Barack Obama s Fight to End Poverty: Rhetoric and Reality

Transcription

1 Barack Obama s Fight to End Poverty: Rhetoric and Reality Richard C. Fording, University of Alabama Joseph L. Smith, University of Alabama Objectives. In this article we examine President Barack Obama s leadership on the issue of poverty. Our analysis seeks to address three specific objectives. First, we begin by examining the Obama administration s anti-poverty efforts and their relationship with recent trends in the U.S. poverty rate. Second, we examine President Obama s rhetorical leadership on the issue of poverty, both in absolute terms and compared to other recent presidents. Compared to other recent presidents, how often has Obama talked about issues related to poverty and poor people? Third, we discuss the implications of our results for theories of presidential leadership. Methods. We rely on a series of analyses of aggregate poverty trends, as well as content analyses of presidential weekly radio addresses. Results. Our analyses find that contrary to the claims of critics, although the poverty rate has risen during President Obama s first term in office, recent increases in poverty have actually been somewhat lower that what would be expected given the state of the economy. The evidence indicates that one important reason for this is the implementation of ARRA. We find considerable support for claims that President Obama has demonstrated relatively little rhetorical leadership on the issue of poverty, although the frequency with which he has emphasized issues related to poverty is not significantly different compared to past presidents. Conclusion. President Obama has had some objective success in his anti-poverty efforts, but his leadership style on this issue can be characterized more as a facilitator rather than a director of change. I moved to Chicago more than two decades ago to lift up neighborhoods that were devastated by joblessness and poverty when the local steel plants closed.andtoday,icantellyouthatthefightiwagedthen...willbeafight I carry into the White House for the next four years, because that fight is not done. It has not even been started by this White House. We re going to have to change things around, because we need to lift up every American out of poverty. That is one of the goals of the Democratic Party. That s what we re going to be fighting for. (Presidential Candidate Barack Obama, May 14, 2008) Direct correspondence to Richard C. Fording, Department of Political Science, University of Alabama, 303 ten Hoor Bldg, Box , Tuscaloosa, AL rcfording@as.ua.edu. The authors names appear in alphabetical order. SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY C 2012 by the Southwestern Social Science Association DOI: /j x

2 2 Social Science Quarterly During his campaign for president in 2008, candidate Barack Obama often spoke of ending poverty, promising to take the fight to the White House. Indeed, in contrast to recent presidential campaigns, poverty was a frequent topic of discussion among all the major Democratic candidates during the 2008 campaign season, in part due to the early success of John Edwards, who made poverty reduction a central theme in his campaign platform. But Obama s commitment to fighting poverty as president seemed credible given his background as a community organizer in Chicago, as well as his liberal voting record in the U.S. Senate. For the first time in decades, those who cared about poverty had good reason to be optimistic that the election of Obama as president would lead to a significant reduction in the national poverty rate. As President Obama nears the end of his first term in office, that goal has yet to be realized. According to the most recent Census Bureau data, the national poverty rate stood at 15.1 percent in Since 1965, the poverty rate has exceeded the 2010 value only once, and that was in 1983 during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Even more disconcerting, however, are recent trends in the poverty rate. Poverty has now increased for four successive years, resulting in the addition of approximately 10 million people to the U.S. poverty population since More than 46 million people were officially poor in 2010, which is the highest total since the Census Bureau started measuring poverty in And perhaps most damaging from a political perspective, more people have become poor during Obama s first term in office than during any other presidential term for which we have data. As one might expect, President Obama has increasingly come to be blamed, at least in part, for the historic increases in poverty. Some of this criticism has come from the right, which has used the poverty statistics to attack the president s failed economic policies. America is a poorer country under President Obama. Since last year, the ranks of America s least well off grew by 2.5 million, according to the government definition of poverty, which includes a family with income of less than $22,314 a year or an individual making less than $11,139. One-sixth of the country, 46.2 million, met this standard, according to figures released Tuesday. That s the highest total since the Census Bureau began keeping track ahalf-centuryago...theblameliessquarelyonmr.obama spolicies,which have strangled the productive sector. (Washington Times editorial, 2011) What is less expected, and perhaps even more problematic for Obama, is the fact that the harshest and most vocal criticism has come from the president s progressive base. Members of the Occupy movement have openly criticized Obama for not doing enough to halt rising levels of income inequality that began during the Bush years. Black leaders, including members of the black congressional caucus, have also criticized the president for abandoning the black community and the problems of the urban poor. The most vocal and stinging criticism has come from Tavis Smiley and Cornell West, who embarked on a national poverty tour in 2011 to highlight the poverty issue

3 Barack Obama s Fight Against Poverty 3 and pressure the Obama White House to make poverty reduction a national priority. Like other critics on the left, West and Smiley have called for greater investment in public programs to help the poor. Yet, their criticism goes further than most and seems to call into question the president s leadership on the poverty issue: it would be nice to hear the president say the word poor. To say the word poverty. We get conversations about the middle class. Well, the new poor are the former middle class. But we can t get this president or any leaders to say the words poor or poverty, much less do anything about it. (Tavis Smiley, announcing 15-city poverty tour, July 22, 2011) This criticism of Obama s leadership would seem to be motivated by two important assumptions concerning the modern presidency. First, Smiley seems to believe that it is a president s duty to communicate his policy priorities to the public. Second, the criticism seems to connect presidential rhetoric and policy action in a way that suggests that rhetoric is at the very least an indicator of policy-making effort, and perhaps even a cause of policy success. This understanding of the importance of rhetorical leadership is consistent with much of the literature on the evolution of the rhetorical presidency, where scholars such as Jeffrey Tulis have described the strategy of going public as a principal tool of presidential governance for the modern president (Tulis, 1988:4). The view that presidential opinion leadership is necessary in the fight against poverty reduction also seems to have been shared by candidate Obama in When he was asked by a reporter in 2008 if he would support a campaign to cut poverty in half in ten years Obama responded: I absolutely will make that commitment...understand that when I make that commitment, I do so with great humility because it is a very ambitious goal. And we re going to have to mobilize our society not just to cut poverty, buttopreventmorepeoplefromslippingintopoverty...(barackobama. Democratic Candidates Compassion Forum, Grantham PA, April 13, 2008, emphasis added) As we approach the end of Obama s first term, it seems appropriate to bring some empirical evidence to bear on the questions raised by Obama s critics. To accomplish this goal, we focus on three sets of questions. In the first section of the article, we examine the Obama administration s record on poverty. Compared to other presidential administrations, has the Obama administration s anti-poverty efforts been inadequate, and thus partly to blame for the historic increase in poverty? Or have Obama s policies actually prevented poverty from becoming much worse, much as Obama himself has claimed? In the second section of the article, we examine President Obama s rhetorical leadership on the issue of poverty through a systematic content analysis of presidential weekly radio addresses. Compared to other recent presidents, how often has Obama talked about issues related to poverty and poor people? And when he has talked about poverty, how has he talked about it? In the final section of the

4 4 Social Science Quarterly FIGURE 1 Average Poverty Rate by President ( ) SOURCE: Annual poverty data were obtained from U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P60 239, Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: article, we discuss the implications of our results for theories of presidential leadership. Presidents and Poverty: Obama s Record in Historical Perspective We begin our analysis of Obama s record by comparing the average poverty rate during President Obama s first term to the poverty rate witnessed during the administrations of several recent presidents. Because the official poverty rate was not calculated prior to 1959, we limit our analysis to the last 50 years ( ), and thus include the last 10 presidents. These comparative data are displayed in Figure 1 and present a very compelling case for Obama s critics. The poverty rate averaged 14.7 percent during Obama s first term, which is higher than the average poverty rate seen for any president since Lyndon Johnson. It is also higher than the average poverty rate witnessed for each of the five Republican presidents who served during the period.

5 Barack Obama s Fight Against Poverty 5 FIGURE 2 Observed Versus Predicted Changes in Annual Poverty Rate, NOTE: The predicted change in the poverty rate is generated from a regression analysis of the annual poverty rate on the change in the annual unemployment rate and the change in real per capita income (measured at time t and t-1). See the Appendix for details. As compelling as these statistics might be, such a simple analysis has obvious limitations. Most importantly, it assumes that these presidents have faced the same economic conditions while in office; or at least that the economy is something that the president can easily control. Obviously, economic conditions have varied greatly over the 10 presidential administrations displayed in Figure 1. And, despite the fact that voters generally hold the incumbent president responsible for the performance of the economy, nearly four decades of research in political science and economics on the political business cycle has found little empirical evidence that the president can exert significant, immediate control over aggregate economic conditions that strongly affect poverty rates, such as income growth and unemployment (Drazen, 2001; Franzese, 2002). We can therefore arrive at a more accurate comparison of presidential effects on poverty by removing the effects of the most important economic conditions that influence the poverty rate. We present these results in Figure 2. Specifically, Figure 2 presents two versions of the annual change in the official poverty rate during the period. The solid line in the figure represents the observed change in the poverty rate, while the dashed

6 6 Social Science Quarterly line represents the predicted poverty rate based on the results of a regression analysis in which the change in the poverty rate is regressed on the annual change in the unemployment rate and the annual growth in real per capita income. 1 Substantively speaking, the predicted values from this regression model represent the expected change in the poverty rate in light of current economic conditions. By comparing the two lines, we can determine whether the actual change in poverty exceeded or fell short of expectations. The results displayed in the figure tell a very different story than what we saw in Figure 1, and in some cases the story is more consistent with conventional wisdom. For example, decreases in the poverty rate consistently exceeded the model s predictions during the presidencies of Kennedy and (especially) Johnson. This is not surprising given the expansion of social welfare programs that accompanied Johnson s War on Poverty. Increases in the poverty rate consistently exceeded expectations during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, consistent with research that finds that government transfer payments and taxes have a smaller redistributive effect under Republican leadership (Bartels, 2008). There are some notable exceptions to this partisan pattern with the Carter and Clinton administrations often displaying increases in poverty that were higher than expected. Under Nixon and Ford, on the other hand, changes in poverty appear to have been almost exactly predicted by economic conditions at the time. Despite these anomalies, there is a modest partisan effect overall. Across the entire sample, under Republican presidents the average observed change in the poverty rate is 0.20 points greater than predicted by economic conditions. Under Democratic presidents, the average change in poverty is 0.24 points less than predicted. 2 How does Obama fare? The results for Obama also depart significantly from the story told by Figure 1, and now provide little evidence to support any claims that poverty has worsened due to Obama s leadership. In 2009, the predicted poverty rate was about a half-point higher than what was actually observed. The results for 2010 suggest that poverty increased about as much as we would expect given the state of the economy. Although these results are based on only two years of data, they provide modest evidence that Obama has behaved more like a Democrat than a Republican. Obama and the Great Recession: A Closer Look Although presidents may not be able to exert significant control over aggregate economic indicators such as unemployment and GDP growth, a president can have a significant effect on government redistributive efforts through 1 The full results of this regression analysis are presented in Table A-1 in the Appendix. 2 This difference between Republican and Democratic presidents is statistically significant (p < 0.01).

7 Barack Obama s Fight Against Poverty 7 government programs that administer transfer payments. In turn, these redistributive programs may ultimately affect the distribution of income (e.g., Bartels, 2008) as well as the poverty rate. A closer look at policy making during the first half of Obama s presidency suggests that there is good reason to suspect that the policies implemented during the first two years of Obama s presidency may have had a significant anti-poverty effect. The most important source of this effect has likely been the package of program expansions bundled within the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009, known more generally as the stimulus. ARRA was signed into law by President Obama less than one month after he had officially assumed the presidency; however, he began working on the legislation almost immediately after being elected. The primary goals of ARRA were to reduce unemployment, invest in infrastructure, education, health, and green energy, and to provide relief to those most impacted by the recession through an expansion of several social welfare programs. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the total cost of ARRA would be nearly $800 billion by 2019; however, the majority of the spending was front loaded and approximately $500 billion had been spent by the end of fiscal year 2011 (CBO, 2012). The key poverty-reducing provisions of ARRA included measures to expand federal spending for several important public assistance programs, in addition to changes to the tax code that would benefit the working poor. Some of the most important specific provisions are listed below (Sherman, 2011). An expanded Child Tax Credit for lower-income working families with children. An expanded Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). Additional weeks of emergency unemployment compensation benefits. An additional $25 per week for unemployed workers to supplement their unemployment benefits. A $250 one-time payment to elderly people and people with disabilities who receive Social Security, SSI, or veterans benefits. An increase in food stamp benefit levels. Supplemental emergency funding for states to use for the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program. The cumulative effect of these provisions could plausibly be quite significant. Yet, there are several reasons why the full impact of ARRA would not be reflected in either Figure 1 or Figure 2. Because the official poverty rate relies on pretax income, it cannot possibly be affected by changes in the tax code, such as the expansion of the EITC. Although the official income definition does count cash transfer payments, it does not count noncash transfers such as food stamps and public housing. Finally, even though cash transfers are included in the Census Bureau s definition of income, the analysis in Figure 2 controls for income, thus suppressing any presidential effects on poverty that operated through changes in cash welfare programs.

8 8 Social Science Quarterly FIGURE 3 Percentage of People Removed from Poverty by Selected ARRA-Targeted Public Assistance Programs, SOURCE: U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey (CPS) Table Creator ( census.gov/cps/data/cpstablecreator.html). In Figure 3, we present the results of an analysis that relies on a more flexible definition of income and therefore allows us to arrive at a more accurate understanding of the anti-poverty effects of ARRA. To conduct our analysis, we relied on two definitions of income to measure poverty a baseline version and a more inclusive alternative version. Our baseline measure of income includes all cash market income, all government nonmeans-tested cash income (except unemployment insurance), the effects of all taxes (except EITC), all government and nongovernment education assistance, and all contributions from outside the household. Our second measure of income relied on all of the types of income in the baseline version, and then added all income from the following sources: unemployment insurance, the EITC, all government means-tested cash benefits, and all government means-tested noncash benefits (except Medicaid). Note that the only difference between the two income definitions is that the alternative version includes income from several government programs that were expanded under ARRA. We then calculated an estimate of the number of poor adults and children under each definition of income and computed the difference. Finally, we computed the percentage of people

9 Barack Obama s Fight Against Poverty 9 lifted out of poverty status by the alternative income definition (compared to the baseline definition) as follows: Percentage of poverty reduction = (No.of poor: baseline definition No.of poor: alternative definition) 100 No.of poor: baseline definition This statistic is plotted in Figure 3. Substantively speaking, the lines displayed in Figure 3 can be interpreted as representing the poverty-reducing effect of the following ARRA-targeted programs: EITC, UI, and all meanstested cash and noncash programs (except Medicaid). Unfortunately, we cannot provide data prior to 2004, but the availability of data for several years prior to the implementation of ARRA allows for a reasonable test of ARRA s impact. In the years leading up to ARRA under the presidency of George W. Bush, this collection of programs regularly removed approximately 25 percent of all people, and about 32 percent of all children, from poverty. As can be seen, there is remarkable stability in this rate of poverty reduction from 2004 through 2008, reflecting the relative stability of federal policies governing these programs. Consistent with the timing of ARRA s implementation in 2009, both sets of percentages increased substantially, to 33 and 41 percent, respectively. Compared to 2008, these statistics suggest that this collection of ARRA-targeted programs and policies lifted an additional 5 million people from poverty in 2009, of which nearly 2 million were children. The povertyreducing effect falls slightly in 2010, but the percentages are still significantly higher than what was seen during the pre-arra period. This abrupt increase in the poverty-reducing effect cannot be plausibly attributed to a built-in mechanical response of these programs to growing need, as suggested by some of Obama s critics. Indeed, as we can see in Figure 3, the poverty-reducing effect of these programs remained virtually flat throughout 2008, despite the fact that the country was officially in the midst of the recession during the entire year. Rather, it would seem reasonable to conclude that the differences observed in 2009 and 2010 are largely due to ARRA. In summary, although poverty has increased since President Obama assumed power, the empirical evidence suggests that poverty would have increased between 2008 and 2011 regardless who was elected president in 2008 due to the slow recovery from the Great Recession. Based on the historical relationship between macroeconomic conditions and the poverty rate, the increase in poverty during Obama s first term was actually less than expected. Yet, the official poverty rate understates the anti-poverty effectiveness of the most important legislative success of Obama s first term the stimulus package. Even by our conservative estimates that only capture the effects of a portion of ARRA s impact, the stimulus lifted at least 5 million people from poverty.

10 10 Social Science Quarterly This estimate does not include the effects of Medicaid expansion, nor does it consider the jobs saved and created by investment in infrastructure projects or the billions of dollars sent to the states to subsidize shrinking state budgets. While some critics may wish that Obama and the federal government had done more to relieve poverty, ARRA certainly represents one of the most significant pieces of anti-poverty legislation since the War on Poverty. But if this is the case, why have progressives been so critical of Obama? If Obama has not neglected the poor in his policy efforts, has he neglected them in his rhetoric? And if this is the case, how can we explain Obama s leadership style on this issue? We address these questions in the next two sections. Poverty and Presidential Rhetoric: Obama in Historical Perspective The modern presidency offers a powerful platform for influencing public discourse and opinion. At the same time, the president s communications with the nation shape the popular view of the president and influence presidential popularity. Presidents use their opportunities to try to move public opinion toward support for their policies while trying to paint themselves and their policy agendas in the most favorable light. In this section, we analyze President Obama s use of the weekly address to discuss issues relevant to the poor and the near-poor. How often does Obama discuss such issues? What terms does he use when discussing them? And how does Obama s rhetoric concerning the poor compare to that used by other presidents? In short, has Obama truly failed as a rhetorical leader when it comes to poverty? The importance of presidential rhetoric was recognized by Cesar, Thurow, and Tulis (1981), who called it one of the president s principal tools for governing the nation. Presidential speeches are designed to accomplish two objects, not always compatible. First, they are intended to maintain and increase public approval of the president. Presidents accomplish this by emphasizing values with which they would like to be associated in the public mind (Edwards and Wood, 1999:340; Sigelman and Whissell, 2002) and by discussing the policy areas on which the public supports the president (Druckman and Holmes, 2004). Presidents use rhetoric to paint an image of themselves that will be appealing to the public. A second goal of presidential rhetoric is to build public support for the president s policies among the mass public. Policy areas featured in presidential speeches increase in salience among the public, and popular presidents can sometimes sway public opinion on specific policies (Cohen, 1995). Using rhetoric to build support for policies is an essential part of governing. Presidents explain problems to the public in ways that favor their administration s solutions, and the members of the public in turn pressure their congressional representatives, directly or indirectly, to support presidential proposals (Beasley, 2010:10).

11 Barack Obama s Fight Against Poverty 11 We examine Obama s rhetorical emphasis on the issue of poverty by analyzing the text of a sample of weekly radio addresses across an historical period that spans the presidencies of Reagan through Obama. The president s weekly address is a five-minute message broadcast on the nation s major radio networks. Franklin Roosevelt was the first president to use radio as a means of regular communication with the public in the form of his fireside chats. The practice was revived by President Reagan in 1982 as a way to speak directly to the American public in simple language (Sigelman and Whissell, 2002; Rowland and Jones, 2002). Presidents Reagan, Clinton, and George W. Bush addressed the nation almost every week, a tradition that Obama has continued. President George H. W. Bush gave the address infrequently. The live radio audience for these addresses is fairly small, estimated at 1.5 million listeners (Han, 2006). However, the address is timed to spur coverage on the Saturday evening news, Sunday newspapers, and the Sunday morning news programs, and is effective in generating such coverage (Han, 2006; Scacco, 2011). The content of the weekly address is intended to present a positive image of the president (Sigelman and Whissell, 2002), focus public and elite attention on particular issues, and to set the terms in which those issues will be discussed (Han, 2006). Weekly addresses often refer to bills pending in Congress and ask listeners to pressure their representatives on those issues (Scacco, 2011). The two broad goals of presidential rhetoric, improving the president s image and promoting the president s policy agenda, can sometimes conflict. If a president focuses on a problem that is not relevant to a majority of the public or promotes policies that do not match the values of the majority of the public, his public standing will suffer. Therefore, we would expect presidents to focus on policies likely to be popular, and to frame their policy agendas in terms of values likely to resonate with the politically involved public. Analyzing Obama s Rhetoric on Poverty-Related Issues We began this analysis by downloading a sample of presidential weekly addresses from Reagan s initial weekly address on April 3, 1982 through Obama s April 7, 2012 address. 3 Our data include the first address in every calendar month. The addresses frequently concern more than one issue, so it is difficult to characterize an entire address in terms of a single topic. Instead, we separate each address into its constituent paragraphs and adopt the individual paragraph as our unit of analysis. The analysis consisted of two steps, the hand coding of training data and the automated content analysis. We hand coded approximately 10 percent of the paragraphs (N = 371) in the data set. These hand-coded paragraphs were used as training data for 3 The texts were downloaded from in May 2012.

12 12 Social Science Quarterly the quantitative (i.e., automated) analysis described below. Each co-author independently coded the same subset of paragraphs as to whether they discussed issues related to poverty. Paragraphs were coded as discussing poverty if they explicitly mentioned poverty or the poor, mentioned a government social welfare program (e.g., Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security), or mentioned a population particularly vulnerable to poverty (e.g., single mothers or the unemployed). 4 The two coders agreed on the coding of more than 95 percent of the paragraphs, and the disagreements were reconciled through discussion. The first steps in the automated content analysis were designed to make the data more tractable by reducing the number of unique terms without loss of meaningful information. This was accomplished by dropping any paragraphs containing less than 35 characters, 5 removing stop-words, and stemming the remaining text. 6 We then dropped from the data any word stems that appeared in less than 1 percent or more than 99 percent of the remaining paragraphs (Quinn et al., 2010; Hopkins and King, 2010). The final data set consisted of 3,179 paragraphs, and for each observation (i.e., paragraph), we have data on the frequency with which each word stem in the entire data set was used. 7 The second step in the analysis was to identify the terms that presidents tend to use when talking about poverty-related issues. We accomplished this by calculating the average frequency with which each term was used in the paragraphs hand coded as discussing poverty, and the frequency with which each term was used in the paragraphs hand coded as not discussing poverty. We then conducted difference of means tests to determine for each term whether it was used more frequently in the paragraphs coded as discussing poverty. We selected each term that occurred more frequently in the paragraphs discussing poverty and for which the difference of means test was significant at the 0.01 level. The selected terms constitute a list of terms highly associated with discussion of poverty-related issues (based on our training data set of hand-coded text). 8 Since our hand-coded data comprise only 10 percent of our full sample of paragraphs, our final task was to implement an automated coding process to code the remaining 90 percent of the sample (approximately 2,800 paragraphs). We accomplished this by first estimating a logit regression model based on our hand-coded data, in which the list of poverty-relevant terms served as independent variables and the human-coded variable indicating whether the 4 References to the unemployment rate as an indicator of the overall health of the economy were not coded as discussions of poverty-related issues. 5 We dropped short paragraphs to eliminate the opening salutations (e.g., My Fellow Americans ) and signing off paragraphs (e.g. Thanks for listening ). 6 Stop words are words that carry no information about the meaning of the text (e.g., a, an, at, on, it, and of ). Stemming means reducing a word to its word stem. For example, healthy and healthful both stem down to health. 7 Most terms do not occur in most paragraphs, so most of our data set consists of zeroes. 8 The list of word stems used as independent variables in the logit model is presented in the Appendix.

13 Barack Obama s Fight Against Poverty 13 FIGURE 4 Poverty-Related Rhetoric by President, Reagan Obama NOTE: The vertical axis represents the average value for our index of poverty-relevant rhetorical emphasis. paragraph discussed poverty-related issues was the dependent variable. 9 We then used the results from this model to estimate the probability that each of the uncoded paragraphs discusses poverty-related issues. These probabilities can be averaged within each year or presidential administration to create an index of the extent to which poverty-related issues were discussed during the period. Results of the Content Analysis Figure 4 presents the average index value by presidential administration, while Figure 5 presents the yearly index value. Figure 4 reflects the conventional wisdom that Democratic presidents talk about poverty-related issues more than Republican presidents. The average probabilities that a paragraph in the weekly address discussed poverty-related issues under Presidents 9 The logit model performed very well, correctly classifying 96.9 percent of the human-coded paragraphs, for a 77.6 percent proportionate reduction in error.

14 14 Social Science Quarterly FIGURE 5 Index of Poverty-Related Rhetoric by Year and State of Economy, Reagan,GeorgeH.W.Bush,andGeorgeW.Bushwere0.09,0.06,and0.09, respectively. 10 The average probabilities under Presidents Clinton and Obama were 0.22 and 0.12, respectively. The large difference between Presidents Clinton and Obama shows that President Clinton talked about issues related to poverty much more than Obama has thus far. In fact, President Obama used the word welfare exactly one time in the addresses we analyze, and that was in a sentence decrying corporate welfare for oil companies. 11 He has used the word poor one time, and that was quoting from a letter he had received. 12 In contrast, President Reagan used the terms welfare and poor 55 and 12 times, respectively, in the addresses we analyze. President Clinton used the word welfare 93 times and the word poor 18 times. The fact that welfare dependency was a main theme of Reagan s rhetoric and welfare reform was a central part of President Clinton s policy agenda explains their frequent use of these terms. Because both Reagan and Clinton had defined 10 The spike in 2004 is somewhat surprising. An examination of President George H. Bush s weekly addresses that year suggest that this spike reflects President Bush s advocacy for job training programs for the unemployed, his discussion of the No Child Left Behind Act and its effect on struggling schools, and his emphasis on the Working Families Tax Relief Act. 11 President Obama s weekly address of March 3, President Obama s weekly address of October 1, 2011.

15 Barack Obama s Fight Against Poverty 15 TABLE 1 Regression Results for Predictors of Poverty-Relevant Rhetoric, Independent Variables β t-value Unemployment rate Poverty rate Democratic president Intercept N 27 R 2.64 D-W Statistic 1.78 NOTE: The analysis was conducted by ordinary least squares. welfare as a problem, they were not associating themselves with the poor or with the welfare programs when they used those words. Obama has not made reduction of welfare rolls and costs a policy priority. So if he uses these words, he runs a risk of being associated in the public mind with an unpopular group and problem. This risk is probably greater for an African-American president who was formerly a community organizer on behalf of poor people (Obama, 1995). In Figure 5, we present the yearly index value from 1982 to The vertical bars on Figure 5 indicate time periods when the U.S. economy was in recession. Although one might expect presidents to focus more attention on poverty-related issues when the economy is in poor shape, no such overall pattern is evident. There was a modest increase in poverty-related rhetoric by Ronald Reagan during the 1981 recession and a slightly larger increase during the most recent recession under Barack Obama. However, there was no such increase during the recessions seen during the administrations of George H. W. Bush or George W. Bush. Regardless, variation during this period is dominated by the increase in rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, beginning in the early 1990s and subsiding after the passage of national legislation in To gain a better understanding of the possible determinants of povertyrelevant presidential rhetoric, we present the results of a simple regression analysis in Table 1. The regression model utilizes our yearly index of povertyrelevant rhetoric as the dependent variable and includes three independent variables as predictors the unemployment rate, the poverty rate, and a dummy variable indicating the presence of a Democratic president. The results confirm the finding in Figure 4 that Democratic presidents (i.e., Clinton and Obama) have emphasized poverty more than recent Republican presidents, even after controlling for economic conditions. It is also interesting to see that the national poverty rate has a positive and statistically significant effect on presidential rhetoric. When the poverty rate is high, presidents are somewhat more likely to emphasize poverty-related issues in their rhetoric. However, the unemployment rate has the opposite effect. It is not obvious why this might

16 16 Social Science Quarterly be the case, but it is important to remember that our measure of rhetorical emphasis does not consider the tone of the rhetoric. Thus, it is possible that periods of declining unemployment may give rise to efforts to cut welfare through welfare reform, resulting in an increase in poverty-related rhetoric that is more negative in tone. This would certainly fit with recent history and the two most important periods of welfare reform activity in our data set under presidents Reagan and Clinton. Given the fact that our measure tells us nothing about how presidents talk about poverty, it is instructive to look more closely at the text and compare the terms used by President Obama when he discusses poverty-related issues to the terms used by other presidents when they discuss these issues. To do this, we focused our attention on the paragraphs that our model identified as having at least a 90 percent chance of discussing a poverty-related issue. We then compared the average frequency of each term in Obama s poverty-related paragraphs with its average frequency in the poverty-relevant paragraphs of the other presidents. We applied a difference-of-means test to isolate the terms for which there is a statistically significant (p < 0.05, single-tailed test) difference between Obama s use and the other presidents use. This produced a list of 68 terms that Obama uses more often than other presidents when discussing poverty, and 52 terms that Obama uses less often than other presidents when discussing poverty. 13 Although many of the words on these two lists are hard to interpret as meaningful indicators of Obama s communication style on these issues, a couple of patterns seem to emerge. First, Obama chooses words that refer to issues relevant to the middle class rather than just the poor. He uses retirement, senior (as in senior citizens ), and Medicare more often than other presidents. The costs of retirement, healthcare in particular, are problems more salient to middle-class citizens than to the poor, for whom a distinct retirement phase of life is less realistic. Second, Obama seems to situate his discussions of the poor in the context of issues affecting the entire nation rather than in the context of issues facing only the poor. He is more likely to use the words recession, financial, and crisis than other presidents. These terms refer to macroeconomic factors rather than personal characteristics, and there are no similar words in the list of terms President Obama uses less than other presidents. The list of terms Obama avoids, relative to other presidents, includes poor and welfare, but also child, children, and mother. Despite the positive connotations of children and mothers, these terms may remind the public of the population most associated with government welfare programs. Similarly, when speaking about poverty-related issues Obama uses the words deficit, program, budget, and government less often than other presidents. These words link the problems of the poor to government programs and to the national deficit. 13 The complete list of terms is presented in the Appendix in Table A-3.

17 Barack Obama s Fight Against Poverty 17 In summary, we find that President Obama does not stand out compared to other recent presidents when it comes to the frequency with which he addresses poverty-related issues. He has addressed poverty issues slightly more than recent Republican presidents, but far less than Democrat Bill Clinton. President Obama is somewhat distinctive, however, in the way that he speaks about poverty. He seems to be more cautious to avoid words that can be associated exclusively with public assistance and the lower class. We elaborate on this finding and tie it to more general conclusions about Obama s leadership style below. Barack Obama and Poverty: Leading by Facilitation In his recent book on presidential leadership, George Edwards (2009) describes two models of presidential leadership. He refers to the first model as director of change, which he defines as a president who creates opportunities to move in new directions, leading others where they otherwise would not go. The director establishes an agenda and persuades the public, organized interests, Congress, and others to support administration policies (2009:11). Clearly, at least when it comes to poverty reduction, Barack Obama has not been a director of change. Does this mean that Obama is not personally committed to poverty reduction? There is little reason to think this is the case. Obama has a long track record as a supporter of poverty reduction as an activist and elected official. He made inequality and social welfare an important part of his platform during the 2008 election (Mettler, 2010). And in the months after the election, when he chose Tom Vilsack for Department of Agriculture Secretary, Obama reportedly told Vislack that the top priority for his department (which also happens to administer the food stamp program) should be that all American children are well fed (Alter, 2010). A more plausible explanation, and one that fits well with our findings, is that Obama has chosen a different style of leadership, which Edwards refers to as facilitator of change. According to Edwards (2009): Facilitators understand the opportunities for change in their environments and fashion strategies and tactics to exploit them. Rather than create a constituency, they reflect and sometimes clarify, intensify, or channel their constituencies aspirations, values, and policy views. Instead of persuading others to support them, they skillfully work at the margins of coalition building, perhaps influencing a few critical actors, to obtain support for their initiatives. (2009;12) This type of leadership style is similar in many ways to the model described by Jacobs and King (2010), which they term structured agency. The two models share the common assumptions that presidents are often severely constrained in their ability to implement their agenda. They are limited in

18 18 Social Science Quarterly their ability to move political elites to their side, and despite the conventional wisdom, their efforts to take their case to the people by going public are rarely successful in changing public opinion (Edwards, 2003). Therefore, presidents must look for and take advantage of opportunities to effect change. Certainly, Obama has faced several important constraints on his ability to be a transformative leader when it comes to poverty. Obama assumed the presidency during a time of severe partisan and ideological polarization and a thin Democratic majority in the Senate that was not guaranteed to withstand a filibuster (Mettler, 2010). But most important, perhaps, is the very nature of the poverty issue itself. Discussing issues related to the poor is particularly treacherous. Research on mass attitudes has consistently shown that among middle-class persons, perceptions of welfare recipients and the welfare system are overwhelmingly negative. Poor people and welfare recipients are typically characterized as dishonest, dependent, lazy, uninterested in education, and promiscuous (Bullock, 1995:125). This fact remains true today. The opinion environment that Obama inherited as president was no less hostile to an expansion of public assistance for the poor than it was before the recession. Indeed, even though the country was in the midst of the worst recession in decades, in 2008 the General Social Survey reported that a mere 18 percent of white independents favored increased spending on welfare, while 82 percent believed that welfare spending was about right (35 percent) or too excessive (46 percent). Gilens (1999) argues that antipathy toward programs designed to help the poor is strongly rooted in the public misperception that anti-poverty programs primarily benefit African Americans, a factor particularly relevant for President Obama as the nation s first African-American president. Obama clearly understands the potential political costs of being perceived as a champion of the poor, and his reluctance to speak directly about poverty reduction and the poor as president was evident even before he was elected president. For example, after John Edwards formally endorsed Obama in a 2008 campaign event in Grand Rapids, Obama spoke about poverty in a way that proved to be very prophetic: Poverty isn t an issue that s talked about on the news or in Washington. It s not always the kind of issue that polls well. But John Edwards decided to talk about it anyway. He decided to center his campaign around it. He came up with new ideas to solve it. He pushed the rest of us to talk about it and debate it. And he did it, not because it was popular, but because it was right. Our analysis of Obama s rhetoric as president is entirely consistent with Obama s expectations of the political backlash that can accompany strong rhetorical leadership on poverty reduction. He has very rarely spoken about poverty or the the poor, just as his critics on the left have claimed. He also seems to attempt to distance himself from the target populations that

19 Barack Obama s Fight Against Poverty 19 are most associated with welfare. When President Clinton promoted his welfare reform ideas, he consistently presented the welfare system, rather than poverty itself, as the problem to be resolved (Carcasson, 2006), and President Reagan presented both the welfare program and welfare recipients in negative terms (O Connor, 1998). It was easy for them to talk about poverty and welfare because they were perceived as reducing welfare. As a supporter of expanding government assistance for the poor and near-poor, it would be unrealistic to expect President Obama to make programs aimed at the poor a central focus of his public speeches. Rather, it would seem to make much more sense for Obama to work as a facilitator, rather than as a director of change. As a facilitator, Obama took full advantage of the opportunity he had inherited the Great Recession. Soon after Obama was elected, his soonto-be Chief of Staff, Rahm Emmanuel, told an audience of top business executives: You never want a serious crisis to go to waste... This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before. Although Emmanuel did not specifically refer to social welfare expansion as one of those things, President Obama certainly used the economic crisis as an opportunity to increase federal investment in poverty reduction. However, his anti-poverty initiatives were designed in a way that did not bring attention to them. They were bundled within the stimulus package and therefore represented only a minority of overall stimulus spending. The initiatives were also primarily designed as expansions of existing programs, which also attracted less attention than would be the case if brand new programs were created. And most importantly, Obama did not emphasize this aspect of the stimulus in his speeches. According to Jonathan Alter, when a congressman approached the First Lady during a reception after the bill s passage and told her that the ARRA was the most significant anti-poverty legislation in a generation, the First Lady reportedly replied Shhhh! Alter went on to explain: The White House didn t want the public thinking that Obama had achieved long-sought public policy objectives under the guise of merely stimulating the economy (131). On the one hand, Obama s facilitation of the passage of significant antipoverty policy has been successful. Our results are consistent with other analyses (e.g., Sherman, 2011) that conclude ARRA prevented millions of Americans from slipping into poverty. On the other hand, Obama s facilitation strategy, which includes a lack of rhetorical leadership on the issue of poverty and an unwillingness to seek credit for ARRA s anti-poverty success, has had negative political consequences. It was inevitable that a backlash would emerge from the right given the scrutiny of conservative media outlets. It was only a matter of time, for example, until Obama would be labeled the Food Stamp President, as he was by Newt Gingrich during the Republican primary campaign. What was less expected, however, has been the criticism from the left. In his efforts to keep his anti-poverty efforts under the radar, Obama has succeeded in convincing his own supporters that he has not done

20 20 Social Science Quarterly nearly enough to reduce poverty. In other words, Obama has minimized one leadership problem by creating another. This second problem is well known in the presidential literature and is rooted in what presidential scholars call the expectations gap thesis. The basic premise of the thesis is that presidential capacity inevitably falls far short of public expectations, and that over time this gap between expectations and accomplishments has grown to unmanageable proportions (Waterman, St. Clair, and Wright, 1999). In hindsight, it seems inevitable that Obama would fall victim to this phenomenon as he was elected with the highest expectations of any recent president. According to a Gallup poll conducted soon after the 2008 election (Gallup and Newport, 2009:387), a majority of Americans believed that Obama would promote a good economy (64 percent), reduce the federal deficit (56 percent), and lower unemployment (67 percent). And if this was not difficult enough, a large majority of Americans (64 percent) expected him to accomplish all of these things without raising taxes. But as high as these numbers were, a full 80 percent of Americans believed that President Obama would improve conditions for minorities and the poor. Of the 16 goals that respondents were asked to consider, this goal reflected the highest level of confidence and easily exceeded the levels seen by recent presidents, including Bill Clinton (68 percent). In light of these exceptionally high expectations, it is hard to imagine that Obama could be viewed as successful with respect to poverty reduction. As Theodore Lowi (1985) once observed concerning this phenomenon, a partial success [in policy terms] is defined as a failure (1985:11, quoted in Waterman, St. Clair, and Wright, 1999). The only solution, as Waterman et al., (1999) suggest, is to convince the public that they are providing leadership, even if in reality they have only a limited ability to affect outcomes (1999:15). Unfortunately for Obama, he is limited in his ability to create this image due to the likely increase in the backlash from the right. President Obama seems to be well aware of this dilemma but all signs point to a continuation of the current leadership strategy. For example, in the fall of 2011 the White House announced new targeted initiatives to combat urban poverty, which could potentially go a long way toward ameliorating Obama s critics on the left and within the black community. But as columnist Walter Russell Mead commented, Obama has not altered his political strategy. Instead, the White House has opted for a dog whistle strategy: making proposals that Blacks will recognize as beneficial and targeted to their special problems without triggering white backlash. For that strategy to work, two things have to happen: Blacks have to see results while swing voters and independents don t notice the President s new concern (Mead, 2011). Whether this strategy will be successful is far from clear, but it is a strategy that is inevitable given the political constraints he faces due to the unpopularity of any policy that might be framed as welfare expansion.