Competition in cruelty.

• Position: Welfare reform politics - Editorial

Bob Dole and Bill Clinton are holding a contest to see who can get tougher with poor women and children on welfare. It is a competition in cruelty, and the losers are millions of poor children whom welfare is designed to protect.

Both Clinton and Dole are poised to strip away the federal guarantee that families with children can collect minimal cash grants from the government when they have nowhere else to turn.

Both are recommending absolute limits on welfare, so if a family uses up its allotted time, gets off welfare, but later falls on hard times, it will be out on the street.

Dole has attempted to distinguish himself with proposals that heap stigma on welfare clients, including mandatory drug testing, and denying aid to any teenage girl who becomes pregnant.

But aside from these gratuitously nasty gestures, the two candidates agree on the basic thrust of welfare reform.

Recently, Clinton and Dole raced to Wisconsin to have their pictures taken in the state that has concocted the most radical welfare plan yet advanced anywhere in the nation.

Republican Governor Tommy Thompson has promised to do away with AFDC altogether starting in 1997.

Clinton quickly announced that he is in favor of Thompson's experiment, which now awaits a federal waiver. Republicans rushed to criticize Clinton for trying to bask in the glow of a Republican idea.

Despite all the national excitement over Wisconsin's plan, people familiar with welfare experiments in this state are appalled.

Governor Thompson's track record on welfare is abysmal. Even as Thompson announced his latest program, "Wisconsin Works," the bipartisan Legislative Audit Bureau was releasing a report showing that Learnfare, one of Thompson's major welfare initiatives, is a failure.

The real story about Wisconsin's experiments with welfare is that they don't work. But the facts don't seem to matter.

Learnfire has had "virtually no positive impact," according to the audit bureau's report. This is only the latest in a series of reports, commissioned by the state, that gives Learnfare a failing grade. In 1990, a federal judge issued a temporary injunction against the program because it left hundreds of people in Milwaukee homeless and hungry, many of them victims of faulty record-keeping. But under the new Wisconsin Works program, Learnfare will be expanded statewide.

There is plenty of evidence that Wisconsin Works won't work, either. State officials brag that they have reduced the welfare caseload...