Jeff Shesol discovers that a “word search of the past fifty State of the Union addresses … turns up very few mentions of ‘poverty’ or the ‘poor’ after Johnson left office”:
The reasons for this are fairly straightforward. It’s a truism of American politics that helping the poor is an idea that (forgive me) polls poorly. The manifest failures in the war on poverty, the relentlessness of Republicans in exploiting those failures, and the unwillingness of Democrats to stand behind its real successes, all help explain that. Whatever the accomplishments of the war on poverty—and there were many—its disappointments created a kind of collective exhaustion with the subject and the complex political, moral, and economic questions it raises about our shared obligation to those among us with the least. Again, it’s hard to blame politicians when the polls tell them that we don’t really want to hear about any of this. Even the poor don’t want to hear about the poor: most (studies say) see themselves as “middle class.”
The Dish 