Skewering the Do-Gooders

With a cover featuring Michael Moore, Senator Clinton, Dan Rather, Rosie O'Donnell and Senator Kerry, it is easy to imagine that Mona Charen's "Do-Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim To Help - And the Rest of Us," (Sentinel, 269 pages, $25.95) is the latest contribution to the lexicon of screaming political titles.

But Ms. Charen isn't interested in the large print, angry name-calling style of the crank-'em-out polemicists. As in her previous book, "Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame Americans First," she amasses a small mountain of archival and reporting data and takes a sledgehammer to traditional liberal thinking on crime, affirmative action, welfare, family policies, homelessness, and education standards.

The book's most fun chapter reviews the wildly hyperbolic predictions of woe that accompanied the 1996 welfare reform act. With schadenfreudic relish, Ms. Charen details how many leading Democrats predicted with absolute certainty that the bill's commonsense requirements for 16-hour weekly work requirements and benefit limits meant doom for poor families. Senator Leahy of Vermont called it "anti-family, anti-child, and mean-spirited." Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts predicted it would "leave children illfed, ill-clothed, and ill-housed," calling the bill "legislative child abuse." New Jersey Senator Lautenberg foretold that American streets would resemble Brazil's dystopia of impoverished children.

Botching the call so spectacularly on the most important domestic policy proposal of the decade should have spurred some soul-searching and examination among the bill's critics. But, Ms. Charen notes, Mrs. Clinton and Barbara Ehrenreich have praised the bill sparingly and grudgingly.

If the cavalcade of silly welfare reform pronouncements is the most diverting, the preceding chapter is the book's darkest, featuring a soul wearying examination of how the left seeks to exploit and maximize racial tensions. (It is hard to believe, but apparently there once was a time when Al Sharpton was not a universally respected figure among Democrats.)

The hysteria over church burnings in 1995 is easily forgotten, but illustrative of how our sad modern debate progresses. After the Southern Poverty Law Center discovered an epidemic of black church fires and USA Today publicized their findings, the faulty research was taken as evidence of a vast racist conspiracy. Jesse Jackson explicitly blamed conservative viewpoints on welfare, crime and affirmative action for the burning of African-American churches, and Time magazine's Jack E. White wrote bluntly, "conservative Republicans. should wonder if their coded phrases encouraged arsonists."

Ms. Charen notes USA Today's much later conclusion that "Analysis of the 64 fires since 1995, shows only four can be conclusively shown to be racially motivated." Of the 30 people arrested in the arsons, 10 were black. Ms. Charen points out that a political movement that once put racial equality as its foremost priority has assumed a "rush to assume the worst about America's white majority." This coastal-elitist Democrat assumption that any community south and west of Washington must be a hotbed of widespread and pernicious racism in 1995 sowed the seeds for their presidential candidates going 0-for-anywhere in this region in 2000 and 2004.

While a solid piece of work, "Do-Gooders" leaves the reader with a nagging hunger. In "Useful Idiots" Ms. Charen made a more consistent effort to compare the wrongheaded thinking behind the left's last blown call in foreign policy - the Cold War - and demonstrated how their loudest voices are making the same mistakes in the war on terror.

But the big domestic issues of President Bush's upcoming second term and beyond are over private Social Security accounts, immigration, stem cell research, gay marriage, and overhauling the tax code. Ms. Charen makes only glancing references to these upcoming fights. It would have been nice to show how the mental blocks of liberal thinking on these issues - a tendency to underestimate the importance of personal responsibility, an eagerness to blame an abstract and collective "society" for problems - could hinder their analysis of the big domestic challenges of the coming years.

In 1994, the arguments and evidence in this book would have been political nitroglycerin. In 2005, they're yesterday's news. Mr. Kerry barely mentioned most of these issues last year. "Do-Gooders" does well. But I wish I had the benefit of Ms. Charen's keen insights on tomorrow's fights as much as yesterday's.

Mr. Geraghty writes the TKS column on National Review Online.