[Meanwhile, elsewhere in the nation – the following is from today’s NY Time.
Full text at http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/26/national/26POVE.html]
Forget Washington. The Poor Cope Alone.
By Evelyn Nieves
Clarksdale, Miss. — In Eastern Kentucky, a 15-year-old boy dreams of quitting school to make real money working at a pizza parlor. Here in Clarksdale, a 68-year-old widow thanks God that she can manage the $200-a-month rent on a house one good rain could wash away. In East St. Louis, Ill., a 20-year-old mother of six wishes she could find a public housing project where the broken glass on the stoop is swept away.
Poor people learn to keep hopes small. So when President Clinton came calling on some of the poorest places in the country last year with ideas to make things better, it was like rain in the desert.
The president's six-state, four-day poverty tour, highlighting for the first time in his two terms the places that remain untouched by the longest economic boom in this nation's history, caused an excitement that bordered on the spiritual. He was like a charismatic preacher, stirring the congregation to believe.
A year later, the president's modest proposals for tax incentives to bring businesses to impoverished communities are still awaiting Senate approval. The idea that anything big might happen to places that have been down longer than they were ever up has long faded. And so has the notion, if it ever existed, that the federal government is the answer to the empty downtowns, idle laborers and the dilapidated buildings all too common in these communities.
In a presidential election season, when the two major-party candidates are suggesting that everyone should benefit from the nation's prosperity, the people who might be buoyed by the words have little use for national politics. In dozens of interviews in communities the president visited — Clarksdale, East St. Louis and the Eastern Kentucky towns of Hazard and Annville — what was clear was that Democrats are Democrats, Republicans are Republicans and people are more concerned with how to fix their own communities than in the state of the country.
Unlike the extensively reported tour of poor communities by Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, when he was a presidential candidate, Mr. Clinton's tour was a day's headlines. And perhaps because this is the age of welfare changes, the places Mr. Clinton visited expected little beyond the visit. East St. Louis, which looks leftover from a bombing, is bent on proving that it is not the urban war zone it became known as a decade ago. Appalachia, which is humming along, in parts, is concerned with telling the world that it is not a haven for barefoot hillbillies in shotgun shacks.
[end of excerpt]
Carl
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