Focus on Poverty & Public Policy

One of the great blessings in my life has been the opportunity to travel to different parts of the world. In every place I have found myself, I have also found the poor, in cities, in remote rural surroundings, in small pockets of deprivation surrounded by suburban abundance. My own family has seen moments of more and less abundance, but we have always had a roof over our heads and food on the table. We have been sheltered by a loving extended family, and even the shock of involuntary unemployment has brought few dramatic changes to our comfortable life. The bill collectors don't call after 9:00 p.m., or before 8:00 a.m., we enjoy clean running water, electricity, and my parents even financed a wonderful family excursion to Pennsylvania. I have so many advantages in my experience and education that I know any economic setbacks, while unsettling, are not everlasting. However, for millions of Americans, poverty is a hard, grinding trudge through an endless tunnel of despair.

A recent ballot initiative here in Rhode Island roused many of the poor to get behind the Narragansett Indian proposal to build a casino in South County. It's not that folks didn't understand the arguments against it, they simply couldn't afford to let an opportunity to trade their lousy $7/hr. job for a slightly less lousy job, at $10/hr. plus tips, get away from them. The entry of these infrequent voters into the process made the casino's defeat a much closer thing than anyone anticipated.

Conventional political wisdom has held lately that fighting poverty does not win many votes. Nonetheless, John Edwards has made this a central issue of his campaign. He unabashedly embraces the right of workers to organize into unions, promotes access to health care and education for all, while refusing to accept contributions from corrupt corporate special interests. Naturally most of the narcissistic media elite can't stand this rabble-rouser.

Kudos to E.J. Dionne for giving Edwards some credit in today's Washington Post:

Democrats have lost enormous ground by allowing a myth to take hold that Lyndon Johnson's Great Society was a failure. "In the 1960s, we waged war on poverty, and poverty won" is one of the most powerful bits of rhetoric in the conservative arsenal.
Edwards took on this falsehood directly in his speech Wednesday in Prestonsburg, Ky., at the end of his tour of impoverished regions. "We accomplished a lot," he said of LBJ's time, "civil rights laws, Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps and Head Start and Title I aid for poor schools. The Great Society and other safety-net programs have cut the number of people living in poverty in half."
Edwards understands that unless the country is given hard evidence that government can succeed, it will never embrace government-led efforts at social reform....
Edwards put forward a pro-labor agenda to increase wages and benefits. He would also step up the recruitment of good teachers for poor children and create 1 million housing vouchers to allow "all families -- not just wealthy ones -- the freedom to move to the communities they choose."
As one of the shrewdest students of poverty has said, "the poor are politically invisible," removed as they are "from the living, emotional experience of millions upon millions of middle-class Americans."
Those words were written in 1962 by the late Michael Harrington in "The Other America," the book that helped launch the War on Poverty. In 2007, the poor are less politically invisible than they have been in a long time. That gives a new war on poverty at least a fighting chance. Edwards deserves some credit for that.