Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, September 9, 1995 TAG: 9509110057
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
In the latest development, Allen's secretary of health and human resources has fired off a public letter to Cranwell accusing him of being a do-nothing legislator on welfare reform.
"I do not recall your personal involvement in any of the progress related to welfare reform," Kay Coles James wrote in a toughly worded three-page letter.
She also disputed Cranwell's contention that the Republican administration intentionally delayed implementing a Democratic-sponsored welfare bill in 1994 so Allen could claim the credit for introducing his own welfare plan this year.
"Your suggestion that this administration purposely delayed a request for federal waivers is not only completely and outrageously false, it is also a vicious slur..." James wrote.
Cranwell brushed off the second attack from the administration in less than a week.
"You know exactly what I make of it," he said. "What they're trying to do is lob what I call long-range artillery at me to distract me from focusing on the issues I am. They're trying to make me a fight a battle on two fronts" - one against the administration, the other against his GOP opponent, Trixie Averill.
Allen advisers made no secret of their desire to engage the governor's most powerful Democratic critic in a long-range debate.
Allen's press secretary, Ken Stroupe, made three unsolicited calls to The Roanoke Times on Wednesday, twice to advise that he was about to make available copies of the letter James had just sent Cranwell, the third time to offer himself or other administration officials for additional comment.
Other Allen advisers called the newspaper twice Thursday to check on whether a story about James' letter was in progress.
Allen's interest in ousting Cranwell - the Democrat most responsible for frustrating the bulk of the governor's legislative agenda this year - is well-known.
Ever since Averill entered the race, her campaign has attracted special attention from the administration and other top Republicans around the state.
At the traditional campaign kick-off in Buena Vista on Labor Day, Allen singled out Cranwell for special blame, warning that the Democratic leader had indicated a desire to "backslide" on the state's tough new welfare rules.
When Cranwell responded the next day, saying Allen had "conveniently" overlooked Cranwell's role in pushing through his own version of welfare reform a year earlier, the administration quickly produced the letter from James.
The essence of the dispute is who should get the credit in Virginia for starting to move welfare recipients onto work rolls: the Democrats, who pushed through a pilot program in 1994 that the administration never implemented, or the Republicans, who won approval for a more comprehensive program this year.
Cranwell had called attention to his role in introducing the legislation to create a statewide study commission on welfare in 1992 - "long before George Allen was elected governor," he said - and his role in getting the commission's recommendations for a pilot program written into law in 1994.
In her letter, James refers to this as something "on which you had supposedly spent three years of your very long legislative career working." Instead, she tells Cranwell that Allen "has not forgotten the sincere interest of those members who have genuinely worked to reform the Commonwealth's failed welfare system," but that Cranwell was not among them.
For all the political heat, there's not much light shed on the details of the competing welfare plans - yet it's in the details that the differing values of the two parties may be best understood and evaluated.
How fast? The Democratic-sponsored plan enacted in 1994 set up a pilot program to offer job training to welfare recipients in exchange for a limit on benefits. At the time, the plan made Virginia one of the first states to cap benefits and set up a program to move welfare recipients into jobs.
Cranwell called the program that emerged from the two-year study commission "one of the toughest in the nation." But James tells Cranwell: "You are well aware that this legislation was hastily drafted, full of loopholes and did not deliver real reform."
The major point of contention is how fast welfare reform should be implemented. Democrats argued that the state needed to test pilot programs to find out whether the new rules worked; Republicans said any changes should be applied statewide as quickly as possible.
In the 1995 General Assembly, Allen threatened to veto any new legislation unless he got his way; in the end, most Democrats, including Cranwell, went along with him.
How much supervision? One of the major disputes in this year's welfare bill was how much supervision welfare recipients need to move off the dole and into jobs. Democrats warned that, without intensive supervision, welfare recipients weren't likely to move into the workplace. They wanted a minimum of one case worker for each 46 welfare recipients.
Allen and other Republicans labeled these social workers "bureaucrats" and blasted the Democratic plan as too expensive. In the end, Republicans got the General Assembly to agree to the current ratio of 92 welfare recipients for each case worker.
There's no easy answer to who's right and who's wrong on Cranwell's central charge - that the Allen administration intentionally stalled for almost a year before asking the federal government for permission to implement the 1994 pilot program.
The plan passed in March 1994, but the administration didn't ask the federal government for a waiver until November. James, in her letter, said it took that long to draw up the program's regulations and policies. By then, she noted, the federal government suggested waiting until after the 1995 General Assembly.
Cranwell wasn't impressed. "How come they promulgated their regulations and policies so quick this year and not last year?"
However, it was easy to tell how quickly Allen's intervention has transformed Cranwell's re-election bid. At the picnic kicking off his campaign Thursday night, Cranwell told a Vinton crowd that this fall's election isn't a choice between Allen and himself. Instead, Cranwell said, the election was a decision on how much financial support the state should give to education.
Allen, Cranwell said, "went too far in a low-tax state when he proposed to cut $52 million from education and $42 million from higher education."
Cranwell also called attention to Allen's attempts to eliminate funding for the Hotel Roanoke Conference Center and reduce funding for Center in the Square and other cultural groups. Cranwell read off a list of how much state funding they annually receive, calling it "some little bit of economic development" for Western Virginia at a time when the administration was offering millions to lure Disney and IBM and Motorola to Northern Virginia and Richmond.
"Yet if George Allen had had his way, that money would have been gone," Cranwell said, dramatically ripping up the piece of paper. "Evidently, they don't think economic development is important in this part of the state."
But the most vivid portrayal of Cranwell's re-election campaign may have been the "This is Cranwell Country" T-shirts worn by two of his supporters at the picnic. On the back was a mock version of the Virginia flag, with a caricature of Cranwell standing atop a fallen Allen. The slogan underneath: "Sic Semper King George."
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB