What Do I Know About Poverty?

By Douglas Mackinnon, NY Times, March 8, 2012
What’s real-world experience worth? Does it matter?
I always thought so, but with regard to a subject I know better than many—poverty—I’m starting to have my doubts.
For all of my childhood in the 1960s, I lived in abject poverty in and around the Dorchester section of Boston. From a tar-paper shack to relatively nice apartments, but never for long. By the time I was 17, I had moved 34 times. Each move was an eviction, from a home with no electricity or no phone or no heat or all of them off at once. Many times we ended up homeless, bouncing from cars to cockroach-infested motels to relatives who would take us in for a few days at best.
This is not the moment to tell my whole story, but from there I somehow entered the Republican side of the political spectrum and was privileged to work for Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Bob Dole. I was a writer on three presidential campaigns and an official in the Defense Department.
Off and on over those years, I also wrote on the subject of poverty. Ten years ago, I published an Op-Ed in The Times, “The Welfare Washington Doesn’t Know,” on welfare reform and poverty. Among others things, I stressed that it was all but impossible for politicians to craft sound legislation if they had no understanding of real poverty (and they don’t). And that we tend to punish, ignore or fear those who live in hopeless despair. I suggested that maybe Congress invite the truly poor to testify before them and just listen. Say nothing and just listen. Learn about lives without heat, electricity, a phone, subway money or adequate medical care. The response was overwhelming.
After being contacted by hundreds of people, numerous television and radio programs, and even a few publishers, I decided I would write a book, eventually, when I was emotionally up to the task of opening old wounds and reliving the horror show that was the childhood of my younger sister, my older brother and me.
About two weeks ago, that book came out. After making an appearance on “Morning Joe” to discuss my background, MSNBC put the segment online with the headline, “Former White House writer details brutal childhood in new memoir.”
When I first saw the headline, I was taken aback a bit by the word “brutal.” But the more I looked at it, the more I nodded in silent acknowledgment. While I had never used that word when discussing my childhood, “brutal” seemed to crystallize those years of dysfunction and squalor.
Next, I thought, shouldn’t that “brutal” existence be worth something in terms of experience? Does what I saw and battled matter?
For some readers going through tough times, the answer is yes. I have already heard from well over 100 people telling me the book has touched them in some way.
But as I stared at that MSNBC headline, I kept wondering if my real-world experience would matter to our elected leaders, whether they were people I knew or politicians who had somehow heard about me or my book. Would it matter to those who often have the fate of the desperately poor in their hands? As some in the Republican party, like Mitt Romney, struggled to find answers to questions about enormous wealth and the day-to-day fight to survive with next-to-nothing, I wondered if someone from the political class might reach out to me.
The answer is no. In promoting my memoir, I’ve been on a number of television and radio programs, which have been broadcast across the nation. Not one elected official has gotten in touch with me to ask if I might want to discuss poverty, my experience and possible solutions.
It was the same before, when I wrote the Op-Ed I mentioned for The Times. I heard from hundreds of people. But not one politician. In the past, when I wrote a column on, say, the space program, or immigration, I heard from certain politicians. But on poverty, never.
I find this odd and more than a little troubling. This is not about me. I don’t care if it’s other people who write a column or a book based on their own experience of unrelenting poverty. I don’t care if they are liberal or conservative. But when poverty remains one of the unsolved tragedies of our time, shouldn’t the observations of someone who truly suffered through it matter to at least one elected official?
In many ways, the mind-numbing ignorance of our “leaders” with regard to true poverty is the largest obstacle to finding actual solutions. At the end of last year, I took Newt Gingrich to task in The Chicago Tribune after he said that “really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works so they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday.” That comment was not only ignorant, but insulting.
I call them “unsung heroes” in my book, but in some of the neighborhoods I inhabited as a child, I got to see, first hand, numerous single moms—many times African-American or other minorities—who worked two or three back-breaking jobs to house their children, feed their children and teach those children right from wrong. All with no support. They were exceptional women and remarkable role models.
Several years ago, with these women in mind, I wrote a column asking whether we might want to think about creating a “Single Mothers’ Day.” Some of my fellow conservatives did not think so highly of my question and let me know it.
A few days after the column ran, I got a handwritten letter from former President Bill Clinton telling me how much he enjoyed it and that he felt it was something we should explore. As an independent conservative, I have long admired Bill Clinton, in part because I believe his own dysfunctional childhood made him a strong advocate for the poor and disenfranchised as he sought to strike a balance between government assistance and self-reliance.
But he was “former” when he wrote to me. What about our currently serving elected officials? Shouldn’t they care about what I learned from what I went through or what someone else who has walked this walk knows?
Douglas MacKinnon was a press secretary to former Senator Bob Dole. He was also a writer for Ronald Reagan and George Bush and a special assistant for policy and communications in the Defense Department. He has worked on three presidential campaigns and is the author, most recently, of a memoir, “Rolling Pennies in the Dark.”