Poverty: The Election Issue That Dare Not Speak Its Name

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/10/21-4


Soon after LBJ became president, an ally warned him not to squander his political capital on worthy but hopeless causes, such as civil rights and poverty. Johnson's reply was: "Well, what the hell's the presidency for?"

A presidential election campaign approaches its climax, as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney criss-cross the land in search of the last few votes. But my thoughts have turned to a couple of candidates from long ago, who have been back in the news these past few days.


One is George McGovern, best known for his landslide defeat at the hands of Richard Nixon 40 years ago and who, his family has announced, died this morning in a hospice in his native South Dakota. The other is Robert Kennedy, indirect subject of a new documentary on HBO devoted to his widow Ethel, among the last living contemporary links to Camelot.

The program wasn't particularly good – too much family frolicking, too little about the Kennedy tragedies, The New York Times's reviewer complained. "All this introspection, I hate it," says Ethel, now 84, at one point. But it was a reminder of what the country lost with the assassination of RFK, whose short-lived candidacy in 1968 remains one of the great "what ifs" of 20th-century American history: how different things might have been if he had gone on to defeat Nixon at that year's election.

But the mere names of Bobby Kennedy and George McGovern get you thinking: whatever happened to the old-fashioned American liberalism under whose banner they so proudly fought? Not today's diluted "liberalism" as practiced by Obama, and which is little more than a schoolyard taunt hurled by right-wing talk-show hosts, but the liberalism that set out to right the wrongs of American society, first and foremost the scourge of poverty.