ArcaMax

I don't hear Romney or Bush describing Social Security and Medicare as "free stuff," even though most retirees collect more in benefits from those programs than they paid in during their working years, according to the Washington-based Urban Institute's annual surveys.

That's why I say that, if Bush thinks getting rid of "free stuff" is such a cool idea, he should promise to get rid of everybody's "free stuff." That would include subsidies to the government's most popular programs outside of the military, Social Security and Medicare.

Then stand back and watch Jeb get run out of town.

Rather than offend the masses of voters by attacking those two very popular programs, Bush talks about African-American voters -- most of whose ancestors, let us not forget, were brought here to help build this country with free labor -- as if they're only looking for free handouts.

The "free stuff" scenario suits a long-running conservative narrative that Democrats cynically buy black votes with welfare that traps blacks in a cycle of dependency. It's important to remember that black voters first migrated en masse from the party of Abraham Lincoln at the same time most white voters did, with Franklin D. Roosevelt's offer of government relief from poverty in the Great Depression.

Today, a larger proportion of blacks than whites live in poverty, but numerically whites in poverty still outnumber poor blacks. Yet by focusing on race, we largely ignore the past half-century's growth in poverty, decline in marriage, slowdown in educational achievement and widening income gap in white America.

As a result, white poverty has a strange new invisibility. But I bet they would make themselves quite visible and vocal if Jeb Bush accused them of only wanting "free stuff."

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)

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