Poverty Is Finally Having Its Day as an Issue in American Politics
President Barack Obama speaks at the Catholic-Evangelical Leadership Summit on Overcoming Poverty at Georgetown University in Washington on May 12, 2015. From left are, E.J. Dionne, Jr., Washington Post columnist and professor in Georgetown's McCourt School of Public Policy; the president; Robert D. Putnam, Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government; and Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute.
Photographer: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP PhotoAfter decades of near silence in the public square on the plight of the American poor, it was a surreal experience bolting early from one well-covered event on income inequality in Washington on Tuesday so as not to be late for the other one, at which the president of the United States was busy agreeing with the head of a conservative think tank. At least, some of the time.
In fact, the moment was so pleasantly disorienting for those who’ve been following these intractable and long-ignored issues that Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, who was moderating the panel the president joined at the Catholic-Evangelical Leadership Summit on Overcoming Poverty at Georgetown University, began by asking the president why he had come. “A friend of mine said yesterday, ‘When do presidents do panels?’” Dionne said. "This is a very unusual venue for a president to put himself in.”