This week two major proposals are being unveiled for reauthorization of the landmark 1996 welfare reform legislation.

Naturally, the Administration's proposal, which the President summarized in remarks at a Washington church yesterday, will get the lion's share of press attention.

But the proposal that is more likely to provide the foundation for ultimate Congressional action was outlined today at a press conference by DLC Chairman Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) and Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE). (Bayh and Carper were joined at the press conference by Sens. Jean Carnahan (D-MO) and Ben Nelson (D-NE).)

Both proposals show the remarkable convergence that has occurred since 1996 around the idea of making support for immediate private-sector employment -- the New Democrat "work first" model -- the main thrust of welfare reform. GOP revisionist history notwithstanding, it wasn't that way in 1996 itself, when Republicans were split between those who mainly wanted to punish unmarried mothers and those who wanted to dump the whole welfare problem on the states with little direction. It was President Clinton and his New Democrat allies who insisted on making work the focus of welfare reform and the primary condition for giving states unprecedented flexibility in how they achieved this goal. And that's why the ultimate legislation, despite some flaws, worked in reducing welfare dependency by more than half.

The President's proposal shows how far he -- and presumably, much of his party -- has moved in the New Democrat direction on welfare reform. Just as the DLC and the Progressive Policy Institute earlier recommended, he would raise the "work participation rate" -- the percentage of people on welfare engaged in full- or nearly full-time work to 70 percent over four years, from the current rate of 50 percent. Of equal importance, he would eliminate the biggest loophole in the work focus of the 1996 law -- the so-called "caseload reduction credit," which let states count any drop in welfare numbers for any or for no reason as "work."

The Bayh-Carper proposal also raises the work participation rate to 70 percent, and kills the "caseload reduction credit" loophole. But unlike the Bush proposal, it provides the resources and incentives to succeed in moving more people from welfare to work.

The three big problems with the President's proposal are:

• It ignores the men: Now that the country has agreed that welfare mothers should be required and helped to work to support their families, it's time to deal with the other half of the problem. The Bush proposal does very little to provide new encouragement, or new punishment, for non-custodial parents (usually fathers) to support their children financially.

• It seems to accept the goal of encouraging "shotgun weddings" for welfare recipients: In a nod to social conservatives who still wish welfare reform would punish unwed mothers, the Administration proposes spending $100 million a year to promote marriage -- even though no state has a clue about how to do it. Those funds would be better spent promoting work and responsibility for mothers and fathers alike, and helping to discourage teens from becoming pregnant in the first place.
• It doesn't provide the resources to put more people to work: The biggest shortcoming in the President's proposal is that it shortchanges the resources states need to help people move from welfare to work and lift themselves out of poverty. The Bush plan doesn't add a single dollar for childcare, which is critical to the ability of welfare mothers to go to work.

By contrast, the Bayh-Carper bill deals with all these problems:

• It makes "the men" a primary focus of welfare reform: The Bayh-Carper proposal says to men who father children on welfare: If you owe child support, you have to go to work to pay it off. The plan gives states resources to help place men in jobs, and provides for a real national campaign to promote responsible fatherhood.

• It focuses on reducing teen pregnancy.

• It provides real resources to move people from welfare to work, and help lift themselves from poverty: States are given the resources to offer intensive job placement and support services; to help ensure that new workers retain health insurance; and to provide transportation assistance (or "upward automobility"). Most importantly, the Bayh-Carper proposal includes $5 billion in additional childcare funds so parents can leave welfare for work.

In many respects, the Bayh-Carper proposal is to welfare reform what the New Democrat "3R's" bill was to education reform. The Administration is supporting the right accountability measures to ensure that welfare reform is focused on private-sector jobs; while many Congressional Democrats are arguing for more resources to make accountability measures work. Bayh-Carper offers both, and thus provides a blueprint for a compromise that can work.

There will be some liberal advocacy groups, of course, who argue that increasing work requirements will be impossible during an economic downturn -- basically, the same advocacy groups who argued in 1996 that welfare reform would fail dismally, leaving millions of families sleeping on heating grates in the nation's cities. And some state officials will whine about work requirements as federal "micromanagement" -- just as many state officials in 1996 demanded no-strings federal cash.

But the reality is that thanks to the success of the 1996 reforms, states will have a much smaller welfare population to deal with in the future, with at least as much money, and an economy that, while not continuing the boom-times of the late 1990s, is still far better than the pre-welfare reform economy of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

It's time to consolidate the reforms of 1996, expand them to include fathers and to focus more broadly on the working poor, get serious and systematic about making work pay, and finally finish the work of redeeming Bill Clinton's pledge in 1992 to "end welfare as we know it." New Democrats should welcome this debate. Sens. Bayh and Carper, who as Governors of their states were pioneers in implementing the first round of work-based welfare reform, are in the right place at the right time to push the debate forward.