Creeping Rodhamism!
Paranoid's Corner: There's a Hillary angle to the previous,
epic-length kausfiles item on the Clinton administration's decision
to promote food-stamp receipt. It's this: Is the president's new emphasis on
food stamps an attempt to create an issue for the first lady to use against New
York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, whose administration has been accused of making it
too hard to get the stamps? ... I'm not saying the White House suddenly ordered
the federal Department of Health and Human Services to champion food stamps as
a way to help Hillary's campaign. The repackaging of food stamps as "critical
work supports" (rather than welfare handouts) has been pushed for years by
influential liberal antipoverty "advocates" such as Wendell Primus of the
Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Plenty of career HHS officials
undoubtedly agree with Primus. But Primus hasn't won many battles with the
triangulating, welfare-reforming White House lately. Why did the administration
suddenly now agree to give him a victory by taking a "food stamps are good for
you" line? What tipped the balance? Maybe they were spooked by Primus'
statistical calculations showing some deterioration in the income of the bottom
10 percent of single parents, even though those
numbers have been looking a lot better recently. Maybe ... If you believe
that, you probably believe it was also just a coincidence that Housing and
Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo's press release promoting a fairly dry
national study of the homeless happened to mention an advocacy group's estimate
that "in New York City in 1998 it cost $40,000 per year to jail someone,
compared with just $12,500 to provide affordable housing and a variety of
supportive services." This after Giuliani announced a controversial homeless
policy that involved police officers rousting homeless people, with some going
to jail. ... Michael Kelly already noted the leftward drift of the waning
Clinton administration in a recent column. Kelly blames both Hillary's campaign and
Gore's need for liberal primary voters. But food stamps are more clearly an
issue in Hillary's race than in Gore's. ...
Not that there's anything wrong with losing money: Isn't the current
(Dec. 20) issue of The New Yorker a little ... thin ? It's
Christmas, after all. Up-market magazines are supposed to be chock full o' ads.
But I counted only 29 pages that looked paid-for. ... Maybe they're making it
all back on their Web site!
More on Flynt: Journalist Dan Moldea, who worked on Larry Flynt's
investigation of Congress, e-mailed to note that I didn't talk to him before I
wrote my recent item
on Flynt and the Newt Gingrich sex scandal. Moldea has a point. Readers can
find Moldea's side of the story here, on his Web site. ... It's fancier than
The
New Yorker 's!
