obama-poor-mandate-575-lw.jpgPresident Obama's landslide victory on Nov. 6 was won amid a culture war between the haves and have-nots. Republican candidate Mitt Romney openly admitted that he wasn't "concerned about the very poor," and he privately derided the "47 percent" of Americans who don't pay federal income taxes, claiming they should learn to take responsibility and "care for their lives." 
His running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan, earned Tea Party bona fides by designing a budget plan that slashes billions from the social-safety net -- cutting funding from programs such as SNAP (food stamps), housing assistance, Medicaid, Pell Grants and student loans. 
The conservative platform of smaller government has been exacerbated in the years following the Bush-Cheney recession, which necessitated huge investments like the bank rescue and auto-industry bailout. Opposition to what the GOP framed as an overreach of government authority became Republican dogma, and permanent talking points of the Fox News and conservative talk radio chattering classes. But their well-scripted attacks only served to mask the economic hardships that lay underneath: namely, the millions of Americans who were without jobs, on the verge of losing homes and who, without government intervention, could have well experienced Depression era-like poverty conditions. 
Enter Barack Obama.
The president's $787 billion stimulus package included several expansions to existing antipoverty programs, including the Earned Income Tax Credit, SNAP and the Child Tax Credit. Obama expanded unemployment benefits to assist the long-term unemployed, and the Making Work Pay tax credit kept 6.9 million people above the poverty line in 2010 and lessened poverty for 32 million more.
President Obama's Affordable Care Act increases Medicaid coverage to all adults with incomes up to 133 percent of the poverty level and will cover an additional 16 million people by 2019 -- all of whom would have never qualified for Medicaid previously. Obama's administration has also invested in education programs benefiting poor and low-income families by expanding the Head Start initiative to reach an additional 64,000 children, and doubled funding for Federal Pell Grants to college students.
As the fiscal cliff -- which would slash funding to all of these programs by half -- looms, President Obama is finally exhibiting the strength and defiance for which many progressives had been waiting. In his first press conference after winning re-election, the president declared, "I've got a mandate. I've got a mandate to help middle-class families and families that are working hard to try to get into the middle class. That's my mandate. That's what the American people said. They said, work really hard to help us."
Critics such as Cornel West and Tavis Smiley have falsely claimed Obama wasn't focused enough on the crisis of poverty, especially in the African-American community. Obama's record proves otherwise. What may be a more fair critique is that the president has been reticent to discuss "poverty" and "the poor" as much as he has addressed "the middle-class" and "small business owners." 
SOURCE: Edward Wyckoff Williams
The Root

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