Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber

by Andy Borowitz

Reagan reserved his most scathing commentary about the laziness of others for a woman he made famous as the “welfare queen.” At almost every stop during his 1976 campaign, he told his reliably all-white audiences, “There’s a woman in Chicago. She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards, and is collecting veterans’ benefits on four nonexisting [sic] deceased husbands… And she’s collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000.” (Perhaps fearing that his story lacked sufficient punch, he later upgraded the number of her aliases from 80 to 127.) His invocation of the welfare queen became so relentless that the humorist Calvin Trillin wrote, “If a cherry tree in the White House Rose Garden got chopped down and all the evidence pointed to Ronald Reagan, he would say, ‘I cannot tell a lie; there’s a lady in California who picks up her welfare check every week in a Cadillac.’ ”