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

[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.