by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
Our Invisible Poor — All Over Again
President Obama’s role in a panel
discussion on poverty at Georgetown has gotten across-the-board
coverage: the Times, the
Post, NPR, CNN,
Politico, the National
Catholic Reporter, Rush
Limbaugh …
From a seat in the balcony of Gaston Hall I took notes on the event, and I wrote them up overnight for The New Yorker, which posted my piece on its website a few hours ago:
In our anti-monarchy, it was a sight beautiful to behold—the leader of the free world ambling onstage and settling into a chair just like the chairs occupied by his fellow-interlocutors, Robert Putnam, of Harvard, Arthur Brooks, of the American Enterprise Institute, and E. J. Dionne, of the Washington Post, and speaking about poverty and listening to the others while the bells of the university chapel chimed noonday in the background.
A little further into the piece I draw a dotted line between President Obama’s engagement with Robert Putnam’s new book on poverty and inequality and President Kennedy’s engagement with Michael Harrington’s book The Other America, which he read about in The New Yorker:
Now Michael Harrington, an alumnus of the Catholic Worker and the Fund for the Republic who is at present a contributing editor of Dissent and the chief editor of the Socialist Party biweekly, New America, has written “The Other America: Poverty in the United States” (Macmillan). In the admirably short space of under two hundred pages, he outlines the problem, describes in imaginative detail what it means to be poor in this country today, summarizes the findings of recent studies by economists and sociologists, and analyzes the reasons for the persistence of mass poverty in the midst of general prosperity. It is an excellent book—and a most important one.
It’s neat to see Macdonald’s long and consequential piece – “Our Invisible Poor” – billboarded alongside my short one on the magazine’s website.
