Mitt and the Poor
Mitt Romney has said in an interview on CNN that he’s not interested in the poor. That’s not surprising, no one is. Certainly not Barak Obama. The fact is the last presidential candidate who was genuinely concerned about the very poor was gunned down in Los Angeles in 1968. Jimmy Carter famously went to the South Bronx as a candidate and promised to do something. But he did nothing and did not speak to the nation about poverty. The last president to care or do anything about the poor was RFK’s nemesis, Lyndon Johnson. Johnson’s father served in the Texas State Legislature where he was an idealist and, at least in terms of policy, a socialist. His mother came from a prominent family. But the Johnsons were poor and Lyndon spent his childhood in shame as a result. As a congressman he brought electricity to his rural district. He did so for a lot of reasons. One was a deal he made with Kellogg, Brown and Root. Another was watching the women in his family become arthritic and hump backed at a young age from hauling water. He never forgot the pain and shame of poverty and used his ill-gotten power to do good. I hope in his epic biography Robert Caro discovers the key to unlock this appalling, brilliant, paradoxical man.
Obama is in a position to speak about the poor. It is his legacy as a politician but also, as a young man, he was a community organizer. But the fact is in America the poor don’t vote. And the poor are overwhelmingly viewed as being black or Latino, even though the numbers clearly show that most poor Americans are white.
The poor in America are an underclass, with a common set of problems that cut across race and ethnicity, although these play a prominent role in how the poor are perceived and exacerbate an already dire situation. The poorest people in America continue to be Native Americans, who are also the most invisible. There are divisions between the urban and the rural poor and now, for the first time, suburban poverty. Oddly, the white poor are despised by liberals, who may not know it. It is easy to talk about rednecks. Rednecks are, fat, stupid, nasty bigots, after all. There is no sympathy for poor whites because they are not perceived as facing racism. But they do face stereotyping and those stereotypes are limiting, infuriating and ultimately defiantly embraced. But again, they don’t vote, so who cares?
It matters that people in this country are poor, and that the middle class everyone panders to and wants to save are falling rapidly into the ranks of the poor. Once there no one will want their vote. It used to be that Americans cared about poverty. After the war, as many Americans of all races rose out of the poverty of the depression, they took with them the memory of what it was like to not have enough to eat, of old people living without pensions, health care, adequate housing or food. They had relatives who were still poor and lived in neighborhoods that were not so rigidly segregated by class. There were unions and civic groups and a legacy of leftist activism, Socialists, Communists and Anarchists. A left center coalition ran the country and incremental improvement was possible.
This doesn’t exist anymore. It is possible today for a man who might be president to say the poor don’t matter to him. He says they don’t need him because they have a safety net. Maybe from the height of a 20 million dollar a year income that safety net has tiny holes. But when you are falling into it from a $40,000 dollar a year income, as you fall to a $28,000, to a $22,000 to an $18,000 dollar income, or no income at all, the webbing widens and the holes become yawning gaps. To be caught by the safety net is to live in constant peril, violence, and uncertainty, knowing the nation despises you. Sadly, it’s also possible for a man who should know better, who does know better, who actually is president and could make a difference to make the same political calculation his opponent does. They don’t vote. They don’t matter.
