The Poverty Platform

John Edwards campaign based around the poverty issue will be an interesting litmus test to see just how well that issue resonates in today's climate as it did under LBJ and under FDR.

In that last campaign, in 2004, Edwards, running as the unflappable optimist in the Democratic primaries, wrote an inspiring book about his days as a plaintiff’s lawyer; this time, his unusual entry into the now-standard field of campaign books is called “Ending Poverty in America: How to Restore the American Dream,” a collection of bleak and technical essays by leading liberal academics. In 2004, when Edwards repeated endlessly that he was the son of a millworker, he sounded proud and hopeful; now, when he brings up his humble beginnings, it’s mainly to suggest that he knows what it’s like to be one layoff or one X-ray away from destitution. This kind of grim “twilight in America” approach hasn’t been very successful for Democrats in recent decades. And yet Edwards could be poised to profit from the current moment in Democratic politics. Over the last few years, the party’s labor leaders and its left-leaning intelligentsia — Ivy League academics, columnists, economists — have become increasingly agitated about the ever-widening disparity between a tiny slice of wealthy Americans and the growing ranks of the working poor. These progressives see in Edwards’s campaign a test case for what they hope will be a more anticorporate, antitrade message for the Democratic Party.

The significance of what Edwards is saying, though, goes well beyond messaging and tactics. As the first candidate of the post-Bill Clinton, postindustrial era to lay out an ambitious antipoverty plan, he may force Democrats to contemplate difficult questions that they haven’t debated in decades — starting with what they’ve learned about poverty since Johnson and Kennedy’s time, and what, exactly, they’re willing to do about it.

If you’ve recently flipped to Lou Dobbs on CNN or opened the pages of a liberal political journal like The American Prospect, you might have the impression that America in the Bush years has slipped into a kind of Dickensian darkness, a period of unbridled greed and economic deprivation on a scale not seen in this country since the Great Depression. Like so many things in politics, this has some basis in truth, but only some. To compare Bush’s America with Herbert Hoover’s — or Lyndon Johnson’s, for that matter — is to engage in not very helpful hyperbole. According to the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, the average income of an American taxpayer in 1929, using today’s dollars, was about $16,000 a year; the entire middle class, in other words, was poor by modern standards. It’s true that the official poverty rate, while fluctuating quite a bit, is pretty much unchanged from where it was 40 years ago (it was 14.2 percent in 1967, compared with just under 13 percent at last count), but it’s also true that what we call poverty has changed strikingly. When Johnson stepped onto that front porch in Inez, there were still rural poor who had no electricity, no running water, no primary-school education. Now most rural towns have access to satellite TV, and even the worst of the housing projects built in the 1960s — though thoroughly horrid places to live — come with solid roofs and indoor plumbing.