Poverty is key theme for Democrats in '08

from The Boston Globe

Edwards, Obama jostling for votes

By Jenn Abelson, Globe Staff

MARKS, Miss. -- The knee-deep potholes on Cotton Street were filled just hours before Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards arrived this week. Residents had waited years for them to be fixed in a city so overwhelmed by poverty it once moved the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to tears.

At a smoked-ribs barbecue, Edwards invoked the legacy of King, calling it an honor to walk in the same places the civil rights leader did and to bring fresh attention to the poor and disenfranchised.

"But we still have work to do," Edwards said Monday to the dozens gathered on the first day of his three-day tour through poor communities in the United States.

From the underpaid poultry workers in the Mississippi Delta to the uninsured coal miners in Appalachia, Edwards's "Road to One America" tour was designed to showcase what he calls the "other America" of boarded-up factories and foreclosed homes. It was also part of an effort to develop a defining theme for his campaign. But he is not the only Democrat to highlight the 37 million Americans living in poverty as a focal point of the 2008 presidential election.

After decades of promoting economic growth as the best cure for poverty, Democrats are trying to woo voters with promises of direct financial aid and to reach out to people who have seen their lives worsen over the last eight years. Democrats are now embracing such solutions to combat entrenched poverty, and in the process taking on Republicans on issues beyond the war in Iraq.

On Wednesday, Senator Barack Obama, one of the two Democratic front-runners, gave a speech condemning urban poverty in Washington, D.C., as Edwards was wrapping up his tour in Prestonsburg, Ky. Senator Hillary Clinton, the leading Democratic contender in the polls, has joined the antipoverty push, focusing on the need to redress the growing income inequality during a speech in May.

Edwards came armed with some of the most specific proposals among Democratic candidates. At each stop on the tour, he vowed to eliminate tax benefits for the rich, provide healthcare for all, create thousands of one-year transition jobs, and eradicate poverty by 2036.

The question for the Democratic candidates is how the focus on poverty will be received by voters, especially the poor but also the middle-class and wealthy voters who would have to foot the bill for any direct federal assistance to the needy.

During Edwards's trek through eight states, audiences responded politely, sometimes enthusiastically to his calls to action.

"Poverty is not a New Orleans problem, or a Cleveland problem, or a Pittsburgh problem," he said to cheers at the county court house in Prestonsburg, where Robert F. Kennedy concluded his poverty tour in 1968. "It's an American problem. And America has a responsibility to do something about this."

Edwards sought to make personal connections with poor residents to make his point. On Cotton Street in Marks, Edwards held the hand of 80-year-old Sammie Mae Henley , who gets $620 a month to support herself and her daughter. He strolled a street of ramshackle, boarded-up houses and mobile homes facing foreclosure.

But privately, many people in the communities Edwards visited expressed a skepticism born of weariness and despair from years of empty promises from politicians and neglect by the federal government.

Edwards's tour began in the lower ninth ward of New Orleans, one of the neighborhoods hit worst by Hurricane Katrina, and the place where he launched his bid for the presidency in December.

At a forum in a newly rebuilt school, 49-year-old Keith Bernard , whose clothes bore splotches of paint from small jobs that he survives on, wanted to know what Edwards would do to provide jobs.

Edwards responded by outlining his program for temporary jobs, including 50,000 for New Orleans, providing one-year government-funded positions for people who have trouble getting employment. He added: "I can tell you that when I'm president of the United States, you're going to have a job."

After the forum, Bernard shook his head at the back of the room. He said the poverty tour seems more like a political ploy and that he is not confident things will change.

"What president do you know that does what he says he's going to do?" Bernard said.

Edwards's strategy is hardly foolproof, not least because the poor have traditionally not voted in great numbers.

Bruce J. Schulman , a professor of political history at Boston University, says the Democratic Party has not made the problems of the working poor and unequal distribution of wealth a focal point during recent election years, even though those issues were central to the party during its years of greatest success from the 1930s to the 1960s.

By contrast, over the last generation, Republicans have successfully attracted white and Latino voters from the bottom of the income ladder, especially in the South and West, on the strength of the conservative social agenda.

To win back these voters and persuade more black voters to get to the polls, Schulman said Democrats must appeal to struggling working people and shift the focus from the party's modern, liberal social agenda to bread and butter issues.

Even in 2004, when Edwards was the vice presidential nominee, his running mate, Senator John Kerry, promoted budget-balancing and tax reform as the way to create jobs, rather than direct assistance. Now, Edwards is willing to add to the budget deficit to accomplish some of the initiatives. His plan to create 1 million temporary jobs would cost $4 billion annually, and he also would fund 1 million housing vouchers for low-income families.

Obama this week called for $1 billion in spending over five years in transitional job programs and several billion annually to replicate the Harlem Children's Zone in 20 cities across the country. That program provides counseling for parents on caring for newborns as well as early childhood education, child care, after-school programs, and free medical services.

As the two candidates tried to one-up each other in dueling speeches on Wednesday, Obama jabbed at Edwards, saying he has worked longer on poverty issues than Edwards. "This kind of poverty is not an issue I just discovered for the purposes of a campaign ; it is the cause that led me to a life of public service almost 25 years ago," he said.

At each of his stops, Edwards talks about the how America deserves better than to have the number of full-time workers living in poverty doubling over the last 30 years.

He asks rhetorically how, in the richest country in the world, the lowest paid workers are making 10 cents less an hour in real wages than they did three decades ago.

Some analysts, including Elaine C. Kamarck of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, contend the campaign emphasis on poverty will be short-lived, and that foreign affairs will ultimately define the 2008 election.

But the poor hope for a boost -- even if it means simply getting the potholes fixed on their streets.

"Whether Edwards can get everybody else interested in poverty in America, I don't know. I hope so," said Butch Scipper , who lives in Marks.

He works as an administrator for Quitman County, which has one of the lowest median household incomes in the country and has seen the population shrink to about a third of what it was a few decades ago.

"We don't need to be a nation of haves and have-nots," Scipper said. "And that's what we have here in Marks -- a bunch of have-nots."