This just in from Bob Herbert of the NYT, who cited Department of Agriculture statistics: there are 12 million families in the US who struggle to find enough to eat. Let's roll that around inside our heads for a moment: if, on average, the US family has 3.14 people, that's around 38 million people who don't have enough money to be assured of meeting their most basic needs. There are less than 300 million people in the US, so that's roughly 1 in 8 people in the US.
If that many people are struggling, then huge swaths of the US population either are struggling or have close friends and relatives who are struggling. That's a huge number of people affected by poverty. Their vote should be a lock for Democrats. It isn't, though.
But here comes the bad news. Herbert made the depressing if unsurprising observation that this massive level of poverty wasn't an issue in the campaign. But, of course, why should it have been? If memory serves, the poverty level in the US hasn't been a serious issue in a presidential campaign since Lyndon Johnson. Since Johnson, the Democrats we've elected have been increasingly less interested in doing anything substantial to lower the level of poverty in this country. (Republican interest, if that's the right word, has been even less.)
I don't want to say that this is a big reason the Democratic party is failing so miserably on a national level (poor people, after all, have much bigger problems than getting to a voting booth on election day), but I would say it's a symptom of a larger problem the party faces. Simply put, it's a moral failure on the part of the party that bills itself as friend of the working people to not be working from the grass-roots on up to seriously address the very real problems of working people, poverty being only the most serious. Bill Clinton's "welfare reform" was only the latest stage in the party's determined alienation of its working class base.
The voting alternatives of the working poor seem to get less and less appealing with each election cycle. I suspect one of the reasons so many people voted "against their economic interest" was that they didn't see that voting for Kerry was "in their economic interest". They may well have been wrong about that; but instead of whining about how stupid they must be, maybe we Democrats could do something more positive--say, try to help them out, without regard for whether they come from red or blue states.
I'm talking about the sorts of activities we tend to associate with charitable organizations like Second Harvest, The Enterprise Foundation, and Partnership for the Homeless, but with a more political focus. We need to be there in communities, and not just handing out cans of food, trying to get a roof over people's heads, and training them for jobs that are increasingly hard to come by. There are systemic problems in our economy caused by things people in Washington do, like passing anti-labor legislation and successively shifting the tax burden onto the middle and working class. When people see that we're serious about doing something about these problems--that is, when they see that there's national coordination of efforts at every level--they'll probably have a bit more respect for what Democratic politicians say when they're running for office. This is entirely apart from the point that it's simply the right thing to do.
Frankly, I have no hope that the party is going to do anything like this unless it's forced to by events it can't ignore. But I can't imagine how we're going to be a party worth voting for if we can't stick up in a serious way for even the minimally decent principle that everyone in the US should have enough to eat. It's terrific that we favor civil liberties, a woman's right to choose, and environmental sanity (if we don't, who will?), but many of our citizens--around 1 in 8 to be more precise--have more important things to worry about right now. That it doesn't seem to be a priority in the Democratic establishment speaks volumes about us.