RIPPING UP WELFARE

Historic turning points in social policy are not always obvious when they occur. Certainly Franklin D. Roosevelt did not foresee that some provisions of the Social Security Act he signed in 1935 would burgeon over the next 61 years into a mammoth federally financed and regulated welfare program. Last week, though, the equally historic nature of the decision facing Bill Clinton was clear not just to the White House but the whole nation. So the President turned his deliberations over a radical overhaul of F.D.R.'s welfare system into a solemn little drama.

Or perhaps a bit of "Kabuki theater," as an official speculated, in which the actors played out stylized roles to a foregone conclusion. Several of the top 15 advisers who sat down with Clinton in the White House Cabinet Room for a supposedly decisive session Wednesday suspected the President had already made up his mind to sign the welfare-reform bill Congress was about to pass. A tip-off: Hillary Rodham Clinton was conveniently out of town at the Olympics in Atlanta and, White House watchers believe, already knew what her husband would do. If the First Lady had been in any real doubt about what her husband would do, Clinton watchers reasoned, Williams would have sat in to listen and report. Also, though no other participants knew it, senior policy adviser Bruce Reed had prepared only one advance draft of the speech Clinton would give, and it assumed a decision to sign (though Reed says he could have quickly revised it to defend a veto).

In retrospect, it seems inevitable that Clinton would sign. And not just to take away from Bob Dole one of the few issues the Republican contender had been counting on to gain traction in the campaign. Political strategists figured a veto might cost the President about five points in the polls, but Clinton could endure that with plenty to spare. A veto, however, would have repudiated the entire moderate, New Democrat stance--champion of family values, balanced budgets, more cops on the streets--that Clinton had been cultivating so assiduously since the rout of the Democrats in the 1994 elections. And, of course, there was that matter of his 1992 pledge to "end welfare as we know it."

Moreover, Congress had stripped out of its new welfare bill many of the harsh provisions that had provoked the President to veto two earlier versions. The decisive breakthrough began in early June, when two obscure G.O.P. Congressmen--John Ensign, a freshman from Las Vegas, and Dave Camp, a third termer from Michigan--conferred after a meeting of Republican members of the House Ways and Means Committee. Says Ensign: "We both looked at each other and said, 'This is crazy!' " What was crazy, they thought, was a decision of the G.O.P. congressional leadership to keep welfare reform combined in a single bill with drastic changes in Medicaid. That bill would be guaranteed to draw a third Clinton veto.

Ensign and Camp, however, wanted some real, popular legislation to present to their constituents. They got 52 House colleagues to sign a letter to Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate majority leader Trent Lott urging that welfare reform and Medicaid be decoupled. Gingrich refused, but meanwhile Ensign was getting calls--30 in a few days, he says--from lawmakers who wanted to join his group. He and Camp got more than 100 House G.O.P. signatures on a second letter, and on July 11 the G.O.P. leadership gave in.