MA Gov. candidate Charlie Baker plans "to get elected on the backs of poor women and children..."

[HomerRamone]

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/10/16/alone-among-gubernatorial-candidates-baker-stresses-welfare-reform/n9vdboUpF35WunSLAcb96H/story.html

Politicians, political analysts, and advocates who are critical of Baker’s focus say it is little more than a plan to get elected on the backs of poor women and children...

“The point is, with welfare there’s nothing to clean up. We have reformed this thing to death. What’s missing is money. What’s left to do is fund the programs — workforce training, GED, ESOL training, childcare.”

Amid political campaigns, debates about welfare can become highly partisan and inextricably linked to issues of race and class. Researchers say much of that tension pivots on perceptions of poverty and who is deserving of assistance.

They note that since the days of Ronald Reagan’s 1976 presidential campaign speech vilifying a welfare abuser in Chicago, a narrative has emerged that associates African-Americans with public aid .

“It’s a way to divide the electorate by racial and ethnic lines,” said James Jennings, a noted specialist in race, politics, and urban policy at Tufts University who wrote a book on welfare reform. “In some people’s mind, when you say ‘welfare reform’ it’s people, families of color, black and Latino women. So . . . it’s a message. It’s a way to blame the other.”

[ReRe]

1. Hey, it worked for Ronnie in 1984

But I don't think it will work in 2014 MA.

[Ken Burch]

2. It works because Democratic candidates are too gutless to challenge it.

A lot of social services have worked well. Others haven't, but mainly because those who designed them have consistently refused to do the two things that would have made those services be most effective:

1)Make two-parent families eligible(at least for short periods, and certainly in areas where the poverty was clearly the result of redlining or the vestiges of segregation;

2)Ask POOR PEOPLE THEMSELVES what they need to get out of poverty.

Instead of doing either of things, and instead of passionately defending those parts of the social wage that have worked well(such as Head Start and, IMHO, AFDC, our party's officeholders have left almost four decades of right-wing attacks on the poor and on the programs that were at least intended to help them go completely unchallenged.

This approach has not only failed in almost situations as policy, it has failed as politics as well...as the presidential elections of 1980, 1984 and 1988 and the midterm results of 1994 and 2010 show.

[ReRe]

3. I think we've...

... gone past the point of no return. The Democratic Party seems to exist in name only. And this will be born out as true or false 16 days from now.