak Republican candidate, but he also allowed himself and the party to be derided as inadequately masculine, even effeminate, and weak on the race- and gender-coded issue of criminal justice. What captured attention during the 1988 campaign was the image of the diminutive candidate Dukakis swallowed up in a military helmet when he mistakenly tried to prove his bone fides by driving a tank. Even more sensationalized was the “Willie Horton” television advertisement, which Republicans used to associate the governor’s parole policies with racialized and sexualized crime. A third touchstone in memories of the Dukakis campaign is the moment during a presidential debate when the candidate muffed a question about whether he would support the death penalty if his own wife were raped.¹⁸ These flashpoints were products of the gendered and racialized politics of the period. They also concretized and enhanced those politics, making everything related to Dukakis, especially policies that directly implicated gender and race, seem toxic for ambitious Democrats.

      New Democrats defined themselves against what they characterized as the trademarks of traditional, liberal Democracy.¹⁹ Dukakis served as a synecdoche for what they found problematic about the whole party, which formed the rationale for their “new” departure. It is easy to see how “new” Democratic politics set the stage for Bill Clinton’s rise to national prominence and shaped his agenda: New Democrats, contra Dukakis, were not from the traditional party strongholds of the urban Northeast and West; they were not ambivalent about policies on crime, welfare, or immigration that might offend advocates of color; and they were not beholden to familiar Democratic allies such as labor unions, feminist organizations, and civil rights lobbies. With the help of these positions and a “tough” foreign policy, New Democrats sought to project an image of mainstream white heterosexual masculinity.²⁰ Clinton’s embrace of welfare reform as an issue and his persistent unwillingness to credit Dukakis’s welfare reform model or recognize the data derived from it was consistent with the emergent terms of New Democratic politics.²¹

      President Reagan signed the Family Support Act in October 1988, on the eve of the Dukakis-Bush election. The FSA differed from Dukakis’s state-level E.T. program: it reflected a greater concern with policing masculine behavior, in the form of enforced financial child support, and was premised on racialized stereotypes of welfare recipients as lazy and therefore in need of work mandates rather than a voluntary program.²² But FSA, like E.T. and other local welfare-to-work experiments, did not settle the debate over welfare. In fact, in the years immediately following what Moynihan described as policy to “turn the welfare program upside down,” the debate seemed to rage even more loudly and intensively than it had before.²³ As political scientist Hugh Heclo has argued, “welfare reform became much more than an isolated campaign issue after 1988. It became a central focus in the strategic maneuvers of party warfare,” a “wedge issue” with which conservatives hoped to separate voters from the Democratic Party and a matter of identity to New Democrats such as Bill Clinton.²⁴