As for the speech, one of the most popular current reactions has been that the president didn't mention al Qaeda, and that this was the first State Of The Union speech in 12 years that didn't refer to that particular bogeyman.
I was more interested in another word that didn't appear prominently in the speech. That word was "poverty." I know, I know. All those references to helping the middle-class are sure winners, and they poll extraordinarily well, and they are fine public policy, especially the free community college idea, which is the best idea of his political career, bar none. The fact that they have no chance of passing this Congress is another point in their favor. The idea that the only common ground between the White House and the monkeyhouse should be on a job-stealing, soul-crushing trade agreement -- and, maybe, a tenuous consensus that having stuff fall down is bad -- is surrendering half the field before the battle starts.
But the whole Democratic party emphasis on the middle-class has made me a little itchy ever since Bill Clinton discovered that it was the magic key to getting old white folks to vote for him. Poverty disappeared from the Democratic policy debates and, therefore, from the national political debate entirely. (The Republicans gave up even on the late Jack Kemp's half-hearted attempt to make poor people relevant within his party.) The last national Democratic politician to put poverty front and center in a campaign was John Edwards and, well, you know...
The argument as I understand it is that all these policy intitatives will work to "expand" the middle class by enabling people to rise and to join it.
But can it not be argued that this position is merely trickle-down in populist drag, merely trickle-down from a lower height? For example, one of the most overlooked problems for poor children in this country is the lack of decent dental care. These kids don't need a free associate degree. They need a damn dentist. There's SCHIP, of course, but SCHIP is one of those programs that nobody talks about except when the Republicans try to shred it. And health-care is probably the one field in which, if poverty is not precisely on the table, it's at least within arm's reach on the sideboard.
The most successful part of the Affordable Care Act is the Medicaid expansion, which is nothing, if it is not an anti-poverty program, but you won't get many Democrats to call it that without slow torture. Generally, it's sold as a way to keep, yes, middle-class families from being impoverished by a sudden and catastrophic medical emergency, or by a chronic disease. Surely, that's a laudable goal. But it also keeps people at the lowest end of the economic scale from, well, dying. That also is a laudable goal, but, strangely, not one for which Democrats enthusiastically claim credit.
You can't call something an anti-poverty program an anti-poverty program any more. The term no longer is politically viable, being an embarrassment to Democrats and anathema to Republicans.
Poverty must appear in our national debates only as a dark threat to our embattled middle class. That's the only acceptable way to discuss it -- not as a daily crisis for millions of people, but as a potential crisis for millions more. It is bound to get lost in the thickets of policy if that's the only way it is allowed a place in the debate. Poverty in this country continues to be a deep and serious problem in and of itself, and not merely a condition into which unfortunate one-time members of the middle-class might one day find themselves. It still demands specific solutions to the specific problems it presents. It cannot be merely a problem that will be solved along the way while we help the middle class -- the way Pfizer was looking for a new blood pressure medicine and came up with Viagra. Poverty is not a side effect. It is a symptom. Always was.
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