Hillary the guardian angel of America’s children? Hardly. She was instrumental in wrecking the lives of millions of them by going all in on New Gingrich’s welfare reform scheme, denying aid to poor families with children. Imagine that, siding with neocons!
As W said “There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — we won’t get fooled again.”
From Salon:
“The problem with Clinton’s claims, however, is that she betrayed children as First Lady. Under the guise of welfare reform, the Clinton administration worked with Republicans to gut social services, ignoring their own senior officials’ warnings that, by doing so, they would be plunging over a million children into poverty.
Bill Clinton ran in 1992 on the campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it.” In 1996, he — with the wholehearted support of Hillary — succeeded, passing the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWORA). PRWORA was based on legislation first proposed by Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. The act was opposed by the left-wing of the Democratic Party, but the Clinton administration joined hands with Republicans and conservative Democrats to push it through.
As part of PRWORA, the Clinton administration axed the Aid to Families with Dependent Children federal assistance program, which had been created 61 years before by the Social Security Act, in the New Deal.
Hillary, as First Lady, advocated strongly for the restructuring of welfare. Her former co-workers at CDF, on the other hand, were infuriated. CDF founder and President Marian Wright Edelman declared that President Clinton’s “signature on this pernicious bill makes a mockery of his pledge not to hurt children.”
“Hillary Clinton is an old friend, but they are not friends in politics,” the CDF president told Democracy Now in a 2007 interview. At the time, CDF “profoundly disagreed with the forms of the welfare reform bill, and we said so,” Marian Wright Edelman explained.
Three senior officials on welfare policy resigned from the Clinton administration in response to Bill and Hillary’s scrapping of welfare. Peter Edelman, a legal scholar who at the time served as an assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, told The New York Times, “I have devoted the last 30-plus years to doing whatever I could to help in reducing poverty in America. I believe the recently enacted welfare bill goes in the opposite direction.”