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According to a Village Voice report, there's been a nationwide drop-off in column inches, frequency and prominence in the press coverage of poverty: "In the fall of 1988, The New York Times devoted 50 stories to the homeless, including five front page pieces. This year [1998] the Times has run only 10 pieces in the same period; none have begun on A-1." Homelessness is just not an A-1 story in our present national conversation. With a warm-and-fuzzy president who feels our pain and parrots back to us what pollsters tell him we want to hear, it appeared safe to avert our eyes -- and the homeless were kicked off the front page and out of our political discourse.

Which brings us to the only major policy on poverty of the Clinton years: welfare reform. A nearly 40 percent drop in welfare caseloads since the law was passed in 1996 has conveyed the false impression that although the poor will always be with us, there's no longer enough of them to deserve our attention. But what will become of the 4.9 million welfare recipients who left the rolls as they face declining prospects for work? "Welfare reform has done better at moving families off the rolls than it has at moving families out of poverty," said Lawrence Aber, director of Columbia University's Center for Children in Poverty. In other words, "welfare reform" has been great for swelling the ranks of the working poor.

Meanwhile, the real work of helping the poor goes on nearly unnoticed. Deborah Constance, who founded A Place Called Home in the middle of South Central Los Angeles, was a successful real estate agent who went on to create a safe haven for children and teenagers in the middle of the violence and drugs that surround them. In a precinct that reported 134 robberies, 11 homicides, 134 felony assaults and 10 attempted murders in one month, A Place Called Home is equipped to handle as many as 1,000 children -- with no government funding.

"The problem cannot be solved from afar with a media campaign, or other safe solutions operating from a distance," says Jeffrey Canada, who runs 43 children's programs from Harlem to Hell's Kitchen. "The only way we're going to make a difference is by placing well-trained and caring adults in the middle of what can only be called a free-fire zone in our poorest communities."

But instead of using the bully pulpit to lead us to take up the fight like Constance and Canada have done, Clinton has been lulling us to sleep, waxing lyrical about his successes: "Now you see the signs of the transformation everywhere," he said recently. "Mothers collecting their mail with a little more pride because they know they'll see a bank statement, not a welfare check; children going to school with their heads held a little higher."

The Rev. Jim Wallis, who heads the Call to Renewal, a coalition to combat poverty, paints a very different picture than the one painted by the president and the presidential candidates. "The new icon of poverty," he told me, "is the working mother with children. I think of the woman a colleague of mine saw at a Burger King recently. She was busing tables, but kept going back to a table in the corner where two kids were sitting. She did this several times before it became apparent that she was their mother and was supervising their homework. That woman at the Burger King is supposed to be our success story."

The real battle line of the first presidential election of the new millennium will be drawn between those who answer to their corporate donors and those who answer to the woman at the Burger King.
salon.com | Sept. 16, 1999

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