Do Candidates Overlook the Poor?

POSTED BY Rosemary Pennington, 18 January 2008

“Screw the middle classes, I will never accept them”.

This election cycle, that line from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Evita” has been running through my head – not because I think the middle class crunch is unimportant, but because there’s another segment of society that seems to have been overlooked by the big dogs running for both the Democratic and Republican presidential nominations.

You know.  The poor.

And if you read Raleigh-Elizabeth Smith’s post this morning about the poor getting poorer, you’ll realize what a big oversight this is.

Granted, former North Carolina senator John Edwards has spent years working on poverty issues (he did help found UNC-Chapel Hill’s Center for Poverty, Work and Opportunity) and has talked at length about “Two Americas” and about how the poor need help.  But, you know, he’s not got much media attention.  Not as much as, say, the race debate that the Obama and Clinton campaigns have been engaged in.  Or the fact Mitt Romney’s a Mormon or Mike Huckabee’s a Southern Baptist.

Those, my friends, are easy stories.  They sort of write themselves.  But those issues stories, they’re harder to wrap around.  Especially when the candidates aren’t really talking about them.

So, I decided to dive into the candidates’ websites.  I hit the Democratic Big Three – Edwards, Obama and Clinton.  And also took a gander at what Romney, Huckabee and John McCain had to offer.  (I chose those three because they’ve all one a contest at this point.)

So, first, the Democrats.

As may be expected, John Edwards' website went into the most detail on just how he’d continue Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty”. There’s a lot on the site and you should really check it out for yourself, but one of the things I found interesting is that Edwards says he’d like to create one million “stepping stone” jobs.  Short-term gigs to help people gain the skills needed to move into better paying jobs somewhere down the line.  Sounds a bit like FDR’s Civilian Conversation Corps to me.  

Barack Obama’s page dealing with his plan to fight poverty isn’t quite as lengthy or detailed as Edwards’s, but there are a number of similarities between the two candidates.  Obama also proposes created what he calls “transitional” jobs to help people catapult out of poverty.  Both Obama and Edwards would like to raise the minimum wage.

Over on Hillary Clinton’s website, well, there’s not much there to look at when it comes to poverty issues.  She has a section devoted to the “middle class crunch” – where she proposes lowering taxes for that section of society as well as strengthening unions.  Some of the other issues she’s concerned with, improving schools and improving access to healthcare, do touch on the issue of poverty.  But there’s nothing dealing with it directly.

Now, for the other side of the aisle.

First, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.  Considering he won the Republican primary in Michigan, a state that’s struggled economically for years, I thought perhaps he’d have a little something about poverty on his site.  

I was wrong.  There’s a lot about terrorism and national security issues, but nothing about helping the poor.

Onto former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.  He helmed one of the poorest states in the union, there’s got to be something there, right?

Wrong again.  He does talk about strengthening education and reforming healthcare, but says nothing explicit about poverty.

Is it going to be three strikes for the Republicans? Or will the Maverick pull them out of the hole?

Nope.  Arizona senator John McCain’s straight talk deals with the economy, tax cuts and the war in Iraq, not a whole lot about the poor.

Not that I’m surprised by poverty’s lack of mention on the Republican websites.  We are in primary season and they’re aiming at their base.  And poverty’s not been a big issue for the party traditionally.  But, given the wild nature of this year’s election cycle, I thought I’d check anyway.  

And, granted, I didn’t do a lot of digging on the websites, just looking around in the “issues” section of each one.  But if there’s nothing on poverty there, where else would it be?

With close to 37 million Americans living in poverty, and many more on the cusp of joining them, you would think this would be a bigger issue for all the candidates who want to be President.  Maybe it will become a bigger one after Tsunami Tuesday, when pundits expect the nominations on either side to be locked in; I don’t know.  All I know is there are a lot of hungry people out there and it would be nice if they garnered a mention every now and then.
Obama, Clinton, McCain, Romney, Huckabee, election 08, Edwards, rosemary pennington, poverty, issues