ON THE OTHER HAND:

Former Sen. Moynihan Has Died (Martin Weil, March 26, 2003, Washington Post)

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the scholar and senator, the orator and author, whose intellectual and political leadership did much to shape national policy on the major issues of his time, died today, his successor, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton announced on the Senate floor.

The cause of death was not immediately announced but Sen. Moynihan, 76, had been ill for several months. This month he had been hospitalized at the Washington Hospital Center after an emergency appendectomy.

A Democrat, Sen. Moynihan represented New York in the Senate for four terms. He decided not to seek reelection in 2000.

Throughout his 24 years on Capitol Hill, he was one of the most trenchant and memorable voices in the ongoing national debate on such issues as national security and Social Security, as well as on welfare reform and family matters.

Beyond that, he gained honor, recognition-and often ignited controversy-in many roles: Harvard teacher and lecturer, ambassador to India and to the United Nations, adviser to presidents.

He was an advocate of renewing and preserving cities and their downtown buildings, winning renown in Washington as a champion of restoring Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the U.S. Capitol. His use of the phrase "benign neglect" to characterize an approach to racial policy that he was advocating set off a firestorm that smoldered for years

A blend of the ivory tower and the big city streets, he combined gifts and qualities that were in many ways unique in American public life: a propensity to lecture fellow senators on sometimes abstruse topics and a proven ability to win the votes of an often fractious and fragmented constituency on election day.

An orator with an easy mastery of statistical fact and telling anecdote, he was a pungent phrasemaker, formidable in debate. In diagnosing the nation's social ills, he warned in an oft-repeated phrase, that America was "defining deviancy down." [...]

Throughout his career he maintained a vigorous interest in protecting the long-term vitality of American society by shoring up Social Security and reforming welfare.

But he was also notable for his opposition to aspects of the welfare reform measures passed during the Clinton administration.

He expressed the fear that it penalized helpless children, and when it was signed he said: "Shame on the president." [...]

Speaking in August, 1980, at the Democratic National Convention that renominated Jimmy Carter, he warned that the "Soviet empire" had begun again to expand, extending influence into Central America while bolstering its nuclear forces in a manner that was "mad and relentless."

The next year, the first year of the Reagan administration, he expressed his opposition to cuts passed by the Senate Budget Committee. "We have undone 30 years of social legislation in three days," he complained.

As that last quote reminds us of Mr. Moynihan's desertion of the very ideas that he made famous once he got to the Senate, the following profile reminds us of his promise, Moynihan of the Moynihan Report (THOMAS MEEHAN, July 31, 1966, NY Times):

The degree of fame that Moynihan has attained recently stems mainly from the fact that he is the author of a much-discussed Government paper entitled "The Negro Family: The Case For National Action," now commonly referred to as the Moynihan Report, in which he urged that the Federal Government adopt a national policy for the reconstruction of the Negro family, arguing that the real cause of the American Negro's troubles is not so much segregation, or a lack of voting power, but the circumstance that the structure of the Negro family is highly "unstable and in many urban centers. . .approaching complete breakdown." This is so, stated Moynihan, because of the increasingly matriarchal character of American Negro society, a society in which a husband is absent from nearly 2 million of the nation's 5 million Negro families and in which, too, some 25 per cent of all births are illegitimate. Moreover, Moynihan pointed out, children, especially boys, who grow up in fatherless homes tend not to adjust to this country's essentially patriarchal society, particularly when their problems are complicated by poverty and racial prejudice.

"From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles," wrote Moynihan a few months ago, enlarging on his report for the Jesuit magazine, America, "there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future--that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder. ..are not only to be expected, they are very near to inevitable. And they are richly deserved."

Here having warned of welfare dependency, when the opportunity came to end that dependence, he voted to maintain it. Similarly, having coined the phrase "defining deviancy downward", he found himself incapable of voting for Bill Clinton's impeachment.

Mr. Moynihan was by all accounts a genial man and he did raise some issues in provocative ways. But, unfortunately, he left the heavy lifting on those issues to others and thereby squandered much of his four terms in the Senate, falling back often on the most purely partisan position. No Senator ever did less with more.

MORE:
-Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Retrospective: With News and Reviews From the Archives of The New York Times
-Pat Moynihan, RIP (Steven Hayward, No Left Turns)
-Clinton's Democratic Support Slips Further (CNN All Politics, 9/06/98)

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) said on ABC's "This Week" program that he thinks if Clinton perjured himself in the Paula Jones' sexual harassment suit about an affair with Monica Lewinsky, it would constitute an impeachable offense, even without additional evidence of obstruction of justice.

-More Moynihan Malarkey (Jonathan Chait, June 1, 2000, Slate)

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 26, 2003 8:34 PM