I have been using Twitter (@bkirby816) more and more. And though I'll never utilize it to full effect (much like this blog), I find it helpful to get a feel for news, events, or to see what a quick take-away might be from someone I follow.
I follow the New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow on Twitter (@CharlesMBlow -- his blog can be found here) I don't know what anyone else thinks of him, but I find him to be on-par with Krugman, Herbert, and Kristof at his paper, Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post, or George Packer at the New Yorker. His Times column runs on Saturday, and I should have read it then, but he tweeted something today that caught my attention:
He goes on to explain over the course of the next tweet or so that "'[m]ost vulnerable' sounds like someone at risk of falling into a bad way...'
"...for the poor," he notes, "particularly those in chronic poverty, things are already bad, have been bad, & will continue to be bad, or get worse..."
He's right. So I read his article of yesterday. Mr. Blow is talking about the State of the Union:
The closest Obama got to a mention [of the poor] was his confirmation for “Americans who’ve seen their paychecks dwindle or their jobs disappear” that, indeed, “the world has changed. The competition for jobs is real.” I’m sure they appreciated that.
The only other Democrat not to mention poverty in the speech was Jimmy Carter in 1980, but even he was able to squeeze in one reference to at least a portion of the poor and disenfranchised, stressing the continuation of jobs programs to “provide training and work for our young people, especially minority youth.” (Carter did mention the poor in a written version that he submitted to Congress.)
It seemed like such a good speech at the time.
Since this was all kind of spawned by new media -- the Twitter thing -- I thought I'd go that route, and find the "word cloud" the White House did on their Facebook page.
Quick, find the word poor or poverty.
You won't find those words.
Why?
Mr. Blow asks this very question:
So how is it that this Democratic president has the temerity to deliver a State of the Union address that completely neglects any explicit mention of the calamitous conditions now afflicting his staunchest supporters: the poor?
(In 2008, Obama won 73 percent of the vote of those earning less than $15,000 a year, 60 percent of those earning between $15,000 and $30,000 and 55 percent of the vote of those earning $30,000 to $50,000. Those were his widest margins of victory of any income group and helped to propel him to victory.)
In the end, he wants to chalk it up to oversight.
I am sorry to say, I am not so sure.
Remember, I loved the State of the Union. I thought it was a great speech, hit the right notes, had a clear, decisive pitch, and issued some solid challenges to Obama's political opponents. In short, it did what it needed to do.
I'll also concede that you can't do everything in a State of the Union speech. If he tried, Obama would still be talking.
I think that Mr. Blow has touched on something larger in American culture today. We've entirely forgotten about the poor -- so much so, we don't even call them that anymore. They are our "most vulnerable." They are "at-risk."
I will be the first to concede that I have fallen into this trap myself. At JWB we're supposed to be working for poor children and families, or at least troubled children and families (the two aren't mutually exclusive). Read our website. I know the word "poor" is on there in a place or two, but not a lot.
This isn't entirely without forethought, I'm sorry to tell you. Poor people, aside from being poor, suffer from two maladies in the political world.
First, they are unpopular with our friends and neighbors on the right side of the political spectrum. Republicans don't like failure and nothing suggests the failure of that shining city on a hill more than the circumstances of a poor person. It was President Reagan, in fact, who made it cool to openly loathe the poor, introducing America to the insidious lie of the "welfare queen."
It's been a few decades since the advent of the welfare queen falsehood, and now Republicans have finally figured out how to craft it as a very successful campaign message. I'll give you two examples, but there's plenty more. One is the new Governor of Florida, hospital grifter (and really rich guy) Rick Scott. You can't have as a cornerstone issue of your campaign mandatory drug testing people who receive government aid and not despise the poor. Governor Scott's entire reason for being in office is to privatize much of government and to cut property taxes by nearly twenty percent. Both of those things will ultimately mean decimated services for those who need them most -- many of them poor.
The other example is this asinine tea party. The average tea partier -- old, slightly higher middle class, and white -- may or may not think about the American poor generally, but be certainly gives no thought to their plight. Take the "15 Economic Statistics That Just Keep Getting Worse" of the Tea Party Patriots (as representative a tea party site as you'll find). With the exception of the first one -- about food stamps -- none of their other core economic boogeymen even come close to addressing issues faced by the poor every day. Yes, the number of Americans living paycheck to paycheck is bad, as is wealth coalesced at the top. But forcing the U.S. Government to use GAAP accounting principles? Really? The professed mission of the tea party (per the Patriot's website) is to "attract, educate, organize, and mobilize our fellow citizens to secure public policy consistent with our three core values of Fiscal Responsibility, Constitutionally Limited Government and Free Markets."
"Fiscal responsibility" and "constitutionally limited government" means government for the few -- and that doesn't include the poor. Trust me, when they say they're focused on "excessive government spending and taxation," they mean no more money for programs that help the poor. In fact, it means building a wealthy and upper-middle class on the backs of the poor.
The second thing the poor suffer from in the political world is bad timing (they kind of have a perpetual case of it, in fact). There is a jobs crisis in America -- a jobs crisis that is deeply affecting the middle class. Take a look at that word cloud again. Don't for a minute think it's a mistake that the top four words are "people," "jobs," "work," and "now."
The overriding theme in America today is one of unease. Yes, it's helped give rise to the misguided tea partiers. But this unease has also obscured chronic poverty in America -- and our chronic inability to deal with it.
We know that investing in early childhood gives a remarkable return on investment -- science actually shows it. We know that we can turn kids around if we start young -- very young -- and get them on track. Geoffrey Canada figured this out in Harlem. It can be replicated across America.
But a good first step would be for us -- all of us, not just those of us who deliver State of the Union messages -- to acknowledge the poor, to use the word poverty, to accept it as part of who we are. The we can work together to fix it.
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