Topper, here is a great column by EJ Dionne from today's WAPO. This is only the first half of it, but I put the link to the whole thing below. Now, this is what I don't understand about you. You claim that Dems have been losing elections because they cater to the poor and not the middle class. Completely ignoring the fact that they have done no such thing! They have catered to the middle class.
Read this and maybe you will get the picture of where I am talking about going, and it DOES NOT hurt or attack the middle class at all. All it does is, finally, allow poverty and the faces of it, back into the national narrative. God knows, they've been missing for far too long.
Making The Poor Visible
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, July 20, 2007; A19
John Edwards may be running third in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, but he has already changed the national conversation on a crucial issue. Poverty is no longer a hidden subject in American politics.
Be as skeptical of Edwards as you want to be. Yes, he has had some trouble since he joined the 3-H Club -- the $400 haircut, building a 28,000-square-foot house and taking $500,000 in payments from a hedge fund. Yes, he has gotten political traction among liberals out of saying endlessly that ending poverty is "the cause of my life."
Moreover, Barack Obama was right to say Wednesday that his early community organizing work shows that poverty "is not an issue I just discovered for the purposes of a campaign." For that matter, Hillary Clinton began her professional life laboring to eradicate child poverty.
The difference is that by harping on the issue, Edwards -- whatever his motivations -- has forced Democrats to abandon their fear of being seen as too focused on the needs of the poor and has thus opened political space for his rivals.
Since the late 1980s, Democrats have been obsessed with the middle class for reasons of simple math: no middle-class votes, no electoral victories.
But focusing on the middle class is one thing. Keeping the poor in the political closet is another. Must appealing to the self-interest of the middle class preclude appealing to its conscience?
Democrats have lost enormous ground by allowing a myth to take hold that Lyndon Johnson's Great Society was a failure. "In the 1960s, we waged war on poverty, and poverty won" is one of the most powerful bits of rhetoric in the conservative arsenal.
Edwards took on this falsehood directly in his speech Wednesday in Prestonsburg, Ky., at the end of his tour of impoverished regions. "We accomplished a lot," he said of LBJ's time, "civil rights laws, Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps and Head Start and Title I aid for poor schools. The Great Society and other safety-net programs have cut the number of people living in poverty in half."
Edwards understands that unless the country is given hard evidence that government can succeed, it will never embrace government-led efforts at social reform
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/19/AR2007071901968_pf.html
Read this and maybe you will get the picture of where I am talking about going, and it DOES NOT hurt or attack the middle class at all. All it does is, finally, allow poverty and the faces of it, back into the national narrative. God knows, they've been missing for far too long.
Making The Poor Visible
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, July 20, 2007; A19
John Edwards may be running third in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, but he has already changed the national conversation on a crucial issue. Poverty is no longer a hidden subject in American politics.
Be as skeptical of Edwards as you want to be. Yes, he has had some trouble since he joined the 3-H Club -- the $400 haircut, building a 28,000-square-foot house and taking $500,000 in payments from a hedge fund. Yes, he has gotten political traction among liberals out of saying endlessly that ending poverty is "the cause of my life."
Moreover, Barack Obama was right to say Wednesday that his early community organizing work shows that poverty "is not an issue I just discovered for the purposes of a campaign." For that matter, Hillary Clinton began her professional life laboring to eradicate child poverty.
The difference is that by harping on the issue, Edwards -- whatever his motivations -- has forced Democrats to abandon their fear of being seen as too focused on the needs of the poor and has thus opened political space for his rivals.
Since the late 1980s, Democrats have been obsessed with the middle class for reasons of simple math: no middle-class votes, no electoral victories.
But focusing on the middle class is one thing. Keeping the poor in the political closet is another. Must appealing to the self-interest of the middle class preclude appealing to its conscience?
Democrats have lost enormous ground by allowing a myth to take hold that Lyndon Johnson's Great Society was a failure. "In the 1960s, we waged war on poverty, and poverty won" is one of the most powerful bits of rhetoric in the conservative arsenal.
Edwards took on this falsehood directly in his speech Wednesday in Prestonsburg, Ky., at the end of his tour of impoverished regions. "We accomplished a lot," he said of LBJ's time, "civil rights laws, Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps and Head Start and Title I aid for poor schools. The Great Society and other safety-net programs have cut the number of people living in poverty in half."
Edwards understands that unless the country is given hard evidence that government can succeed, it will never embrace government-led efforts at social reform
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/19/AR2007071901968_pf.html
