The Politics of Poorness

Hillary Clinton and John McCain, each of whom has hundreds of times the family money of Barack Obama, are out there in electoral fantasy land claiming he is out of touch with the poor.

After drinking boilermakers with the boys a while back, Sen. Clinton is now telling Indiana's blue-collar voters that "politics has become too abstract, too generalized" in Obama's elitist world.

“Most people get a lot of meaning in their life from the work that they do,” Clinton says. “People want to be seen, they want to be appreciated, they want to be acknowledged.” And she is out there acknowledging the hell out of them with girlhood tales of helping out in her father's fabric-printing plant and, according to the New York Times, "sounding less like a Wellesley alumna than Roseanne Barr’s old sitcom character, the den mother of her factory floor."

Meanwhile, McCain is calling Obama insensitive to poor people by not endorsing his proposal to suspend the federal tax on gasoline this summer, a refusal "to giving low-income Americans a tax break, a little bit of relief so they can travel a little further and a little longer, and maybe have a little bit of money left over to enjoy some other things in their lives."

McCain, who is still fielding questions about using his wife's company jet during the primary season, and Clinton, who lent her campaign $5 million from her pin money, seem determined to educate Obama on what he failed to learn as an organizer in poverty-stricken communities.

Indiana Flashback

The news that the Hoosier State will be in the primary spotlight for the first time in decades triggers memories of forty years ago when celebrities went there to try to stop the war in Viet Nam.

Indiana in the spring of 1968 was our Agincourt. "We happy few" were gathered not to spill blood for Harry and England but to stop American bloodshed in Asia. I slept in spare rooms and on pullout couches to spend days being driven to meeting halls, suburban living rooms and farmhouses, asking people to vote for Eugene McCarthy in the Democratic presidential primary.

I told them I was a thousand miles from home with no political ambition, no other motive than to try to end a futile war. Some listened. In one living room, three nuns gave me their blessing.

In terminals and crossroads cafes, I ran across others--Paul Newman, Myrna Loy, Erich Fromm, Garry Moore, faces and names people would recognize and come to hear. We traded experiences and notes. I recalled a 1942 story by Irwin Shaw, "Preach on the Dusty Roads," about a man who, after seeing his son off to fight in World War II, was overwhelmed with remorse that he hadn't been out begging people everywhere to prevent it or stop it. We were in Indiana trying to save other people's children.

Years later I would run across someone from that time and we would talk like old comrades in arms, recalling how good we had felt about what we were doing.

It still does.