[Comment] Every candidate should be talking about poverty - The Plain Dealer

from The Cleveland Plain Dealer

It's easy to dismiss Democrat John Ed wards' "poverty tour" as political theater.

Although Edwards has been talking about "two Americas" - "the rich and everybody else," as he put it in Youngstown Tuesday - since he first ran for president in 2004, he's always seemed a bit of an unlikely populist. Maybe it's the fortune gleaned from jury awards, the North Carolina mansion or the big lecture fees to talk about poverty. On one leg of this week's field trip, ABC News reported, his wife, Elizabeth, was talking about her new $245 sneakers. Her extremely well-barbered husband is on the cover of Men's Vogue. It makes people wonder if Edwards is for real.

But wealth doesn't preclude empathy for the poor - think of Franklin Roosevelt, regarded by his patrician peers as a traitor to his class, or Robert Kennedy, who in 1968 led reporters through some of America's poorest communities. Nor is the political wisdom of taking on poverty immediately obvious, even in a Democratic Party where economic populism is again chic. Poor people have never been a potent voting bloc in this country, which may be why few politicians give them more than lip service.

So even if you choose to roll your eyes when Edwards implores a gaggle of reporters to "listen to these folks, not me" as he streaks from New Orleans' Ninth Ward to rural Mississippi to Cleveland's Mount Pleasant neighborhood to Youngstown to Appalachian Kentucky, give him credit for shining a light on the sad reality of so much poverty in this land of plenty.

As important as other issues are, every candidate for president ought to be talking about how to end the isolation of the poor. About the predatory lending that has ravaged this city and the high-poverty school systems that often seem to accept failure as a given. Thirty-seven million poor Americans - and many more who are one layoff notice or health emergency away from joining them- deserve to be part of the national discussion.

Some of Edwards' suggestions on these fronts do not inspire. His call for 1 million "stepping-stone jobs" is reminiscent of old federal programs. His recipes for encouraging economic diversity in school systems have been tried with scant success. It will take more than rewritten trade agreements and federal incentives for alternative energy to revitalize a manufacturing sector that nowadays demands skills that few of the chronically poor have.

So let's hope Edwards was listening when the go-getters at the Youngstown Business Incubator pleaded for a government that makes it easier for them to launch new enterprises and to train workers for the future. And let's hope his rivals listened to a succession of people tell Edwards they were "embarrassed" - about taking bad loans, falling behind on their bills, marrying abusive spouses. Would-be leaders who ignore such Americans ought to be embarrassed.