The Poverty Problem Problem
A post I wrote on Blue Hampshire in August 2007. If I remember correctly David Sirota and his supporters told me my "bottom 99%" focus was the stupidest thing they had read in a long time. Ha!
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The Poverty Problem Problem
Sat Aug 11, 2007 at 13:50:58 PM EDT
So it's been several weeks since Edwards's "poverty tour", and perhaps it's time to ask why his signature issue seems unable to get traction. I can't speak for the the areas where Edwards has toured, but I can take some guesses regarding the lack of traction in New Hampshire, where 10% of children live below the poverty line.
The problem here is that putting the myriad of problems associated with poverty under a "poverty platform" makes them less relevant to people's lives.
Just recently, for instance, I helped move a thirty-seven year old friend of mine back into her father's house. Because of a medical condition that limits her employment, she makes less than $12,000 a year, and the cost of living just got to be too much for her.
$12,000 a year. (Of course, she was able to get a credit card...)
And her apartment? Here's the wall of the bedroom in which she was sleeping:
What you're seeing there is what happens to plaster over the space of a year when the landlord refuses to believe the mortar is leaking.
Medical condition, low pay, disturbing living conditions. But would she say she's in poverty? No. At least not without an ironic laugh.
She'll tell you straight up: she's not poor. She's broke.
I would suggest, that in New Hampshire at least, very few people living below the poverty line would see themselves as having a "poverty problem". They have a rent problem. They have a child care problem. They have a medical problem. Recently they have a rising food cost problem.
But were you to ask them to name their current problems, I doubt poverty would rate.
So why pull all these problems under a poverty umbrella? It's pretty simple really. The "poverty problem" is a middle class construction with Christian overtones -- by pulling these together in a poverty platform Edwards gains the right to talk about these in moral terms. It's difficult to talk about the skyrocketing price of milk as a moral issue, but tied to poverty, you can do that. Same with health care, education, childcare, and labor.
This, of course, has been the dream of the Democratic consulting class for a while -- that we on the left can counter the empty moralism of the right with a rousing indictment of our nation's true moral failure: the failure to provide those that fall through the cracks of our economy with enough to live decently.
But it's flawed. It's a pipe dream. Forces political and otherwise have removed the barriers between the middle class and the poor. Burn rates are high, savings are low, and Corporate America, which used to absorb risk in exchange for reaping rewards has taken the rewards and pushed the risk down on to their employees.
There is room for some moralism here, if that's the way you want to play it -- but it a world where every middle class family is one medical procedure away from sinking permanently into the underclass, that moralism looks less like RFK and more like Lou Dobbs. And if you find that distasteful, it's probably best to stay out of the moralism business altogether.
I think Edwards has some of the smartest policy proposals I've seen. If he can move away from the moral frame, and call the problems by the names people know them under, more people might see the strengths of those policies -- we might realize that my friend's problems with housing and medical care are not that far removed, at least qualitatively, from the problems that squeeze the middle class.
Drop the poverty frame, and there's a powerful message to the "bottom 99%" of us that we are more similar than we think, and we should throw our lot in together, not out of charity, but out of common interest -- an approach which, to my thinking, has always been more humane in tone than charity.
Here's hoping Edwards adjusts his messaging on this.
And if he wants to see the wall on his next tour, he's welcome to stop by. My friend is gone, but I know the current tenant.
She's a Richardson supporter.
