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" Something happened yesterday that had not happened before in this sprawling, money-drenched, language-bending hooley out of which will come the next president of the United States. A candidate from one of the two major parties gave a speech about poverty. Not about the burdens on the embattled middle class. Not about students from the suburbs crushed by their college loans, or about the mortgage crisis and its effect on people drowning in debt over their second homes. But about the fact that we have a staggering number of poor people in this country, most of them children, and that their paths to a place in which they could be afflicted with the burdens of the embattled middle class are blocked by what appear to be intractable barriers of stagnant wages and permanent and growing incoime inequality. That candidate was Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny-starver from the state of Wisconsin. The speech itself \u2014 Ryan&amp;#039;s first serious policy address since joining the ticket in August \u2014 was banal conservative boilerplate about cultures of dependency and about how the states can do things better for the poor people in them than the federal government can, and about how churches and private charities can do things better for the poor people than either one of them. (Ryan even got in a mention, in the context of government meddling, about how the administration is &amp;quot;requiring Catholic hospitals, charities and universities to violate their deepest principles&amp;quot; by making sure the health insurance they offer to their Presbyterian scrubwomen includes coverage of birth control.) It also comes late in the campaign, at a time when the Republican ticket is scrambling to moderate itself for the homestretch, so it can also be argued that it was a cynical piece of a toweringly cynical strategy. Ryan said: Upward mobility is the central promise of life in America.... But right now, America&amp;#039;s engines of upward mobility aren&amp;#039;t working the way they should. Mitt Romney and I are running because we believe that Americans are better off in a dynamic, free-enterprise-based economy that fosters economic growth, opportunity and upward mobility instead of a stagnant, government-directed economy that stifles job creation and fosters government dependency.... It was stunningly ahistorical, pretending, for example, that we never had a period in the life of the country in which we left poor people to fend for themselves, or depend upon public charity, and that the programs that Ryan&amp;#039;s own &amp;quot;budget&amp;quot; eviscerated weren&amp;#039;t a reaction to the fact that a system like that cannot provide. It was stunningly oblivious, as Ryan pretended that &amp;quot;block-granting&amp;quot; these programs to the state won&amp;#039;t result in, say, food-stamp money being repurposed for golf course construction, or pothole repairs in the better neighborhoods. It was stunningly disingenuous, as Ryan kept using the word &amp;quot;reform&amp;quot; after making a career and a reputation out of producing &amp;quot;budgets&amp;quot; that eviscerate the social safety net. The Urban Institute studied one of them and concluded, among other things, that handing Medicaid over to the states would cost over 35 million Americans their health insurance. And, ultimately, it was stunningly dishonest, because Ryan declined to tell us how many poor people would have to die of preventable illnesses in the transitional years between what he calls &amp;quot;a government-directed economy&amp;quot; \u2014 which we don&amp;#039;t have, but never mind \u2014 and his private charity, block-granted nirvana. But dammit, it was a speech. About poverty. Of all the issues that have been abandoned in this campaign, with the possible exception of climate change, poverty is the one most egregiously ignored. The Democrats have abandoned the topic, pausing in that effort only to point out that the Republicans are lying about what the president has done in regards to Bill Clinton&amp;#039;s welfare-reform act of 1996. (Ryan did it again yesterday.) The fact is that, for all Ryan&amp;#039;s blather about how poverty was &amp;quot;winning&amp;quot; the war on poverty \u2014 a line he copped from Ronald Reagan, by the way \u2014 the programs of LBJ&amp;#039;s Great Society did far more good than they did harm. Medicare went a long way toward eliminating poverty among the elderly, and Medicaid did much the same thing for the rest of the people in poverty. Between 1963 and 1970, the poverty rate in this country dropped from 22 percent to 12 percent. Head Start has been an unqualified success, so much so that the Republicans have tried to chloroform it for going on 40 years now. Life expectancy increased and there was a precipitous drop in infant mortality. And all that didn&amp;#039;t happen because our churches got better at running soup kitchens, as noble as the people who work in them are.  And, just for the record, Lyndon Johnson tried to reform the Aid To Families With Dependent Children, the federal welfare program, which predated his presidency by over 30 years, but his efforts were stymied in Congress. But the Democratic party doesn&amp;#039;t dare talk about any of that, as the Democratic party still lives in abject terror of the scarecrows erected by Republicans in every election between 1972 and 1992. And that is not even to mention the subject of race, which runs under any discussion of poverty like an poisoned underground river. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were Great Society programs, too. The last Democratic presidential candidate to talk about poverty as poverty, an issue with its own unique imperatives, and not as a kind of aspirational spur to encourage people to fight their way into the embattled middle class, was John Edwards in 2008, and we all can see how well that worked out. Republicans are right to talk about the 46 million people living in poverty. Dead wrong about why, and dangerously wrong about the solutions, but at the very least, they&amp;#039;re bringing up the topic. They make a capital mistake in simply using the issue by shoehorning it into their rigid ideology \u2014 because poverty is also about health care costs, about environmental regulations, and, yes, about birth control, and because poverty is a national problem requiring us to work through our national government \u2014 but they&amp;#039;re talking about it, out loud and in public. To paraphrase Walter Sobchak, say what you want about zombie-eyed granny-starving, at least it&amp;#039;s an ethos. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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