"Poverty is a shortage of money."

Apropo my previous post about Pennsylvania Republican Senator Pat Toomey's saying that the number of people who really need help is a small segment of the population:

There has been a spirited exchange in The Nation about the term "culture of poverty."   The discussion originated with Barbara Ehrenreich's "Rediscovering Poverty" in the April 2nd issue.   Letters to the editor then followed in the April 30th issue.

Ehrenreich referred to Michael Harrington's book The Other America, which became the defining work on poverty in this country and informed much of the debate about Lyndon Johnson's "war on poverty."   Some of the back and forth had to do with how the term has been misunderstood and misused since that time.

As Harrington used it (his son insisted in a letter to the editor) "culture of poverty" referred to the effect of poverty on the attitudes and lives of those living in poverty.  It was not used to suggest that it was the cause of poverty.

But it has come to be misused (either through misunderstanding or deliberately and manipulatively) by conservatives like Pat Toomey to blame poverty on the poor themselves, saying they create the "culture of poverty" by their "bad attitudes and faulty lifestyles."  This then allows conservatives to feel justified in trying to limit the social network programs that Democrats favor.

This is another example of Karl Rove type tactics.   Take something that is a strength of your opponent and turn it into a liability, then blame the victim.

Ehrenreich herself put it very succinctly:

"Poverty is not, after all, a cultural aberration or a character flaw.  Poverty is a shortage of money."

Democrats have got to learn how to rebut the Toomeys, the Roves -- and, yes, even the pandering Romneys -- with pithy rebuttals instead of policy discourses.   Don't let them get away with turning things upside down.

We dismissively sneer at "bumper sticker" slogans.  But that's what people remember.  They don't remember policy discourses.

This election is too important.   It will determine the direction of the Supreme Court for the next generation.   It's already way too conservative, too pro-business.   A Romney presidency would make it even worse, changing a 5-4 split to a 6-3 or maybe even a 7-2.

Ralph