Jeb Bush's past words on women are bad. Democrats' past laws are worse
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Version 0 of 1. Jeb Bush has a single mother problem – and has for quite a long time. In his 1995 book Profiles in Character, Bush, who plans to make his presidential run official on Monday afternoon, wrote that single mothers should be shamed: “There was a time when neighbors and communities would frown on out-of-wedlock births and when public condemnation was enough of a stimulus for one to be careful.” During his first run for Florida governor in 1994, he said that women on welfare “should be able to get their life together and find a husband.” He also didn’t veto a bill while governor known as the “Scarlet Letter law” that would force women adopting out their babies to publish the names of possible fathers in local newspapers. Put together, these offenses show that Bush has very little empathy for women’s lived experience, and a lot to apologize for. And he has, sort of: Bush now says that while his view on “the importance of dads” has not changed, his thoughts on shaming “have evolved over time.” But while the Democratic National Committee has been doing a happy dance over the past week – excoriating Bush and telling people to remember “how he really feels about you, your family, and your friends when he launches his campaign to be our next President” – they seem to have a selective memory. Because Jeb Bush’s undoubtedly offensive and retrograde thoughts on women were actually codified into law during the Clinton administration, thanks to welfare reform. Marriage promotion programs are most often thought of as a Republican legacy and, indeed, George W Bush’s Healthy Marriage Initiative sunk $150m per year into promoting the policy that poor women didn’t need jobs, but husbands. Local programs funded by the initiative were outrageously sexist – one based in Pennsylvania, for example, offered employment services exclusively to male participants to try to economically advantage men and economically coerce women into marrying them. But long before Bush’s initiative, President Bill Clinton’s 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act first made marriage promotion a central part of federal welfare law. While we know Hillary Clinton doesn’t believe that women should get married to lift themselves out of poverty – equal pay and women’s rights were a huge undercurrent of her official campaign launch speech on Saturday – I still wonder how much Clinton will have to distance herself from her husband’s past policies when they don’t align with her current campaign. Although politicians shouldn’t automatically have to answer for their spouse’s missteps, Clinton invoked her husband’s presidency on Saturday on Roosevelt Island, tying her political experience to his tenure. So while weighting her campaign down with the worst of her husband’s legacy would feel very retro, it’s clear she’ll have to do better at explaining their differences then and now than the new political standby that their views have “evolved”. She needs to not just to clear the political air by addressing the policies that her spouse put into place and which hurt women; she also needs to address their party which stood by him when he did so. After all, it’s not just the Clinton-era welfare reform that caused so much damage to the economic prospects of women and people of color: the Defense of Marriage Act happened on Democrats’ watch, and the “war on drugs” continued on without interruption. It’s thrilling to see Clinton run as a progressive – especially in light of her and President Clinton’s moderate legacy. But if we want to see a woman in the White House – and for to get her there by appealing to the left – we can’t ignore Democratic history or the party’s complicity in policies that hurt women, people of color and the LGBT community. It wasn’t just the Jebs of the world who went after marginalized communities; Democrats did it too, and those voters would be within their rights to be skeptical about whether they’d ever do it again. |