What fashionable candidates are swearing.

Political rhetoric rediscovers poverty during a time of plenty.

POVERTY AS POLITICAL OUTERWEAR HAS BECOME all the rage in Washington recently. Not since FDR's New Deal, Johnson's War on Poverty, and Reagan's socialism for the rich have the needs of a specific group of Americans been championed so directly by presidential aspirants. It could be that a budget surplus coupled with a long-running economic expansion have finally made the nation's persistently unaffluent something of an embarrassment among all our riches.

Whatever the reason, presidential candidates seem to have rediscovered the poor among us and have even taken to saying things out loud about them. Al Gore wants to ease child poverty with a new campaign to force absentee dads to return home at least long enough to drop off a child support check. Democratic hopeful Bill Bradley already has a plan to treat the nation's ailing health care system but recently launched a skirmish on poverty.

Echoing Bill Clinton's challenge to "end welfare as we know it," Bradley, who voted against Clinton's welfare reform, now calls for the end of "child poverty as we know it."

But for a truly "we're not in Washington anymore, Toto" experience, you have to listen to the Republican Party's anointed one, George W. Bush. The Texas governor surprised a lot of folks with his recent expression of tough love, not for budget-busting welfare moms, but his own apparently bad humored political party.

Chastising the COP for its grumpy indifference to the poor, Bush called for a "compassionate conservatism" that puts social needs ahead of tax breaks and "does not attempt to balance the budget on the backs of the poor." Bush-the-younger's "vision thing" is a government partnership with faith-based institutions and private companies to combat poverty.

All these good intentions couldn't have come at a better time for the nation's poor. Not only do they have to endure the daily indignity of poverty in the world's wealthiest democracy, many of them recently discovered they were even poorer than they thought they were. Since the 1960s the poverty line has been measured somewhat arbitrarily by multiplying an average monthly family food basket by three; thus $16,600 is the current annual poverty line for a family of four. That measure has never satisfied a lot of the sociologists and economists who study poverty. Many of them place that mythical family's true poverty threshold higher--between $21,000 and $23,000.

The Census Bureau may be ready to agree, beginning an "experimental" standard for poverty that would move the line for a family of four to $19,500. If that new measure becomes accepted, the number of America's poor will jump from 12.7 percent of the population to 17 percent--46 million people--and the bloom will truly be off our rosy economic forecasts. The adjustment could mean a vast de facto expansion of existing poverty relief programs.

Of all the candidates, it could be that Bradley has committed the most gray matter to considering how best to respond to poverty in America. "Child poverty is kind of a slow-motion national disaster," Bradley told a church in Brooklyn where he unveiled his plan. He proposes as president to spend nearly $10 billion annually to lift millions of American children out of poverty over the next decade.

Bradley hopes to recruit 60,000 teachers into poor school districts and after-hours programs. His plan would also increase the minimum wage over two years and index it to the growth of the median wage, permit mothers on welfare to keep their child support payments, and increase subsidies for child care while improving access to existing programs.

"If we do not look to raise the poorest children among us, we have no heart," Bradley said. "And if we do not nourish the spirit of our children, we have no soul."

It would be easy to dismiss all the antipoverty verbiage as the latest rhetoric a la mode from Washington, but anyone concerned about the problems of poverty and human deprivation in the United States should take acute interest in the candidates' proposals. The church has often said that a just society will be measured by how well it cares for its most vulnerable members. (Reviewing the U.S. bishops' voting guide, "Faithful Citizenship," is one way to start putting your faith in U.S. politics.)

It could be that we are encountering one of America's periodic social phase shifts when fiscal abundance and a too-long inattentiveness to social needs become apparent simultaneously. We could be entering a period when, by God, we might be able to do something about poverty in America. But only if the candidate who would be president is eventually reminded to put some reality where his rhetoric is.

By KEVIN CLARKE, managing editor of online products at Claretian Publications in Chicago.