Politics Of Welfare Debate Denounced, And Resumed

President Clinton appealed to Congress to “go the final mile” on Saturday by burying differences on welfare reform quickly to keep it from being engulfed by election-year politics.

But his call for reaching “common ground and higher ground” was laced with sharp partisan attacks on Republicans, including indirect but clear swipes at Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

“This is a time to deliver for the American people, not to pander to extremists,” he said in his weekly radio address. “We can’t let welfare reform die at the hands of ideological extremism or presidential politics or budget politics.”

Republicans also used their weekly radio rebuttal to focus on the welfare debate now raging in the Senate.

Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, delivering the GOP response, asserted that “the Congress and the president simply cannot wait any longer to reform the failed welfare system.”

He said the current system “has consigned millions of lower-income and disadvantaged Americans to a life that begins and ends on a dead-end street of irresponsibility, poverty and dependency.”

The Senate is in the process of considering a welfare overhaul measure and several key votes are expected in the coming week. Senate Republicans are deeply divided over terms of the final legislation, and no particular version appears to have majority support.

The House-passed version would ban benefits for mothers younger than 18 with children born out of wedlock and for children born to a parent already receiving assistance.

Clinton and congressional Democrats claim conservative Republicans are trying to hold welfare reform hostage to extreme political views.

“For too long, American people have been frustrated by demands for ideological purity, by politicians who put their personal ambitions first,” Clinton said in an apparent reference primarily to Dole.

The Kansas Republican, the leading GOP presidential contender, has been pressing his own version of welfare reform legislation. Democrats have accused him of going out of his way to court the GOP’s right wing.

Clinton said that some progress had been made toward a consensus on welfare reform.