Jean quit her job flipping burgers and swirling soft serve at a local Dairy Queen to care for her father. Four generations of the family lived in the rented double-wide now. Pennington had recently lost his wife of fifty-one years and had moved in with his daughter Jean. While drinking from a can of Mountain Dew, Clinton talked with sixty-nine-year-old Ray Pennington, a self-described “old-timer” with severe emphysema who required a portable oxygen tank to breathe. The economically depressed coal town lay deep in the Appalachian Mountains. On a steamy day in July 1999, President Bill Clinton rested in a plastic lawn chair in front of a ramshackle prefabricated home in the Whispering Pines trailer park in Tyner, Kentucky. Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act US Department of Housing and Urban Development US Department of Health and Human Services Read ExcerptĬommunity Development Financial InstitutionĬongressional Committee on Party Effectiveness This piercingly intelligent book shows how bygone policy decisions have left us with skyrocketing income inequality and poverty in America and widened fractures within the Democratic Party that persist to this day. Though politically expedient and sometimes profitable in the short term, these programs fundamentally weakened the safety net for the poor. Fueled by an ethos of “doing well by doing good,” microfinance, charter schools, and privately funded housing developments grew trendy. Historian Lily Geismer recounts how the Clinton-era Democratic Party sought to curb poverty through economic growth and individual responsibility rather than asking the rich to make any sacrifices. The result is one of the great missed opportunities in political history: a moment when we had the chance to change the lives of future generations and were too short-sighted to take it. But this incisive political history shows that the current inequality crisis was also enabled by a Democratic Party that catered to the affluent. The 40-year history of how Democrats chose political opportunity over addressing inequality-and how the poor have paid the priceįor decades, the Republican Party has been known as the party of the rich: arguing for “business-friendly” policies like deregulation and tax cuts.
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