On Poverty, Edwards Faces Old Hurdles

"We don't need new policy. We have plenty of policy," said Waller, now part of a Washington think tank called Inclusion. "It's just that no one's helping us move it."

Old Debates Are New Again

For years, the national poverty debate has run on a seemingly endless loop. Liberals have argued that the poor suffer from structural disadvantages -- underfunded schools, disappearing jobs, inadequate child care -- that could be addressed by public investment. Conservatives have argued the problem is cultural -- absent fathers, teenage mothers, high school dropouts.

What action that has been taken has swung from one pole to the other -- in 1993, President Bill Clinton signed an expansion of the earned-income tax credit; three years later, he signed a welfare reform law with new work requirements.

Standing apart from the back-and-forth has been an unavoidable fact: No program has helped lift up the poor in recent years as much as a strong economy. In the prosperous 1990s, the number of people living in high-poverty neighborhoods fell by 24 percent, or 2.5 million people. Since then, the poverty rate has increased, to higher than it was 30 years ago.

"The ultimate goal is to create tight labor markets that create opportunities for poor people," said Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson.

Meanwhile, a separate debate has been underway within the Democratic Party, over how aggressively to fight for the poor. After pushing through the major anti-poverty programs of the past century -- the New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society of the 1960s -- the party has had to defend some of the programs against charges that they are wasteful and promote dependency. Democratic candidates have urged help for the disadvantaged, but more often have couched economic issues in terms of helping the middle class.

Edwards's main rivals for the nomination have mostly adopted this measured approach. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), who has upset some poverty advocates by supporting tougher welfare work rules, talks about helping the poor by raising the minimum wage, reforming immigration and promoting savings. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) proposes expanding the earned-income tax credit and subsidizing temporary jobs but leavens this with calls for more personal responsibility, particularly among African Americans.

Edwards, on the other hand, calls poverty "morally wrong" and a "national shame," and he proposes paying for his plans by immediately repealing the Bush tax cuts for the rich. His admirers say his emphasis on poverty is proof of political courage. But it also fits with his strategy to carve out a niche as a populist truth-teller to the left of Clinton and Obama, a shift from his 2004 campaign tone, which he now says was too cautious.

Edwards disavows any calculation in talking about poverty. "Is this a powerful political issue? Maybe not. I don't know whether it is or not," he told the National Jewish Democratic Council last month. As he describes it, his decision to make poverty his focus of the past several years -- and, by extension, of his 2008 campaign -- was relatively spontaneous. In his 2004 campaign, he talked about poverty, but mostly within his broader theme of "the two Americas." That December, Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, met with friends and advisers to discuss how he could spend his time before his next campaign.

"We talked about a whole range of possibilities . . . for an hour, hour and a half, and Elizabeth said, 'Can I just say, I've been sitting listening to you talk about these various things and, John, the place that you light up and show greatest passion is this issue of poverty,' " he said. "That's when I decided I wanted to devote significant time to it."

Edwards launched the UNC Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity in September 2005, with Hurricane Katrina and the scenes of deprivation it laid bare days earlier giving the venture an unexpected timeliness. The center had a small staff, paid for mostly by several million dollars from Edwards's campaign supporters. It organized a dozen conferences and panel discussions over Edwards's two-plus years there, sponsored a book published last week and explored rebuilding strategies for New Orleans.

Edwards received a salary of $40,000 for work that had him on campus a day or two a week. He spent the rest of his time traveling the country and working as a paid adviser to a hedge fund.