| The People | ||||
| No
matter what your public policy interest, American Dream is brimming with real-world
examples of the way real lives are affected by the issues that many of us only
discuss in philosophical terms. From child care to domestic violence to drugs,
hunger, and poverty rates, there’s something in this book for everyone. Click
on the topics listed below to read passages from American Dream. |
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| Angela Jobe Kesha Jobe Redd Jobe Von Jobe |
Jewell
Reed Opal Caples Hattie Mae Crenshaw Ken Thigpen |
Michael
Steinborn Jason Turner Bill Clinton Newt Gingrich |
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The month Bill Clinton announced that he was running for president,
she stepped off a Greyhound bus in Milwaukee to start a new life. She was twenty-five
years old and arrived from Chicago towing two large duffel bags and three young
kids. Angie had a pretty milk-chocolate face and a fireplug build-her four-foot-eleven-inch
frame carried 150 pounds-and the combination could make her look tender or tough,
depending on her mood. She had never seen Milwaukee before and pronounced herself
unimpressed. "Why they got all these old-ass houses!" she groused. "Where
the brick at?" Irreverence was Angie's religion. She arrived in Milwaukee
as she moved through the world, a short, stout fountain of exclamation points,
half of them capping sentences that would peel paint from the bus station walls….
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----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Kesha Jobe |
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At fourteen, Kesha was an open, oddly innocent girl, who alone
among the kids still poured out her thoughts in letters to her dad. She also had
a severe case of asthma, which compounded her problems in school. With only one
functioning lung, anything from cold weather to a whiff of cologne could bring
a disabling attack; it was the rare day that passed without one. Landing in Milwaukee,
Kesha had responded with courage, and not just physically. Failing second grade,
barely able to read, she had struggled uphill to a fourth-grade report card that
had shimmered with As. Kesha "has great potential for success," her
teacher had written home. But with her transition to middle school two years later
(Angie's first off the rolls), Kesha's progress slowed.. (P. 187) |
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----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Redd Jobe |
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Angie worried that with his streetwise airs he was trying to
emulate Greg. She also worried he didn't have the mettle to pull it off. "Redd
is as sweet as pie, but wanna be bad," she said. "Redd is a kitten.
Redd is a baby....He's a ticking time bomb." Most of his teachers shared
Angie's fears, and some just gave up on him. But at least one saw some promise,
calling him "artistic," "thorough when you want to be," and
praising his "sense of humor." Among the papers that survived in the
bottom of his closet is a middle-school essay called "A Grimmer Mouse." He has small pointed ears and a big round body....I found him in the woods crying in a box. I took him home and tried to feed him.... Redd suddenly stopped and looked up. Until then, he said, he hadn't realized that he had been writing about himself. "That's about my daddy," he said. "He wasn't here." (p. 316) |
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----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Van Jobe |
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Von was afraid of the dogs; in that, as in most things,
the brothers formed a study in contrasts. Athletic where Redd was sedentary, even-keeled
where Redd was explosive, Von was the only one of Angie's kids diligent about
school. "School's fun," he said. "You benefit more from going to
school than not going." Every inner-city school's got a kid like Von, an
unmined gem waiting for someone to discover his shine. The question was whether
anyone would notice before the mudslide of living swept him away. Riding the school
bus one day, Von made a crack about a classmate's hair. She taunted him back,
Von looked away, and Redd rushed over and punched her. Redd got suspended, but
Von was the one whom Angie whipped, for walking away. Don't ever punk out on your
brother when he's fighting your fight! (p. 188) |
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Since Angie and Greg were all but married,
Jewell was her all but sister-in-law. She was also Angie's closest friend. On
the outside, they formed a study in contrasts. While Angie groomed herself for
durability, Jewell arrived in cover-girl style. She was a half foot taller, with
a curl in her hair, perfect teeth, and art gallery nails; with a gleaming pair
of tennis shoes, she could turn sweatpants into high couture. Still, there was
nothing brittle about her beauty or soft behind her reserve. While Angie swore
away her frustrations and cried after too many beers, Jewell treated pain as a
weakness best locked inside. Jewell was a survivor, too. (p. 6) |
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Something about Opal had always set her apart.
She was probably the smartest of Jewell's childhood friends and definitely the
wildest. Expelled from not one but two public schools, Opal, unlike Angie and
Jewell, went on to graduate and even did a semester of community college. While
Jewell didn't spend much time mulling life beyond the ghetto, Opal worked worldly
allusions into her conversation. Her husband was so stuck on himself "he
thinks he's the Prince of Wales." When their mothers made them go job hunting
as teens, Opal got all the offers. "I have a personality that attracts people
to me-I do!" she said. "Lotta people tell me that." With education,
experience, and a gift for making friends, Opal could leave a welfare office voted
most likely to succeed. But there was something that neither her caseworkers nor
cousins knew. Opal had been smoking cocaine. (p. 13) |
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----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hattie Mae Crenshaw |
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Barely sixty when I met her, Hattie Mae
wasn't old. But she was old enough to remember chopping cotton to pay the plantation
store. She settled into her story from a white-tiger love seat in Jewell's living
room. Family history bores Jewell; she left the room to do her nails. Hattie Mae
smiled as she began: "I growed up on Senator Jim Eastland's plantation in
Doddsville, Mississippi. That's when black peoples was just beginning to come
out of slavery." Patient with my puzzled looks, Hattie Mae talked on, pointing
me toward welfare's forgotten prequel. (p. 18 |
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----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ken Thigpen |
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Ken soon discovered he had the qualities a good drug dealer
needs. He was smart, personable, and hardworking. He was savvy about marketing;
anyone who brought him five clients got a round on the house. And since he didn't
consume his product, he didn't burn up his profits. Plus, he was tough. Because
of his ponytailed good looks, some people called him "Pretty Boy." But
his attitude toward collecting debts brought another nickname, "Batman."
"I used to beat them niggers' ass down with a baseball bat," he said.
He figured a reason that he didn't have kids is that one of his victims returned
and blew off one of his balls. By the time he arrived in Milwaukee, he had spent
half his adult life behind bars. (p. 182) |
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----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Michael Steinborn |
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A social worker! He couldn't believe he was a social worker!
Six months earlier he was an unemployed jack of the building trades, drunk by
noon and wondering how he and his pregnant girlfriend were going to get by. Now
he was a "Financial and Employment Planner," dispensing career advice.
He hated the grip of starched collars on his throat. He hated the new-carpet office
smell. Above all, he hated feeling responsible for any part of ghetto life, just
as he had as a kid collecting his father's rents… "I never wanted to
be a sucker for a sob story," he said. Yet as a caseworker Michael was surrounded
by sob stories, and just like his father he believed some of them. (P. 252) |
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----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jason Turner |
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Onto this stage rambled a curious sight: an
affable, paunchy, middle-aged bureaucrat in a leaky old Mercedes-Benz, convinced
that he could make work programs work even in the heart of the ghetto. Nothing
about Jason Turner suggested a figure about to make welfare history. He tangled
his syntax and chewed cheap cigars. His shirttails were so chronically untucked
that Tommy Thompson privately nicknamed him "Scruffy." But a few months
before Congress passed the new law, Turner seized control of the Milwaukee program
and set off the first urban exodus. In doing so, he turned an obscure patch of
Midwestern blight into a policy lab that would draw visitors from around the globe.
Turner belongs to a welfare subgroup that confounds most stereotypes: the right-wing
idealist. (p. 161) |
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With his dodging and dashing, Clinton did himself a disservice.
He left the impression he was merely playing a cynical game to win an election-an
impression that still chafed him years later. "I was really steamed when
everybody said, 'Oh, Bill Clinton just did this for the ninety-six election'!"
he told me. "Hell, I didn't have to do this to win the election....I was
going to win the election in ninety-six on the economy. I did it 'cause I thought
it was right." Indeed, for all his technocratic renown, a surprising thing
about Clinton's approach to welfare was that his policy preferences weren't all
that strong. Block grants or entitlements, hard time limits or soft ones-he could
argue it either way. The pledge to "end welfare" had let loose a storm,
and Clinton was borne along like everyone else, albeit on waves of his own making. Yet beneath the maddening evasions and elisions, he did have a more consistent vision and a less self-serving one-a vision of how welfare had poisoned the politics of poverty and race. Welfare cast poor people as shirkers. It discredited government. It aggravated the worst racial stereotypes. It left Democrats looking like the party of giveaways….. (p. 150-51) |
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----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Newt Gingrich |
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On November 9, 1994, the country awoke to two words Democrats
never dreamed they would hear: "Speaker Gingrich." Part emperor, part
rock star, part talk-show host, he swept into town trailing spectacle and a dozen
outlandish identities. He was the scorched-earth conservative who denounced his
critics as "viciously hateful" and "totally sick." He was
the wacky futurist who lunched with Alvin Toffler and mused about space aliens.
He was a modern Moses, who delivered his flock from forty years in the minority
wilderness. As he completed his rise from backbench bomb thrower to self-styled
world leader, his triumph seemed absolute. Suddenly Gingrich, more than anyone
else, had the power to define "ending welfare." It took Clinton seventeen
months just to draft a plan; Gingrich, as leader of the Republican House, would
write one and pass it in seventy-nine days. (p. 123) |
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