More on Half In Ten

Hopefully I'm not piling on, but I'd like to add to Shawn's comments about the Half In Ten Campaign.

Both the CAP report and this campaign are pushing policy that would not only help people currently in poverty, but would help prevent folks in the middle class from slipping into it. As a result, "poverty will be cut in half." A more strategic way to say this is to call for expanding the middle class by making opportunity widely available and providing enough economic security to sustain a broadened middle class. This is how the Drum Major Institute's middleclass.org defines their issues/constituency. Basically, both CAP and DMI are talking about the same stuff, but in different terms.

DMI's frame is more effective in part because it reflects the apirational side of American political culture. This has been persistently documented. Very few people identify as poor. Rather, low-income folks see themselves as making their way to the middle class. People on the edge of poverty see themselves as moving toward stability. Nobody likes being called poor, as Shawn said. Plus, everybody supports the idea of helping people move up. More than 85 percent of the public thinks society should make sure "everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed." That language could be something you'd want to lead with, but what do I know?

Security is also an effective frame. People who've already made it to the middle class value security- health security, job security, child care security, etc. Clearly policies in the CAP proposal would achieve these goals. Yet it's not highlighted and nothing really articulates how folks in the middle class would benefit. On the website, we see pictures of sad-eyed children, not abandoned factories.

And I'd echo what Shawn said about the ONE campaign's inclusion of the "we're all in this together" thought. A campaign like this has to make an argument about whose role it is to address the problem. Is it the individual's or society's problem? Government or charity to the rescue? I think the language of interdependence and solidarity make an effective argument for a strong governmental role, so there's definitely a viable option to use. But there's little mention of it, and I'm afraid that people will default to thinking that addressing poverty is a matter of individual responsibility.

Which brings us to the core question: who is this campaign supposed to inspire and persuade? Because it's not low-income folks who're trying to get to the middle class. And it's not folks who're losing their foothold in the middle class.

The sad irony here is that the policy proposed is politically savvy. It bridges class divides that for so long have stymied progress. And now is exactly the right time for a proposal like this, just when everyone's feeling like the American dream is slipping away. But its ideology and language do not address today's political moment or American culture, and as a result we may miss a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.