Memo to GOP: Poverty Isn't Just About Race
A white conservative like Ryan has to work harder to win Obama-level trust in minority communities. His task is made all the more difficult by pressures from his party's conservative base to treat the federal government as little more than a problem, which pretty well describes Ryan's latest budget proposal.
Yet, as he told me in a telephone chat a few days before he unveiled that budget proposal, he's pushing to restore the Grand Old Party to a "party of ideas," a party that offers market-driven alternatives to liberal government-centered remedies for joblessness and other social problems.
He's not alone. Other GOP hopefuls such as Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah have been promoting various ideas for tax credits, immigration reform, incarceration reduction and other help to low-income earners.
That's why I offer a radical suggestion to the new idea-conservatives: Begin your anti-poverty crusade where Lyndon B. Johnson did 50 years ago, among poor whites.
Go out and preach the value of hard work, good schooling and saying no to meth and addictive painkillers to poor white rural Appalachians, where LBJ announced his war on poverty.
Just as LBJ went to Appalachia, go to Scioto County, Ohio, for example, which Republican Gov. John Kasich called "ground zero" in the battle against overdoses after 1 in 10 newborn babies tested positive for drugs.
Go out and preach tough love to unemployed blue-collar white males and white unmarried mothers in the devastated factory towns studied by Charles Murray in "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010," a book Ryan ironically was citing when he made his "inner city" gaffe.
After all, there are numerically more poor whites in the country than poor blacks or Hispanics. But the issue became unfortunately colorized in media and public perceptions in the mid-1960s.
Today Americans of all colors are looking for answers to economic and social decline. It's time for both parties to stop treating poverty as just a racial problem. It's an American problem.
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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.
(c) 2014 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
