Package it, Spin it, and Clinch the Vote: Selling Poverty

In America’s war on poverty politicians have devised plenty of clever ways to demonstrate their commitment to the issue, including already some of the 2008 presidential candidates.

They take to the streets of the inner city, to the back roads of rural regions left behind by corporate culture, to ghost towns forgotten by the Information Age. This effort leads to the type of validation the voters need: on the front page of every major paper, a photo, stretching five columns wide, of them kissing a barefoot baby.

While this might send a politician well on his or her way to war with poverty, even with such meticulous planning there is a good chance it won’t work.

Why can’t a politician fight poverty simply by talking to American’s poor?

“Its elementary political arithmetic,” said William A. Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former domestic policy adviser during President Clinton’s first term.

There may be more poverty around than we as a country may like, but poor people — people officially living below the poverty level — are still in the minority (12.3 percent, to be exact). No one’s winning the election on the disenfranchised vote alone.

Moreover, it is improbable that this 12 percent will be encouraged to participate. Poor people often have more pressing matters than politics to attend to. Ruth Walls works at a substance abuse out-patient clinic in Laurel, Md. Over the 27 years she has worked at the clinic, she’s seen many of her clients slip in and out of poverty. Politics isn’t even a blip on their radar, she said.

“Some of these people are living shelter to shelter, they’re from prisons, and that’s just — that’s not a priority,” Walls said. “I don’t think that’s the first thing that people are thinking about, they’re wondering where they’re going to sleep at night or where they’re going to get food.”

Joan Kim owns an independent pharmacy in the same town. She’s seen sky-high medication costs drain the savings of the senior citizens who make up her clientele. She tends to agree with Walls, that these people aren’t focusing on political campaigns; they’re making sure they can cover their co-payments.

“They really have to choose,” Kim said. For these people, staying informed of changing healthcare coverage trumps following politics.

So the poor vote is too shaky to stand on. Luckily, the eager politician can go after the next-best thing: the middle class vote.

The trick is to link the fate of the middle class with people in poverty. This can be done in a couple of ways.

“Appeal to the conscience of non-poor Americans,” Galston said.

Alternatively, there is a possibility of forging connections between those who are poor and those who aren't, Galston said. For example, using a slogan that pledges support for “regular families” — the vaguer, the better. “Regular people” is a catch-all category with maximum appeal.

It hardly takes a genius political campaign to blur the line between the poor and the non-poor. The mortgage crisis has created a wave of angst. A recent census report will demonstrate the rising number of Americans without healthcare insurance coverage. Middle class paranoia is even more rampant than middle class guilt.

Is there something unethical about slapping an “everyman” label on the anti-poverty platform? Julie Varner, a poverty advocate for the Maryland Catholic Conference, doesn’t think so. Varner thinks the distinction between the classes is overdrawn.

“People living in poverty are not ‘other’ than people living comfortably,” she said. “They have to work to make their budgets fit every month just like anybody else.”

There’s one more thing to consider: middle class skepticism — more troublesome than guilt or paranoia — is a latent factor that flares up just before the primary election. Middle class voters are going to be watching the campaigns closely for signs that a politician is not going to make good on his or her promises.

The best prevention is to be careful with campaign rhetoric. To get the poverty vote, politicians should steer clear of campaign promises to “eliminate” poverty. That kind of ambition makes for a great press release, but it doesn’t convince Varner. She says any promise to eliminate poverty betrays a lack of understanding about the “real amount of work that needs to be done.”

“I would take it as a sign of seriousness if the candidates didn’t talk about eradicating poverty, but steadily reducing it over time,” Galston said. “Some realism in their idealism would be one thing I’m looking for.”

Poverty is a worthy issue — but in today’s political campaigns, the issues matter less than the final sale. At the end of the day, the winner isn’t the best policy-maker, but the one who can turn a political profit. Politicians ultimately need to sell this message to people who can afford it.