War on poverty: the second front.

When I came into New York as a small boy in the 1950s, I used to stare transfixed out the grime-smeared windows of the New Haven Railroad at the streets of Harlem. My fascination was predicated less on race (black people were not a novelty to me) than on housing stock. I would stare into the bleak tenements and wonder: How could people live like that in a country as rich as America?

I don't want to overplay the acute political sensitivity of my nine-year-old self. But I do want to stress that I came of age at a time when hope was alive in America, when there still was a naive liberal faith that the tangible manifestations of poverty could be eliminated by the right mix of government programs. This is not the place to recite the litany of abject failures from public housing to Model Cities to the War on Poverty The blame has been apportioned many times over. Yet I still face that gnawing sense that the defeat of idealism was not inevitable, and that poverty amid plenty remains as morally wrong now as it was during the innocent cocoon of my childhood.

The poor have simply ceased to exist politically in America. Phil Gramm is about the only candidate who refers to them--and he wants those slackers to get out of the wagon and help the rest of us pull. The presidential race is really between two camps of selfish white people--a bunch of Republicans who want to cut taxes for people like themselves and a rickety Democratic coalition that wants to preserve existing programs mostly because they employ Democrats. The Republicans scorn the poor, and the Democrats don't dare risk being politically associated with them. (In Clinton administration strategy sessions on the budget, I'm told, when anyone is so hidebound as to mention "the poor," one of the younger political types corrects him by saying "the poor and the middle class.") Small wonder that the White House even defends Medicaid as solely an entitlement for the middle class in nursing homes.

Faced with a presidential campaign that seems the death knell of hope, I will confess that, damnit, I miss Hubert Humphrey and Nelson Rockefeller. I miss Urban Coalitions and all those earnest cries for a "Marshall Plan for the Cities." I know the limitations of their bulldoze-it-build-it-and-bureaucratize-it remedies. But hand it to those Humphrey-era liberals (even those in Republican clothes); they had a broader vision of what might be possible than their burnt-out political heirs like Dick Gephardt and Mario Cuomo. Defending the tattered remnants of the social safety net against the coordinated attacks from the Gingrich Gang may be a decent excuse to re-elect Bill Clinton. But don't lose sight of the bipartisan agreement that in the next millennium, as in ages past, the poor will always be with us.

A few weeks back, I had an emotional meltdown during a small welfare briefing by such War-on-Poverty visionaries as House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Archer and his Sancho Panza, Florida Congressman Clay Shaw. Responding to criticism of the GOP end-the-entitlement welfare bill, Shaw said, "When you have a program like AFDC that pays people not to work, not to get married and to have children, what can be worse than that?" The answer is simple: Begging in the street is worse than that--and so is rooting through trash cans in search of food and entire families living on cots in homeless shelters.

What I would love to hear in 1996 (and know I won't) is a presidential candidate brave enough to talk about opening a second front in the struggle against permanent poverty. Maybe it's time to once again consider spending real money (try $50 to $100 billion a year) on new, well-designed programs that offer the hope of uplift rather than simple income maintenance. How would we possibly pay for such an extravagance in an America that already has the lowest--yes, I said lowest--budget deficit (in relation to size of the economy) of any major industrialized nation? Gosh, I'll have to put on my cap for that one. Go after middle-class entitlements, of course, and throw in corporate welfare.

George Bush got it wrong--the problem is not our wallets but our will. If we must squander public money (and no modem democratic government will ever run with austere efficiency), why is it that the poor are always at the end of the line behind the corporate tax lobbyists, the agribusiness behemoths, the defense contractors, and the AARP? Just a small question to ponder as we wait so impatiently for the ersatz drama of the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.