Real welfare reform was achieved only when politicians stopped listening to Moynihan, whose chief qualification as the Senate's welfare reform expert was that he had eloquently botched the job four previous times. Third, with his talk about the mother-child bond, it's pretty clear Bradley shares Moynihan's aversion to requiring many welfare mothers to go to work. That's not a crazy position, though it's subject to attack on many fronts. Bradley's position is less defensible if, like Moynihan, he would also block the state experiments that might prove him wrong. So far, the states that seem to have been most successful since 1996 have been those, like Wisconsin, that do expect single mothers with very young children to work, at least when provided with subsidized day care.
Voters can make up their own minds.
But they are certainly on notice that a President Bradley would probably try to stop the current wave of reform in its tracks. Give Bradley a Democratic Congress and you can all but declare the 1996 reform dead. It's not hard to predict what the voters might say. Welfare has always been an emotional issue, the subject of highly effective 30-second ads. With Bradley, we have that rare instance of a potentially devastating negative political spot that would be justified in both substance and proportionality.