Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [260]
The great achievement of Reagan’s second term, indeed of his entire governorship, was the California Welfare Reform Act of 1971. It took him six months of struggle with the cocky new Democratic speaker of the assembly, Bob Moretti, to get the bill through the legislature, and when he first asked his aides, including Meese and Deaver, what they thought his chances of success were, their answers ranged from “We shouldn’t try” to “None.”109
Since coming into office, Reagan had been determined to get what he called Sacramento II: 1969–1974
4 1 7
“the welfare monster” under control—one out of nine Americans was on some form of relief by the early 1970s, and in California the Aid to Families with Dependent Children caseload was increasing by forty thousand a month.110 On March 3, 1971, Reagan unveiled the “lengthiest, most detailed and specific legislative proposal ever originated by a California governor,” which called for cutting welfare expenditures by as much as $800
million annually by tightening eligibility requirements and closing loop-holes while increasing funds for “the truly needy.”111 Reagan’s most controversial proposal would force able-bodied fathers—and mothers with older children—to work at public service for their AFDC checks.112
The bill became law on August 13, after a final version had been hammered out in three weeks of face-to-face negotiations between Reagan and Moretti, which involved a fair degree of cursing as well as nitty-gritty hag-gling over nearly every subclause. “Both he and I developed a grudging respect for each other,” said the thirty-four-year-old speaker, who came from a poor, half-Italian, half-Armenian family in Detroit. “I don’t think that socially we’d ever have mixed, but when the governor gave a commitment he kept it, and when I gave a commitment, I kept it. So that working on the development of legislation with him was relatively easy because we always knew where the other guy stood.”113
“Reagan always prided himself on his ability to compromise,” said Mike Deaver, who had been given the fancy new title director of administration at the start of the second term. “And he understood that there always was going to be compromise. He would tell you stories about what he learned in his work with the unions and the studios and the Screen Actors Guild. That’s where he really learned how to compromise— when to make the move and so forth.”114
The path to reform had taken Reagan to the Winter White House at San Clemente that April for a “welfare summit” with President Nixon, who had proposed his own Family Assistance Plan in 1969 and was not happy about the California Governor stealing his thunder. Nixon’s plan essentially amounted to a guaranteed minimum income for welfare recipients and was seen by conservatives as yet another example of his inability to control spending and his lack of principles. Reagan had even testified against Nixon’s plan in U.S. Senate hearings the previous summer.115 Their three-hour meeting in San Clemente was mediated by Caspar Weinberger, who had left Sacramento to become Nixon’s budget director. Reagan essentially got what he wanted, the presidential blessing for his work-for-checks 4 1 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House reform. In exchange he agreed to stop opposing Nixon’s plan, which would be shelved in 1972.116 Reagan’s reform legislation, on the other hand, would become the model for other states, and eventually for the federal government during the Clinton administration.
For Nixon, struggling with a recession, inflation, and soaring deficits, as well as a war in Southeast Asia he could neither win nor end, Reagan increasingly represented a looming threat to his renomination in 1972. Despite Reagan’s assurance at a White House meeting in January 1971 that he
“would not in any way allow himself to become a candidate,” as Nixon’s chief of staff H. R. Haldeman noted in his diary, the President’s paranoia was set off by the slightest sign of