Bringing the poor into the picture

I have often scratched my head over the fact that American politicians never talk about the poor. John Edwards did, and look where it got him. I know, I know: it's all about pandering to voters, so candidates elevate the pain of the middle class (who can't afford gas for their SUV's), and pledge to eradicate their suffering. The poor, the story goes, don't vote, so why should politicians waste their breath talking about them. But that's not true. And in a race this tight, with an economy this bad, shouldn't every vote be sought. And, setting cold, cynical political calculations aside, isn't it time someone talked about the poor in America, especially after the epic, wide-screen depiction of poverty we saw in the aftermath of Katrina? Katrina wasn't just a glimpse into what goes wrong when you turn government over to people who have contempt for government (although it was certainly that), it was also a chance to see the poor we customarily ignore.

The English economic historian R.H. Tawney once sketched the poor as "a man standing permanently up to the neck in water, so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him." After years of tearing down the structures built by a series of Democratic presidents throughout the mid-twentieth century, we now find our poor with fewer protections against this rising tide. Katrina swept away the homes and jobs of tens of thousands of poor people in New Orleans. And home foreclosures and recession threaten to swamp hundreds of thousands more.

Obama should take up Edwards' campaign to end poverty within 30 years. Edwards called poverty, "the great moral issue of our time." And that message, even that formulation, resonates powerfully with people in many faiths. Hillary has recently concluded that McCain will make the general election about national security, and that she has a better chance than Obama to compete head-to-head with McCain on the issue. She is wrong about that in too many ways to count, but I'll offer three reasons she is mistaken. First, McCain can claim to be a Vietnam War hero. Yet, as we saw with John Kerry, that doesn't get you very far. But, he was dead wrong on Iraq and continues to be. Hillary is only a little less wrong than McCain on Iraq; she can essentially argue that she has seen the light and, oops, we should have been more careful in going to war in Iraq. Second, McCain's position on Iraq--that we are winning and we shouldn't surrender--is indefensible from a longer-view strategic perspective. We are exhausting our military resources. Our national guard units cannot respond to domestic emergencies and the army can't resond to other threats elsewhere in the world because they are bogged down in Iraq. If you aren't making that argument--and Hillary hasn't indicated she will--then you aren't taking on McCain head on. Third, I don't care what McCain believes, or what Hillary believes McCain believes, there is no way this election is going to be fought and won over national security. This election is about the economy, stupids. And shifting the conversation now to poverty is an opportunity to move your pieces across the board, while McCain is still learning the rules of the game.