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

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

Some of his colleagues saw a touch of cynicism, the report went on, "since they remember when he was identified as a critic of these ideas." Perhaps this assessment is unfair. Did his split personality reflect genuine ambivalence rather than crass political pandering? Hodgson occasionally alludes to this question without resolving it.

Moynihan Wet made occasional appearances but never came close to erasing the record of Moynihan Dry. In 1999 and 2000, he won a good deal of press--as well as praise from Republicans--for supporting partial privatization of Social Security. A small step in the right direction, perhaps, but he would have left the program's basic structure in place. Moreover, Moynihan Dry had not been above playing demagogue on the issue. In 1981, after Reagan budget director David Stockman had proposed some modest cuts, the senator introduced a resolution condemning the idea as "a breach of faith with those aging Americans who have contributed to the Social Security system.

During a 1995 visit to Arizona, Moynihan Wet offered a faint echo of his 1968 piece on racial preference: "There's a tendency to get more and more groups involved, and...when there are people who will take advantage, you'll end up with unanticipated consequences." That same year, the Senate considered a measure forbidding ethnic and gender preferences in contracting by the legislative branch. Moynihan Dry voted to kill it. Three years later, he voted the same way when Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky offered an anti-preference amendment to a transportation bill.

The old skepticism of Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding briefly resurfaced in 1993, when the incoming Clinton team began making pronouncements on welfare. Moynihan wrote that he had been "repeatedly impressed by the number of members of the Clinton administration who have assured me with great vigor that something or other is known in an area of social policy which, to the best of my understanding, is not known at all." After this flash of Moynihan Wet, Moynihan Dry became a rabid opponent of welfare reform. Literally speaking of an "apocalypse," as Hodgson recounts, he foresaw "children on grates, because there's no money in the states and cities to care for them."

Nothing of the sort happened, of course, which undercuts Hodgson's description of the senator as a "prophet." The comment also points to a problem that plagued Moynihan throughout his career: His affection for the well-turned phrase often trumped prudence and careful thought.

Take the Moynihan Report of 1965. The notion of family pathology was sensitive enough, but then he had to add this line: "The very essence of the male animal, from the bantam rooster to the four-star general, is to strut." In 1994 a Senate hearing on childbearing by the very young took a strange turn when he remarked: "I mean, if you were a biologist, you could find yourself talking about speciation here," that is, the creation of a new species. "It has something to do [with] a changed condition in biological circumstances."