OPINION
The ‘buck’ lives on in food-stamp myth
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o appreciate the Republican triumph over America’s poor last week, when the party’s majority in the House of Representatives stripped food aid from the nation’s farm bill, you must go back to Ronald Reagan’s speeches about the Welfare Queen in his 1976 campaign for president against Gerald Ford. If you’re not old enough to remember, you’ve read about Reagan’s hilarious — well, hilariously told — accounts of the woman who was arrested for welfare fraud on Chicago’s black South Side. She drove a Cadillac, dined sumptuously on food stamps and raked in $150,000 a year tax-free by accumulating 80 separate identities and using them each month to collect scads of food stamps and Social Security, dependent-children and VA checks. Medicaid paid her doctor bills. No one ever found the woman — not, that is, until Truthout.org claimed last year to have located her, not in the Chicago ghetto where Reagan had placed her, but in Bentonville, Ark. The
Welfare Queen was Wal-Mart and the Walton heirs. Wal-Mart had pocketed $16 billion in profits ERNEST the previous year DUMAS and the Walton heirs enjoyed a fortune of $100 billion because Wal-Mart’s “everyday low wages” and benefits made its workforce the nation’s largest recipient of food stamps and other forms of federal aid. It was a spoof. Needless to say, Reagan wasn’t talking about Sam Walton or his spawn. Reagan’s story, as best as anyone could guess, was based on a Chicago woman named Linda Taylor, who was prosecuted for using four (not 80) aliases to cheat the government out of $8,000 (not $150,000). Fictional as they were, Reagan’s welfare stories and his impromptu speech at the GOP convention galvanized a new base for the party in the South and made him the presumptive nominee for president in 1980. It made the Cadillac-
McDaniel, the comeback kid?
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clear political trend of 2013 has been the coming back to electoral life of candidates scarred by sexual scandals in a manner unprecedented in modern American politics. Beginning with Mark Sanford’s reemergence as a successful candidate in a South Carolina special election for Congress, and now continuing through the New York City candidacies of former Congressman Anthony Weiner and former Governor Eliot Spitzer, candidates presumed politically dead because of their very public indiscretions have returned to viability. While time will tell whether Weiner and Spitzer can complete their comebacks, polling this week shows that both have real shots at winning Democratic primaries for mayor and comptroller, respectively, in one of the nation’s toughest political environments. While he will not appear on the 2014 ballot, another post-scandal comeback is underway in Arkansas.
Attorney General Dustin McDaniel, who entered the 2014 campaign cycle as the leading candidate for JAY governor, only to BARTH exit after an affair with Hot Springs lawyer Andi Davis came to light, shows all signs of a man who does not plan to leave the political arena after the end of his term in office. After an early year hiatus, McDaniel has reemerged on the public stage with a vengeance, beginning with the late March oil spill in Mayflower. McDaniel has been by far the most aggressive public official attacking the ExxonMobil Pipeline Company regarding the spill, first rhetorically and then in court, suing the oil giant in mid-June. The attorney general’s office has reasserted itself in protecting consumers in a series of high-profile actions. Most recently, McDaniel presented the case
driving black mother with a passel of kids the symbolic totem for food stamps and welfare, especially in the South, and it helped cement the GOP as the go-to party across the Southern seaboard from Virginia to Texas. Not to be sexist, Reagan at other times that summer referred not to the Welfare Queen but to “strapping young bucks” — a derogatory Southern euphemism for black men — who used food stamps to buy T-bone steaks. Reagan never identified the South Side Welfare Queen or the “bucks” as African-Americans, just as he did not mention blacks or segregation when he symbolically kicked off his 1980 campaign for president with a states-rights speech at tiny Philadelphia, Miss., made famous 12 years earlier by the murder of three civil rights workers who were trying to register blacks to vote. No Republican congressman — and certainly none of the four from Arkansas who voted to leave nutrition for the poor out of the farm bill — will say that race had anything to do with it and, in fact, will take umbrage at the suggestion. They’re against white moochers, too. But all us old crackers know the roots of the Southern notion of food stamps as chiefly the government
resource for poor black families that are too lazy to work. That wasn’t always the image of federal nutrition efforts. They began in 1933 with the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which, mainly to help white farmers whose produce prices had collapsed, bought farm commodities and distributed them among state and local relief agencies. In the South, the commodities went principally, though not altogether, to white families. The commodities program was converted to food stamps in 1939, then ended in the boom that followed World War II, and was reinstituted temporarily by President John F. Kennedy in the recession of 1960-61 and permanently by the Food Stamp Act of 1964. Some 47 million Americans now get food stamps at some time during a year, a sizable increase since the great recession began in December 2007. It is true, as Obama critics claim, that the administration has encouraged people to get food stamps, if their incomes qualify them, to stimulate spending and economic growth. Obama’s Recovery Act of 2009 raised benefits for every household that gets food stamps, but that program will end Nov. 1, reducing a family’s food aid by $250.
for a statewide conversation about the future of a death penalty system that is “completely broken.” In short, McDaniel is being an aggressive, populist and mature attorney general. In addition to doing his job quite well, McDaniel is also deeply engaged behind the scenes in Democratic Party politics. Party insiders praise his commitment to recruiting candidates for down-ticket statewide offices and for the handful of state legislative seats that could sway the state House back to the Democrats in the 2014 elections. As those races develop, McDaniel will also be a player in helping to finance them. His Leadership PAC provided $6,000 of former Congressman Mike Ross’s record haul reported this week. Indeed, some think that McDaniel himself might well be the strongest candidate the Democratic Party could put forward in either the First or Second Congressional Districts, the former where McDaniel grew up, the latter where he now resides. As of today, the party lacks candidates in both these races. With the Mayflower story having longer legs than anyone expected when the spill occurred, my hunch is that McDaniel is probably better situ-
ated in the slightly more cosmopolitan Second District, where the sexual indiscretion might matter less and where he could make inroads into populous Faulkner County because of his leadership on the oil spill issue. Patience, however, still may be McDaniel’s best political friend — the 500 text messages that Andi Davis claims to have between herself and McDaniel still cast a shadow over any immediate political ambitions. McDaniel is smart to sit out this cycle so that the messy affair fades. In 2016, however, a still-young McDaniel will be well-positioned for a return in a state where Democrats suddenly have a short bench. Assuming incumbents maintain the aforementioned congressional seats, McDaniel will have his choice of races: either of the First or Second District Congressional races or the race for U.S. Senator John Boozman’s seat. While he might not have the political heft he had before the affair, McDaniel maintains the natural political talent and the ideological synchronicity with the Arkansas primary electorate that initially kept Mike Ross (a politically talented man in his own right, as reflected in his recent record
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JULY 18, 2013
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