Well now here we go again, more Republican hypocrisy!
(CNN) -- She's out there, lurking in the 2012 presidential race like a horror movie villain who refuses to die.
She has 12 Social Security cards, mooches on benefits from four fake dead husbands, and collects food stamps while driving a Cadillac. She rakes in about $150,000 a year in welfare benefits and, of course, people assume she must be African-American.
President Ronald Reagan gave America a sunny "Morning in America" optimism, but he also gave it the "Welfare Queen," an infamous character who has re-emerged in this year's presidential race.
Critics have accused the three leading Republican presidential candidates of resurrecting Reagan's Welfare Queen by calling President Obama the "food stamp president," implying that blacks live off other people's money, and by declaring that America is moving toward an "entitlement society."
Yet few people have examined the story behind the birth of the Welfare Queen. Did she really exist? Why do people still talk about her when welfare ended 15 years ago? Can her story still swing voters at a time when the great recession has forced more whites to rely on government assistance?
For some, the Welfare Queen is an epic political lie. Reagan invented her, and Americans keep buying the lie.
"It's one of those persistent symbols that come up every election cycle," says Kaaryn Gustafson, author of "Cheating Welfare: Public Assistance and the Criminalization of Poverty."
"This image of the lazy African-American woman who refuses to get a job and keeps having kids is pretty enduring. It's always been a good way to distract the public from any meaningful conversations about poverty and inequality. ''
In time, though, it didn't matter what reporters said. People started repeating the story as true.
"It hangs together as a good story because it's consistent with people's perception of the real world," says Craig R. Smith, who was a speechwriter for former President Gerald Ford and a consulting writer with President George H.W. Bush.
"Like in any good mythology, you need heroes and villains and in the Welfare Queen, you had a villain who was taking advantage of the system."
Was the Welfare Queen a racist story?
Smith doesn't think so. He says Reagan always opposed segregation, and had a "terrific record" combating racism as president of the Screen Actors Guild.
"Reagan was very sensitive about being called a racist," says Smith, author of "Rhetoric and Human Consciousness: A History." "The minute anybody would say something about that, he would get upset. He would say fraud is fraud."
Others say the Welfare Queen story stuck because it exploited white America's racial fears.
Reagan never said the Welfare Queen was black, but he didn't need to. People assumed she was because of rhetorical clues Reagan dropped, says John Hinshaw, a history professor at Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania.
"The Welfare Queen driving a pink Cadillac to cash her welfare checks at the liquor store fits a narrative that many white, working-class Americans had about inner-city blacks," Hinshaw says. "It doesn't matter if the story was fabricated, it fit the narrative, and so it felt true, and it didn't need to be verified."
For at least one woman on welfare at the time, the story was brutal.
It's one of those persistent symbols that comes up every election cycle. The image of the lazy African-American woman who refuses to get a job and keeps having kids is enduring.
Kaaryn Gustafson, author of "Cheating Welfare"
For others, the Welfare Queen reveals an uncomfortable truth: More Americans have turned the social safety net into a hammock.
"You hear these horror stories going around that people are buying junk food with food stamps and paying cash for vodka and beer and things not covered with food stamps -- that gets people mad," says Steven Hayward, author of "The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order: 1964-1980."
The Welfare Queen has become such a legendary character in political circles that her existence is treated like Bigfoot. Most scholars say she never existed, while a few insist the truth is out there.
Gustafson went in search of the Welfare Queen and discovered something surprising.
There wasn't one Welfare Queen, she says. There were three.
The birth of the Welfare Queen story
Here's how Reagan first told the story when he ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976. At virtually every campaign stop, he attacked welfare chiselers by bringing out the same character, according to press accounts.
"There's a woman in Chicago," Reagan said, according to an article in the now-defunct Washington Star. "She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards. ... She's got Medicaid, getting food stamps and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000."
It was a powerful story, but reporters investigating it concluded it wasn't quite true. Some said it may have been based on a then-47-year-old woman in Chicago, but that Reagan wildly exaggerated her abuses.
For the rest of the story go to the link provided:
-
added by:
![]()
kennymotown
- 12 comments
