Vice president Gore wants you to know that the executive branch he represents is the finest, best intentioned, most effective in history. Gore is a proud man. But he is a thoughtful man, too, a teller of unpleasant truths. So he must remind us, as he did at a special “summit” meeting in Washington on September 15, that despite four-plus years of Clintonite achievement, it remains sadly the case that “all is not right with America.” Why, on any given evening — here “amid our amber waves of grain and our fruited plains” (and our million-dollar DNC softmoney fund-raising galas) — there are American children who lie awake in bed, tormented by a “sore pain.” The sore pain is hunger.
In fact, there are “millions of Americans,” the vice president reports, ” who are simply not getting enough to eat” because they cannot “figure out how to make ends meet, how to get food on the table.” This is “appalling,” a ” tragedy,” a “blight on our nation’s soul.” And Al Gore will . . . not . . . tolerate it: “We cannot stand by and let people in this nation starve.” Yes: “starve.”
Now, we know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that hard evidence of this American starvationthrough-poverty crisis is curiously missing from all the established statistical tables.
You’re thinking that the Centers for Disease Control’s annual “Births and Deaths” report for 1996 has American life expectancy at an all-time high and American infant mortality at an all-time low (considerably less than half what it was in 1970). You’re thinking that CDC’s “National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey” has found no significant protein, calorie, vitamin, or mineral deficiency in any major segment of the nation’s population. You’re thinking that Americans in every economic category are able to spend ever lower percentages of their income on food — to the point where groceries are less a budgetary burden on the poorest Americans than they are on middle-income Europeans.
You’re also thinking that far from wasting away, Americans at all levels of income are growing markedly obese. The most recent data, reported by CDC in March, describe an impressive expansion of the U.S. waistline since the late 1970s. The percentages of children and adolescents who are overweight have roughly doubled. A full 35 percent of American adults are now overweight — up from 25 percent. And other federal statistical instruments consistently establish the following link between personal income and portliness: The less money you earn, the more likely you are to be fat.
Every year, to be sure, there are circumstances of more than incidental hunger — medically observable malnutrition — in our population of 260 million. But they are extremely rare, almost statistically undetectable. And they are most commonly and directly associated not so much with poverty, but with alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness, child abuse, or comparable individual or family pathology. There is otherwise no serious evidence of endemic and persistent American hunger. No one in the United States, tonight, tomorrow, or the next day, for reasons of finance, faces a measurable danger that he will “starve.”
So what in the world is the vice president talking about? What, for that matter, can Clinton agriculture secretary Dan Glickman possibly mean when he says that one in three American children “live in families that do constant battle with hunger” and are “at constant risk of malnutrition and the lifetime of chronic illness that can accompany it”?
In simplest terms, they are referring, very loosely, to some nifty new numbers jointly baked up by the departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services — what Gore is pleased to call “the first-ever baseline study of the scope of hunger in America.” Only it turns out this “cornerstone” research isn’t really about hunger per se. The survey’s own authors point out that clinical measurements of the “physical sensation caused by a lack of food” do not provide “sensitive indicators” of any problem as it is ” primarily experienced in the U.S. context.” In other words, you could walk from sea to shining sea and never find much hunger, which result would make for a very dull vice presidential announcement, indeed — dull even by standards primarily experienced in the Al Gore context.
So instead, the government has asked a representative sample of U.S. households 58 questions largely designed to measure certain “characteristic affective states” — anxiety and uncertainty — involving food budgets and consumption. At some point in the last 12 months, did you worry that the refrigerator would go empty before you could restock it? Did you ever eat ” less than you felt you should,” or a nutritionally unbalanced or low-cost meal, for purposes of economy? Every household responding yes to at least three such catchall queries has been officially designated at risk, or “food insecure.”
The Clinton administration administered this survey in 1995 during the one calendar week average Americans are most panicked about money: April 16 through April 22, right after tax time. So you will not be surprised to ” learn” that there are a whopping 11.9 million “food insecure” U.S. households, comprising 34.7 million people. Or that 4.2 million of these households (11. 2 million people) are now assumed by our government to be living with actual ” resource-constrained hunger.” You will not even be surprised to “learn” that among these chronically “hungry” Americans are 185,000 households — with almost 700,000 individual members — who have annual incomes exceeding $ 40, 000.
The technical term for this kind of social-science project is: garbage.
That’s not what’s most interesting about it, though. Politicians have been exaggerating civic needs, and then proposing to meet them, since time began. The Left, for its part, has traditionally made crude appeals to the American heart with Dickensian fantasies about current conditions of poverty. And until recently, Democratic-party liberalism has always encouraged such sentimentality in order to advance some hard-boiled, real-world design — some new or expanded social program or entitlement.
But those good old days are clearly over, and something hard and cold with calculation has taken their place. Think, for a moment, what it would mean if almost one in seven Americans truly were, as the vice president ludicrously suggests, at serious risk of starvation. It would be a genuine national emergency. The president — any president, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican — would be obliged to place full federal power behind a rescue. Just for starters, you would expect the president to call out the National Guard for distribution of bread and soup. At the very least, you would expect our current president, Bill Clinton, to demand an immediate expansion of federal food-aid spending, which now stands at $ 35.6 billion a year. You would expect him to do something appropriate to scale.
But you would expect wrong, and that’s the kicker. The Clinton administration is happy to pretend that more than 11 million American stomachs are growling for lack of nourishment. It is happy to pretend that little children with distended bellies will shortly begin wilting in our streets. But the only practical response our ostentatiously “concerned” vice president can muster is a public service announcement featuring folk-music retreads Peter, Paul & Mary on something called food-waste “gleaning.” This land is your land, it is supposedly choking with privation, and the Clinton administration politely suggests that you should donate your half-eaten sandwich to a local community kitchen.
The whole little episode makes such a neat, pathetic commentary on the emptiness of second-term Clintonism in general. It’s become a fixed routine. This White House wildly and cynically hypes — or outright fabricates — a domestic-policy “crisis.” It asks the public to love and admire how much the president “cares.” And it hopes, all the while, that no one notices how little his administration actually dares to do about anything.
Messrs. Clinton and Gore are now surviving on the very barest minimum daily allowance of ideological nutrients. Quick: Someone “glean” these boys a half- eaten idea. They’re starving.
David Tell, for the Editors
