ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, October 28, 1996 TAG: 9610280110
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: GEORGE F. WILL
SOURCE: GEORGE F. WILL
THE MOST important African-American man in public office is a conservative - Justice Clarence Thomas. Less obviously, but surely, the most important African-American woman in public office is a conservative.
Eloise Anderson is director of California's Department of Social Services, a $16 billion agency in a state where until now 12 percent of the population accounted for 27 percent of the nation's spending on Aid to Families with Dependent Children.
Anderson says this about the end of that federal entitlement to welfare: ``People say, `The poor won't know what to do!' Tough. They'll learn.'' She adds, ``When I was young, people did not think the poor were stupid.''
It took just a stroke of a pen - the president's - to transform Anderson, 54, from someone supposedly on the far-right fringe of the social-policy debate into someone who had been prematurely correct about where the debate was going. President Clinton signed Congress' repeal of a 60-year-old federal AFDC entitlement because he had been dragged to where she had been standing for years.
Born on the edge of poverty in Toledo, Ohio, Anderson became a social worker in Wisconsin and became incensed by the disconnection between the rules cranked out by the state welfare bureaucracy in Madison and the lives led by the people she struggled to help in Milwaukee.
So she drove to Madison, parked outside the state welfare office and began bombarding the people who worked there with questions: What do you do? Ever worked anywhere else? Ever been to Milwaukee? Soon she was working on Gov. Tommy Thompson's welfare reforms, which got her interviewed on public television, where California's Gov. Pete Wilson spotted her.
She became a national figure because of 15 minutes on ``60 Minutes,'' during which Leslie Stahl asked her, ``Will you not concede that you have a large number of unemployable people who are on welfare?'' Anderson conceded nothing of the sort, saying there were lots of low-paying jobs that immigrants take but welfare recipients refuse.
Stahl: ``But we're talking about sweeping floors.''
Anderson: ``That's employable.''
To The Manhattan Institute's ``City Journal'' she has said: ``If you tell me, `I'm pregnant, and I've never worked,' I would say go talk to your family; go talk to his family. But don't come here, because having a baby is not a crisis. That's a condition and your behavior caused that.''
Why the explosive growth of illegitimacy? People live up - or down - to expectations: ``It was accepted. Back in the 1960s, middle-class whites took the shame out of a lot of stuff.'' And there also was ``the feminist thing - men are dogs,'' we can live without them.
For many young girls, she says, the first sexual relationship is involuntary. When the daughter born to a teen-age mother becomes a teen-ager, she is apt to meet in her home the male friends of her mother's man - men in their late 20s or early 30s. And so illegitimacy is transmitted. Dismantle the welfare system, Anderson says, and young women will think differently about men and getting pregnant. We shall see.
``Maybe my time has come and gone,'' she says. Actually it is just arriving. Given the devolution of federal welfare responsibilities to the states, this is exactly the time for her to be where she is, doing two things.
One is putting in place measures to direct welfare recipients to work, thereby underscoring the transitional nature of welfare. The other is exhorting the poor, and particularly the African-American poor, to ``get off the plantation'' - the intellectual plantation of conventional liberalism, and the closed world of dependency she thinks it produces.
While waiting for the mainstream to come to her, she has felt the full fury of liberal intolerance of deviations by African-Americans. She has been sustained, she says, by the example of someone who, like her, rose from near-poverty and left that plantation, Clarence Thomas.
- Washington Post Writers Group
LENGTH: Medium: 75 linesby CNB