The Poverty of a Plan
Matt Bai, writing another great item for the New York Times Magazine, explores John Edwards’ poverty agenda in the cover article of a special issue "on the widening gap between the rich and the poor in America".
Read the whole thing. But the critical and important point of the article (The Poverty Platform) is found at the very end of the piece when Bai notes the damage that could result from a campaign without a carefully considered communications strategy for the broader audience – the audience that doesn’t believe government should or can be in the business of addressing poverty.
The stakes are high.
Edwards has pulled together many of the policy proposals of the last 15 years or so -- what he needs is a compelling way to talk about them.
All of which brings to mind an important question about Edwards’s antipoverty agenda: should he manage to outlast Clinton, Obama and the others to win the nomination, does he have a strategy to sell his lavish plan to the American people? How exactly does he plan to pitch middle-class voters on the War on Poverty, Act II?
Since Ronald Reagan, Democrats have largely avoided talking too much about social programs for the poor, fearing that middle-class voters would recoil at the thought of more of their hard-earned money going to welfare moms. Some progressives have tried recently to get around this problem by arguing that there really isn’t much of a distinction anymore between the poor and the middle class — that, as inequality worsens, the once-solid middle class, as the Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren has written, is “vanishing.” By this theory, average voters should now support antipoverty programs because those same programs will benefit the middle class. This is a tricky formulation, since it seems to rely on a narrow and convenient definition of “middle class” — namely, struggling households headed by two working parents with no education beyond high school. In fact, as the Washington policy group Third Way documented in a recent report, middle-class college graduates have performed remarkably well in the new economy, and while their debts have risen, their wealth and assets have accumulated even faster. It turns out that the middle class, in the sense that most Americans think of it, isn’t vanishing at all.
Edwards seems conflicted about which argument to make. He is most compelling about poverty when he’s talking about it as a national obligation — what he calls “the moral issue of our time.” But he also recognizes the need to persuasively connect it to the self-interest of middle-class voters. “For the majority of Americans, you have to convince them that it’s good for America and good for them,” he told me. “Which means it’s important to strengthening and growing the middle class. It’s important to the inequality issue. It’s important to America, and as a result important to them personally.” Edwards summarized his message to voters this way: “We’re all in this together. Do you love your country? We want everyone to have a chance.”
At times, he seems to fall back on the “vanishing middle class” idea, telling audiences that five million more Americans have already slipped into poverty during the Bush years. (Translation: You could be next.) But when we talked about it, he bluntly admitted that such a pitch probably doesn’t work. “They don’t feel that way,” he said, referring to middle-class voters. “I think there is a discomfort, but most people don’t accept the idea that they’re going to go backward.”
Given his obvious passion for a new war on poverty, it’s puzzling that Edwards doesn’t seem to have yet thought through how one really builds a mandate for it. In order to sell Americans on a costly new bundle of antipoverty programs, it’s probably not enough to make an argument of conscience; there has to be some clear and compelling reason why ending poverty isn’t just good and desirable but also critical to the nation’s economic health. The stakes here are exceptionally high. If Edwards isn’t successful, then Democrats will most likely conclude, once again, that poverty is a losing issue. It took 40 years after Robert Kennedy’s death for another establishment Democrat to summon the courage to build a campaign around economic injustice. If Edwards should win the nomination but lose the White House, it might well be another 40 years before anyone tries again.
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