Sen. Moynihan, Wet and Dry. - Review - book review

Reason, Nov, 2000 by John J. Pitney, Jr.

Moynihan feared that the process would snowball. Trouble is, he wrote, ethnic groups will never have equal success in different fields because they value different kinds of success and excel at those they value most. "But government knows little of such variegations," he said, "and I very much fear that if we begin to become formal about quotas for this or that group, we will very quickly come to realize that these are instantly translated into quotas against." And then came the kicker: "Let me be blunt. If ethnic quotas are to be imposed on American universities and similarly quasipublic institutions, it is Jews who will be almost driven out."

Such comments drew the attention of Richard Nixon in his search for intellectual firepower for his incoming administration. Shocking the Democrats who still could remember Moynihan Dry's service in the previous administrations, Moynihan Wet signed on with Nixon as a domestic policy adviser. With proximity to power, though, Moynihan Dry returned. His major project was the Family Assistance Plan, a radical welfare overhaul that included a guaranteed annual income. Nixon embraced the plan and announced it in a nationwide address. The plan passed the House but died in the Senate. Moynihan Dry missed his biggest potential victory.

Hodgson attributes the bill's defeat to petty political infighting and Nixon's preoccupation with the Vietnam War. He misses the point. Though some observers at the time thought Moynihan's plan was a variation of Milton Friedman's negative income tax, it was something quite different. Rather than give cash assistance in place of social welfare programs, as Friedman had proposed, the plan would have been an addition to them--a massive expansion of the welfare state.

Martin Anderson, who served with Moynihan in the Nixon White House, wrote the definitive analysis of this plan in his book Welfare (oddly absent from Hodgson's endnotes). According to Anderson, Democratic Sen. Russell Long of Louisiana figured out that the plan would not only explode the budget but also discourage welfare recipients from working. "How do you justify that?" he asked an administration witness at a Senate hearing. "What possible logic is there to it?" The witness had no answer.

After this fiasco, Moynihan turned to foreign policy, first as ambassador to India, then as the U.S. representative to the United Nations. In 1976, he ran for the U.S. Senate against conservative incumbent James Buckley. He won by attacking Buckley's "extremism" and reluctance to back a federal bailout for New York City. Still, some hoped that the occupant of the Senate seat would turn out to be Moynihan Wet instead of Moynihan Dry.

Not a chance.

Year after year, vote after vote, Moynihan endeared himself to labor unions and the Washington establishment. In 1990 Congressional Quarterly's reference book Politics in America reflected on his career. On most domestic issues, his entry read, "Moynihan has been less intent on rethinking fundamental questions than on lining up emotionally with liberal Democrats in support of preserving the New Deal or the Great Society."