The Obama administration’s vision

This chapter seeks to define the Obama administration's vision for American social policy. It argues that Obama’s policies were based on a moderate left-leaning modernizing effort through the expansion of existing antipoverty programs, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), food stamps, Earned Income Tax Credit and unemployment insurance. The Affordable Care Act (2010) was the most significant antipoverty initiative of the Obama presidency. The administration was committed to a moderate social investment approach centered on expanding educational opportunities and generalizing access to health care, especially for low income Americans.

Introduction

The introductory chapter sets out the broad political context that helps explain the Obama partial success in terms of antipoverty policies. It points out to major contradictions in the American political tradition: a deep-seated suspicion of government intervention combined with a strong attachment for entitlement programs, the paradox of a presidential institution portrayed as one of the most powerful in the world but that faces considerable constraints in terms of enacting domestic reforms. The introduction enumerates the structural constraints – constitutional and institutional - that limit the president’s capacities for action. In essence, the legitimacy of the federal government intervention has always been a contested terrain. This has resulted in variable-speed federalism, with a strong pattern of state diversity, especially in relation to welfare.

Navigating the political backlash

This chapter explores how Obama progressive policies prompted a strong political and ideological backlash. It explains how the Tea Party accentuated partisan polarization, a trend that characterizes American politics since the end of the 1970s. Tea Party ideology had three major elements: a hatred of Barack Obama, a visceral rejection of redistributive and pro-poor social policies, and a focus on the need to cut federal government intervention to the bare minimum. As states legislatures shifted to the right, House Republican proposals on welfare and food stamps had strong moralizing and criminalizing undertones. Legislative proposals were inspired by socially regressive state experiments such as mandatory drug testing for welfare applicants or requiring that cash assistance cards should be banned in strip clubs or casinos.

Obama’s welfare and antipoverty policies: an assessment

This chapter assesses the extent to which the Obama administration has been able to implement its legislative program. The most important achievement has been the Affordable Care Act, especially the Medicaid expansion. One of the biggest contradictions of the Obama presidency is that it continued broadening the role of the federal government whilst cutting the number of federal government jobs due to tight fiscal rules. In fact, the dispersion and fragmentation of policymaking has continued, particularly with regard to welfare and employment policy. Finally, the Great Recession and persistent wage depression have accentuated the structural social and economic inequalities that have plagued U.S. politics for the past three decades. This has created a huge disconnect that the fragmented U.S. polity has been unable to address.

Conclusion: The American welfare state in comparative perspective

To conclude, the fundamental American social contract remains ‘mean and lean’ in comparative terms, despite the real efforts assigned to antipoverty policy under Obama. The conclusion also identifies areas of divergence and convergence between Europe and the United States in terms of legal and political support for socio-economic rights. European and American policymakers have placed a renewed emphasis on equality of opportunities as opposed to equality of outcomes. There’s been a blending of some elements of Anglo-American liberalism and the social-democrat tradition. By and large, convergence between European and U.S. social policies occurs mostly along "regressive" lines.

The politics of damage limitation

This chapter is a case study of symbolic politics and Republican obstruction in Congress. Congressional Republicans accused the Obama administration of wanting to undermine work requirements for TANF recipients. The tendency to blame the victim, the perception that poor people either do not know how to spend their money or, worse, that they would deliberately misuse public funds, that there was a need to cut "entitlements" and social spending were popular narratives that played a crucial role in the agenda-setting process when Congress started to examine proposals for reforms either for food stamps or TANF. Although Democrats opposed the most radical retrenchment Republican proposals, they were essentially engaged in a damage limitation exercise. Welfare litigation has also played an important role in the evolution of social policy. But welfare court cases do not strike the public imagination, thus allowing a hostile anti welfare view to dominate much of the political conversation.

The American social contract

Chapter 1 explains how the American political and legal tradition is characterized by a lack of strong legal protection of socio-economic rights. It examines the legacy of welfare reform, in particular the Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act signed by Bill Clinton in August 1996. This legacy is based on a consensus on paid work as a moral duty of citizenship as well as a preference for localized service-based social programs as opposed to federal cash assistance. Chapter 1 shows that the U.S. social contract has become increasingly flawed as social and racial inequalities widened and as the labor market became increasingly polarized. The Great Recession laid bare the holes of the safety net.