Obama must make poverty reduction a priority for his second term

Piece for New Statesman website
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As Barack Obama prepares for his second inauguration in front of the Capitol building on Monday, most politicos are by now familiar with the demographics which helped put him there. Election night saw 96 per cent of African-Americans vote for the President; 70 per cent of Hispanics and 73 per cent of Asian Americans. Less dependent on traditional independent voters, the Democrats 'expanded the electorate' by boosting turnout in these communities. 

That this causes a problem for the Republicans has quickly become conventional wisdom. It's been little noted, though, how the demographics of 6 November create a challenge for the Democrats too. An important component of the Obama campaign's "get-out-the-vote" (GOTV) effort was the President's personal appeal. There was a pronounced sense of a personal connection between many non-white voters and Obama, and of protectiveness (of which race was one but not the only factor).

The question for 2016 is, how do the Democrats maintain that level of support without Obama on the ticket? They are unlikely to find a candidate with the charisma, backstory and platform to match Obama, whose breakthrough was a truly once-in-a-generation event. 

The answer can only be that, from the White House to the Senate, Democrats need to go further in the next four years to deliver on substance for these communities. Here, immigration reform is often mentioned. But just as pressing is the indelible link between race and poverty in America, particularly in urban areas.

Far too many of the majority black neighbourhoods that helped deliver Obama's re-election in states like Virginia or Ohio continue to be blighted by hardship. A litany of grim statistics bears this out. More than 1 in 4 African-Americans and Hispanics grow up in extreme poverty - with millions struggling just above this threshold. Forty per cent of children in African-American communities grow up below the poverty line (the US is ranked 34 out of 35 of industrialised countries when it comes to child poverty). Poverty is not of course simply an ethnic minority issue – but they are clearly disproportionately affected.

None of this is new. The statistics are familiar, and wash over many American heads by now. But as Michael Harrington once wrote in his seminal book on the subject, The Other America, "you can rationalise statistics...but you cannot rationalise an indignity". Nearly fifty years after Martin Luther-King said that "I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture of their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits", a significant chunk of the US is still held down by hunger, violence, illness, poor education and precariousness. And sadly, that number has increased since 2007.

Anyone going door-to-door in the election in some of the poorer parts of places like Franklin County in Ohio would have found many who benefited in some small way from the President's first term. Particularly so on healthcare. Stimulus spending and his general stewardship of the economy have also stopped a total collapse in living standards. It could have been a lot worse.

But, as the likes of Paul Tough have argued brilliantly, this is not the prospectus on poverty that Obama the candidate first emerged on. Then, he gave speeches – like the one in Anacostia which Tough details – arguing for a wide-ranging approach to poverty in America. Higher minimum wages and better union representation featured, but also specialised parenting, nutrition and early education programmes. 

If the campaign was anything to go by, the prospect of returning to this seems weak. In the parks and multi-purpose arenas in which Obama delivered his campaign stump speech, the mention of poverty was noticeably scant for a candidate largely relying on GOTV among poor neighbourhoods. If it was name checked it was in a more conventionally liberal way, usually about the need for more teachers – rather than at the heart of his moral vision as once before; his words had lost their transformative edge. As some observed, at times it was like listening to a John Kerry speech.

Prior to that, in office, Obama put up none of the fight for an increase in the minimum wage that he had pledged. He gave not one single speech on poverty itself. Many of the programs he once envisioned exist but remain under-funded and minuscule compared to his initial vision. The basis of union organisation remains weak, as legislation aimed at strengthening it fizzled out early on.

Little of this is Obama's fault alone, of course, but it speaks to a nation's priorities. It's part of a wider cultural blind spot in the US. As Harrington wrote all those years ago, a key dimension of poverty in America is its invisibility to many people. There are certain neighbourhoods most folks don't go into, certain parts of town many go their whole lives without seeing, especially in places like Washington. There's little space in the 'American dream' narrative for those who don't pull themselves up to greatness, or the middle class, but who quietly struggle for their whole lives. It's time the President carved one.

As in the UK, the problem is one not just of unemployment but perilously low wages and economic insecurity. The percentage of those working but still in poverty is at its highest in nearly two decades; average wages are in a thirty year slump. And more and more Americans are falling closer to the threshold. 

For this reason, it's particularly welcome that Obama prioritised, fought for and won protection of the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit in the recent fiscal cliff negotiations, which the Republicans had earmarked for abolition. Beyond that, though, he urgently needs to rediscover the spirit and ideas that animated his early words and interventions on poverty, like the one in Anacostia. African-American community leaders are gathering this week to pressure the President into making urban poverty a priority for his second term. 

There's no doubt that Obama remains a deeply intelligent and thoughtful man, of authentic social compassion. But his record on poverty is a case study in his journey from transformational candidate to good, solid but unspectacular liberal incumbent. He is said to worry about his place in history in this respect, and has asked historians how he can match up to likes of Lincoln. Bringing poverty out from the political fringes offers him this opportunity. For the Democrats, too, it can no longer be dismissed as a 'core vote' concern which turns off swing voters – if they are to replicate 2012's voting coalition in 2016, turnout among minority voters is the swing vote. They will need to act and deliver on a malaise still ubiquitous in far too many of those voters' lives. An electoral imperative has been given to an issue which should long ago have been a moral one.

One year on from Brown’s Citizens UK speech

Gordon Browns’ eve-of-election speech in May 2010 to Citizens UK was easily the best of his premiership, and must rank among the best in his career. Fiery, crusading and sincere it was a brief glimpse of the brilliance that the faithful always told us disbelievers was there. Had the preceding years not been so different and so the election result quite as catastrophic, it would easily be seen as one of the defining political speeches of recent times. As it was, its one year anniversary passed by completely unnoticed last week. In fact, the speech doesn’t even feature in Steve Richard’s totemic history of Brown, Whatever It Takes. But I think it’s worth taking a look at again, as it suggests a few things: about Brown, his party – yes, but also centre-left government in general.

On a purely technical level the speech is pretty exemplary. It builds momentum and a sense of urgency with rhetorical tricks such as triple repetition (a la Thatcher’s "No, No, No" or Blair’s "weak, weak, weak"): "When people say…when people say…when people say"; "you will always find in me a friend, a partner, a brother" and so on. The quick but consistent pace at which it moves means the past (civil rights, anti-apartheid), the present (living wage, Obama) and the personal (Brown’s family) are effortlessly woven together where it’s so easy to get it wrong and look crass or opportunist – ask Ed Miliband after his TUC address.

These are all age-old devices, but the reason they work for Brown is because the delivery feels so genuine and passionate - confident but not choreographed or staggered in the way so many political speeches are these day, no inbuilt pauses for applause or for focused grouped soundbites to sink in. Brown subsequently achieves what most modern politicians can only dream of: to appear ‘on our side’, to be inspiring, even poetic - to deliver a political sermon in a very secular age. It’s a testament in my view to Brown’s status as the most fascinating, complicated politician of his generation that this all came from the mouth of the same clunky, emotionally constipated bloke-on-the-telly everyone became used to; "an analogue politician in a digital age" as Cameron once chided him.

But it’s the politics of it which are most interesting to me. Look at the actual words he constantly uses – "fight", "march", "movement", "community". These are all phrases that would give ‘Third Wayers’ and triangulaters a heart attack. They’re also the diametric opposite of the a-political, ‘father of the nation’ image he had been determined to maintain through his premiership. Where previously Brown tried to meet the Tories inheritance tax cut half-way, here he clearly denounces it and builds that opposition into his own world view. For proof, compare the different word clouds (I know I should leave the house more) below of this speech and his conference speech just eight months prior, which is instead dominated by the more recognisable and vacuous New Labour touchstones of "change", "new", "choice", a sense of empowerment and place substituted for the more expressionless "country", "Britain", "world" and so on. Both rhetorically and politically, Brown had let go.

Now I know he was very much preaching to the converted with Citizens UK, but I’m not convinced it would put ‘swing voters’ off in the way many may claim – or certainly no more than he already had done so. I think most British people can countenance a bit of aggression and tub-thumping as long as it’s perceived as owing to passion rather than pantomime (think PMQs). Nothing Brown said was too abstract and its underlying moral convictions would be shared by most, I think.

In exact policy terms the speech may have reflected the rather tired nature of Labour’s manifesto, but the section from 6:00-6:49 does have the beginning of a decent narrative on public services: one that goes beyond being transactive/technocratic but also rejects Cameron’s false dichotomy between state and society, by placing government investment and community alongside one another where they belong ("building together, investing…"; "your hospitals, your schools, your children’s centres upon which communities are built").

Finally, there’s a whole generation who came of political consciousness during the fag end of the Blair years who – if, like me, they weren’t born into a Labour family – came to see Labour as the establishment party. Daft I know, but they certainly looked, acted and sounded like it to us at the time. This is just a faint echo of what a new study shows is the biggest problem social democratic parties in Europe face: people simply do not trust them to challenge invested interests anymore. Above all else the success of Brown’s speech, with its insurgent tone on inequality and poverty, shows centre-left parties that just because you’re in government doesn’t mean you have to become synonymous with the establishment, or even make peace with it. You can still be constantly at war with the status quo and constantly campaigning against the forces which make it up – you can still be part of a movement, essentially ("Let’s march, together")*.

Rescuing the standing of social democracy may be the only bigger task than rescuing that of Brown’s – at least we can be pretty sure Brown’s decline has bottomed out. But whatever exact form centre-left renewal ends up taking, it must surely start by trying to resuscitate what briefly sparked into life on that Monday night in South London last May.

Gordon Brown speech to Citizens UK, May 2010












Gordon Brown speech to Labour party conference, September 2009













*Incidentally it’s been noted before that some of Obama’s problems up until recently came from ignoring this: he never defined himself against Wall Street, for instance, even though public opinion permitted him to, he never harnessed his unprecedented campaign resources (and ethos) in government and so on. Anyone more tuned in to US politics than I am these days got any thoughts on this?