Infinite Monkeys

Crock of Shtick

Michael Barone's blog is a must-read for political junkies, and today's entry is a gem--it breaks down the current shape of the 2008 Presidential race. I particularly loved this almost paranthetical point:

Edwards seems to do better than Kerry in polls now, but it doesn't seem certain to me that his stump speech is going to enchant the press in the '08 cycle as it did in '04. His shtick on how many Americans live in poverty is going to wear thin. His stump speech includes a line about a little girl whose parents couldn't afford a winter coat.

Give me a break. You can buy a little girl's winter coat at Wal-Mart for $10. That's the price of taking the little girl out to lunch at McDonald's. As Juan Williams points out in his book Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America—and What We Can Do About It, no one in America is stuck in poverty if he or she does three things: graduates from high school; gets a job, any job; refrains from having children before getting married. Poverty comes not from any structural failure of society but from dysfunctional behaviors. Edwards's poverty shtick is a crock.