The P-Word: Why Hillary and Barack Won't Say It--A Special Presidents Day Post

WHEN JOHN EDWARDS ENDED his candidacy for president, he called for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to pick up the mantle of poverty awareness that he had been carrying pretty much on his own for the past four years. Indeed, Edwards, who brought the issue to the fore in the previous campaign with his notion of "Two Americas," has made the topic of American poverty--especially in the South--his controlling metaphor, particularly through the Center on Poverty, Work, and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and his One America Committee. For better or worse, no public figure has devoted more of his energy to addressing systemic causes of poverty than Edwards. That said, I would argue that one reason Edwards never got the traction his candidacy deserved is because he focused too heavily on class during his campaign--a topic that, ironically, America is more uneasy about than race or gender.

Based on the poverty-line calculations developed in the 60s and using the Consumer Price Index as a measuring stick, around 12% of Americans live in poverty or "below the poverty line." However, according to United Nations calculations, which look at people who make less than 50% of the median income, America has a poverty rate of 17%. Yet, when polled, most individual Americans identify as middle class. Few Americans admit to being poor, and even fewer like hearing wealthy people talk about poverty.

Indeed, poverty remains one of the most slippery areas of American social identification. How easy now to pass as not-poor and how critical to be able to do so. One of the most powerful narratives of American mythology is the possibility of wealth--rags to riches, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, the self-made man, Horatio Alger, Donald Trump, Ross Perot. After 200 years of Capitalism, a strong strain of class consciousness remains in the American social fabric: if you are poor, that's your choice.

While a person can't help what gender or ethnicity s/he is born into, one can do something about social class. At least, that is the standard line. What's more, if one does not improve his or her social class, there is still a painful aura of failure attached, a laziness label, what we might call the prejudice of the poor.

Writers like Curtis Sittenfeld, George Pelecanos, William Faulkner, Richard Russo, and Robert Pinsky have explored the deep prejudices of economic class in their fiction and poetry, but such conversations have yet to migrate with such complexity to the political realm. It is this profound problem that Edwards sought, like no other public figure, to address, and sadly, because we don't know how to have this conversation, it probably cost him the race.

Why? Americans don't like to be told they are poor, and most poor Americans refuse to publicly support candidates who make poverty such a key issue out of fear of being seen to need an economic safety net. To sign on with Edwards might be to admit to poverty, to confess one cannot acquire on one's own. This is why Obama and Clinton won't say the P-word. Some pundits have criticized both for letting Edwards' poverty message go the way of his candidacy, but both intuit that address poverty issues as "poverty issues" is a dead-end road.

Few White Americans want to be talked to about being poor by a well-off Black man; even more importantly, Obama knows that such a tack may make him come off as an angry Black Man, a better-coiffed Al Sharpton. And, to be truthful, how authoritative can Senator Clinton sound about poverty? She is not herself poor, she has never made poverty part of her senate work, and her husband stole any Clinton-based-poverty thunder years ago.

Obama does have a good record trying to improve impoverished conditions. Right out of Harvard law school, he went to work as a community organizer in one of Chicago's poorer neighborhood. Over the course of his campaign, I suspect he will address issues of poverty without using loaded terms. He will talk about solutions rather than problems, policies rather than poverty.

However, until the stigma of being poor is removed from American popular and social culture, it's hard to envision how a politician can really address the issue. Public perception is as important as law in solving social problems--and neither can tackle the nearly impenetrable mythos of American upward mobility.

The Wire: What Does It Mean To Be The Best Show On TV

ON SUNDAY, THE FIRST episode of the final season of The Wire aired on HBO. Much has been made of the elliptical Baltimore-based series, now in its fifth year. Ellen Gray of the Philadelphia Daily News claims it is the best show on television, and Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate, has called it "the best show ever broadcast in America."

Even so, The Wire's visibility on the red carpet of popular culture is far overshadowed by the better dressed Mad Men, Dexter, The Sopranos (even in death; perhaps especially in death), Lost, Rome, and Pushing Daisies. In fact, The Wire made none of the top ten lists of 2007 on Metacritic. If so many viewers and critics appreciate the show, why don't they love it? Is there something about The Wire that both impresses and repels? Perhaps it is not possible, even in 2008, for America to fully embrace a project that foregrounds poor African Americans, violence, urban corruption, and an ambivalence about the drug war. Perhaps America is only ready to confront some of its values.

At its core, The Wire is about value: the value of human life, the value of drugs, the value of law, the value of the political machine, and, perhaps most importantly, the value of values. In a capitalist culture in which everything has a price, what is a life or a package or a vote or a body worth? What are neighborhoods worth? What is the value of skin color?

The show sets out to explore these questions, but we rarely get answers. The Wire is no morality play. Unlike The Sopranos, Deadwood, and Dexter, which present themselves as theater, The Wire refuses to position itself. For new viewers, this be confusing, but it is within the show's nebulousness that it arrives at clarity. That is, from no position, it can interrogate everything.

The Wire navigates the uneasy waters of drama, documentary, journalism, and comedy. We don't always know its argument; we don't understand all of its themes. We rarely know how to feel because the show upends typical value systems. In so doing, it enacts what we might call an "emotional ethic." By this I mean the character of the show, its project, is strong enough not simply to advance its own ethic but also to enable us to view our own ethical spectrum through the world of the show. The Wire makes the irrational rational, the ugly beautiful. It can make what should be wrong, right, and, sadly enough, the opposite.

One of the main plot points of the third season involves "Amsterdam," a moniker for an area of drug and gang-ravaged Baltimore that an aging police chief secretly converts into a legalized drug zone. It is a rogue move. None of his superiors know about the experiment because it flies in the face of the department's standard practice of juking the arrest numbers. But, on many levels, the experiment works. Hoppers and Cornerboys leave the corners. Residents fix up their houses and return to their stoops. Violence drops dramatically; in part because cops monitor Amsterdam. One of the great ironies of modern television is born--cops overseeing the legal sale and distribution of drugs to the benefit of local neighborhoods.

This is a provocative story line for any show, and in any other program, such a plot would have come off as farce. But, because The Wire embraces complexity and ambiguity, they can tackle themes that other shows merely bungle.

Their most important theme in this regard is race. No other show on television excavates the deep connections between race, identity, class, capitalism, and family like The Wire. Though scenes switch quickly--sometimes without commentary or exposition--from the White world to the Black world, the main focus are poor African Americans in inner-city Baltimore. Last season, the show moved away from the flashier subjects of sex trafficking and drug legalization and honed in on the daily challenges of teachers and students in an all-Black middle school. Here, every student is on the cusp of every possible bad choice. Every teacher is handcuffed by horrible facilities, atrocious funding, and a mandate for higher test scores.

The show follows the lives of four young men, 12 and 13 years old, as they deal with their White teacher (a former cop from the previous seasons), the insanity of their home lives, and the pull of the corners. The layers of complexity in the lives of each of these boys could fill an entire season; so overwhelming are the obstacles around them. The show's brilliance lies in its patience. It takes its time peeling the onion away, revealing disturbing layer after mortifying layer. A palpable bravery lies in the decision to circumscribe what might happen. Some of the scenes in the classroom are exceedingly uncomfortable. David Simon, Ed Burns, and their team of writers possess an uncanny ability to capture the hoplessness and ennui of trying to teach and learn division and multiplication in this school in this city to these kids.

In many ways, The Wire resembles the social novels of the late 19th and early 20th centuries more than other contemporary television shows. Savvy viewers will see similarities in Zola, Dickens, Sinclair, and Ellison, especially in terms of how, even in the 1800s, we spend our children. Even the pace and plotting feels literary. So dense are the issues, so interwoven the stories, so precise is the detail, the narrative needs the patience of a novel to correctly unpack its story. The rise and fall of Frank Sobotka in season two is high tragedy Sophocles and Shakespeare would crib from.

To be the best show on TV, then, is to be not like TV.

I suspect when The Wire is no more, it will get some of the attention it deserves, but, just like the students in that middle school, it may not make a difference.