Commentary: McCain Failed to Mention the Middle Class Last Week, But Neither Nominee Mentioned Poverty

By: Deborah Mathis

This time three years ago, the national obsession was not presidential politics; it was poverty. Hurricane Katrina had flushed the poor out of their homes in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, pushing them into streets and shelters and FEMA-funded hotel rooms or claustrophobic trailers.

The country responded with sorrow, embarrassment and outrage that so many people were still so poor more than 40 years after the War on Poverty. It had been, after all, off the Topic A list for so long that some people seemed to think it, like polio, had been eradicated. The outbreak of reality presented in the hurricane’s aftermath put poverty back on the map, so to speak.

But that was then. No sooner had we started talking about poverty again than we dropped it like a hot potato. Sensitivity fatigue set in. The country returned to its old habit of looking the other way, pretending the problem either didn’t exist or was overblown or, in the worst instances, that the poor deserved their fate.

COMMENTARY....