The Poor Can’t Wait
The Poor Can’t Wait
Rakim Brooks: The Poor Can’t Wait
Poverty in America is a national emergency. Last Wednesday the Department of Agriculture announced that 45 million Americans were participating in the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program. That?s 15 million more American adults than the 30 million who are currently estimated to be below the official poverty line. And today the Census Bureau is reporting that roughly 49 million Americans are impoverished?2.4 million more than the official estimate released in September. If you believe that receiving food stamps makes an American poor, then the combined findings of these reports places American poverty at roughly 21 percent. Over 61 million Americans have been left in the gutter in this economy.
Advocates and concerned citizens must pressure the president and Congress to do something about this growing crisis, but it is wrong to say that President Obama has done nothing to help the poor. As the White House?s October 2011 report Creating Pathways to Opportunity reveals, when the president was strong politically, he touched the lives of millions of poor and working people. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act implemented several policies proclaimed by advocates as effective anti-poverty measures. And they worked. Making Work Pay, a new tax credit for working families, kept 1.6 million families out of poverty. An expanded Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit saved an additional 1.6 million from poverty. Obama?s moves on unemployment insurance kept 4.8 million Americans from falling into destitution, and lifted another 2.2 million out of poverty. In all, that?s more than 10 million Americans impacted by the president?s anti-poverty efforts.
Still, advocates should put pressure on the President to speak more publicly about what ails America?s most despairing households, and encourage him not to muddle the message. Even when he was successful, Obama was always a reluctant warrior in the battle against American poverty. He very rarely spoke about his successes, preferring instead to highlight overall economic trends and policies that specifically targeted the broad American middle class. This was alright when he was legislating effectively, but now his silence compounds the poor?s plight. They have lost their legislator-in-chief, and he has not been replaced by a leading advocate.
The president?s silence is not a gaffe. Letting Republicans bind Democrats to the poor has always produced electoral disaster for liberals. Consider the candidacies of George McGovern and Walter Mondale, and you?ll understand why Bill Clinton made welfare reform a central issue in his campaign and continues to claim it as one of his presidential successes. As E.J. Dionne explained in Why American Hate Politics, Democrats lost the white working class when liberal reformers made race and poverty central to their agenda.
Thus Tavis Smiley is right when he declares that the president won?t say the word poverty without equivocation. Just as Obama has sought to avoid any appearance of preferential treatment for blacks and minorities, he will hold poverty at arm?s length. He needs those voters who Hillary Clinton referred to as ?hard-working Americans? to win re-election.
The president?s chief advisors know the script too. At a recent summit on poverty hosted by the Root, presidential advisors Valerie Jarrett and Melody Barnes continued to submerge Obama?s anti-poverty efforts. Though labeled as an anti-poverty platform, Creating Pathways to Opportunity contains a jumble of policies directed at poor, low-income, and working- and middle-class families. Barnes and Jarrett justified this by calling the report a ?holistic? approach. That is plain spin. These policies are not all directed at the poor, represented by families earning less than $21,000 and individuals working for less than $11,000 annually. Creating Pathways to Opportunity has a broader audience, one that resembles the voters that Obama will target in 2012.
Defenders of the president claim that he is only silent about his successes because no one wants to give him credit at a time when people continue to struggle to get by. Saving more than 10 million from poverty is a laudable accomplishment, but not a re-election slogan when, since 2009, more than 6 million people are newly poor and 12 million more Americans are receiving supplemental nutritional assistance. Just as no unemployed person wants to hear that the president saved someone else?s job, no hungry person wants to hear that they would have been hungrier were it not for the president. They just want three square meals a day and a job. Obama?s problem is that, when asked that fabled question, ?Are you better off today than you were four years ago?? Americans of all stripes are answering, ?No.?
I?m sympathetic to that argument, but silence about his policies doesn?t mean that he needs to be silent about poverty. And the fact that he can?t pass any legislation doesn?t justify his silence either. Candidate Obama understood the power of pure symbolism when it buttressed his own presidential aspirations. There?s no reason he can?t muster some of that magic on behalf of the poor. They can?t wait.
