Like this changes anything

Turn on the TV news this week, and chances are that you'll see little else other than coverage of the Republican National Convention in New York and the resulting protests. More interesting, though, is what will be conspicuously absent from the George W. Bush love-fest that the Big Apple is becoming.

A few days ago, the Census Bureau released new data showing that both the poverty rate and the number of Americans without health insurance rose for the third straight year, a change that directly contradicts the president's contention that his tax cuts have been enough to stimulate an economy that has been bleeding jobs since 2001.

A consistent theme of the Bush-Cheney re-election bid has been securing a bright future for generations of Americans yet to come, an idea that recklessly assumes that equality of opportunity currently exists in the United States. This is unsurprising, considering that Republican campaign strategists know their base intimately, and realize that depressing talk of job losses in the American South will do little to bolster their cause.

Also, the machine behind Bush's bid for a second term is fully aware that conservative middle-class voters that comprise its demographic care very little about the plight of the urban poor in this nation, preferring to worry about the daily peril to their jobs, children and mortgages.

The president's own commerce secretary, Donald Evans, dismissed the new data, saying that it "looked backward in time at an economy that was substantially weaker" than it is today. Comments of this nature from a leading executive branch official show that our current administration has no interest in seeing a change in the reality that 35.9 million Americans living below the poverty line face on a daily basis. At no point in either this campaign season or the last has a notion of poverty and inequality even entered the lexicon of Mr. Bush.

Particularly interesting are the implications for the South, which if you believe the census numbers, has been the region hardest hit by the economy's slowing. While average pay kept up with inflation last year in most of the nation, it failed to do so in states like South Carolina. The Washington Post reported that the number of Americans without health insurance rose to 45 million, and that "white adults, primarily in the South, accounted for most of the increase." Yet, S.C. Republican Senate candidate Jim DeMint was quoted as saying that people need to "stop whining about job losses" in the state, on top of last week's news that South Carolina has dropped to 50th in SAT scores. Since we know that poverty is the greatest barrier to educational success, the saddest piece of data to emerge from the census report is that by the end of 2003, 12.9 million children lived below the poverty line in America. The future for our state, and indeed the nation does not look bright if we continue in the direction we are currently traveling.

This is not to say that the Democratic Party has done a better job during this campaign cycle. Democratic Presidential nominee John Kerry said in response to the new census data that "we need a president that stands up for the middle class," again letting political pragmatics prevent him from championing the cause of the American poor. We have yet to see if vice presidential candidate John Edward's rhetoric on the "Two Americas" will become a part of the Democratic platform or if it will get lost in the clatter of sound bites between now and November.