Mr. President, you dropped the ball

There is another gathering of the political elite, this time in Charlotte. More overblown rhetoric. More promises of prosperity and better days ahead. All the preening and bile is rather nauseating, particularly at a time when we desperately need servant leadership and compassion as a nation.

Jesus taught his disciples by word and deed that they must put others first and foremost. Here is the discussion in Mark 10:42-45:

Jesus called them together and said, “You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Our political leaders do not serve those with the least. They only serve those with the most. That is not an exaggeration. And it becomes obscene when you consider the ungodly amount of money that will be consumed by this election. That gold is certainly bread cast on water because the politicians elected will reward their wealthy benefactors with policies that will make the rich richer.

Barack Obama gave us the hope of leadership that would serve the least with as much energy as those with the most. Paul Tough contrasted the promise and performance of Obama on the issue of poverty in an excellent analysis in the New York Times. It is not a narrative that will receive any attention in Charlotte.

Tough's article describes the vast gulf between Obama's advocacy for the poor before his election as president and his actions as president. After graduating from law school at Harvard, Obama served in poor communities on the south side of Chicago. He became immersed in the challenges faced by communities like Roseland. Giving younger generations a way out of the grinding poverty became a personal and political objective.

As Obama’s time on the South Side progressed, he grew preoccupied by the fate of Roseland’s young people, especially the teenage boys, who seemed increasingly directionless and hopeless. It was not just money they were lacking, he realized, but something deeper. As a boy, Obama spent several years in Indonesia, with a close-up view of third-world poverty, and in his memoir, Obama compared the lives of the children he saw in Altgeld Gardens with the lives of the children he saw as a boy growing up in the slums of Jakarta. In many ways, Obama wrote, the Indonesian slum-dwellers had it better. “For all that poverty, there remained in their lives a discernible order,” he explained. “The habits of a generation played out every day beneath the bargaining and the noise and the swirling dust. It was the absence of such coherence that made a place like Altgeld so desperate.”

The first step in serving those in poverty is to immerse yourself in their world. This is essential because you see their humanity, their suffering, and the conditions that maintain despair. Obama came, saw, learned, and felt the challenges faced by the poor. It fired his imagination and passion. He translated those experiences into a vision that he carried with him the presidential campaign in 2008.

“When I’m president,” Obama said, “the first part of my plan to combat urban poverty will be to replicate the Harlem Children’s Zone in 20 cities across the country.” With a candor unusual for a presidential candidate, Obama acknowledged the high price of his program: “Now, how much will this cost?” he asked. “I’ll be honest — it can’t be done on the cheap. It will cost a few billion dollars a year. . . . But we will find the money to do this because we can’t afford not to.”

Here is someone who had a clear vision of how to help the poor, especially younger generations, escape poverty. He saw the need for innovative programs that give them a hand up the economic ladder. He even had a program in mind to serve as a model to promote. There was every reason to hope that addressing poverty would be a priority of this man as president. Those hopes have not come to fruition. Syndicated columnist Bob Herbert wrote a scathing assessment of the Obama administration's policies and advocacy for the poor. As Herbert put it, “Barack Obama can barely bring himself to say the word ‘poor.’"

So what happened? How did Obama go from a man with a plan to one that dared not mention poverty?  Reality has not been kind. Recovery from the recession has been slow, poverty levels have increased, and his opponents have labelled him the "welfare president" for making sure safety net programs were not cut. This is where your leadership mindset matters. If you are a servant leader as advocated by Christ, then the poor are a priority and the political calculus does not matter. If you are desperate to hold on to your own power, then you have to dance around your opponent's narrative.

This is the sound of dancing around poverty.

A better approach, (Valerie) Jarrett said, was for the president to propose and support a set of broad programs that raised all Americans economically, an approach that she described as inclusive. She added: “I think our chances for successfully helping people move from poverty to the middle class is greater if everyone understands why it is in their best interest that these paths of opportunity are available for everyone. We try to talk about this in a way where everyone understands why it is in their self-interest.”

The political narrative is certainly full of manure. It has become deeply dishonest, particularly on the subject of poverty. Politicians and political operatives like to claim the poor are few and not really suffering. They are not telling the truth.

The Census Bureau tracks a category that the government calls “deep poverty”; families are said to be in deep poverty if they earn less than 50 percent of the poverty line — which means around $11,000 a year for a family of four, not including food stamps or other noncash support. The number of families in deep poverty grew sharply during the recent recession and its aftermath, and in 2010, the share of Americans whose families made less than half of the poverty line hit a record: 6.7 percent of the population, or 1 in 15 Americans. The numbers are even higher for children, disturbingly so. In 2010, 1 in every 10 American children lived in deep poverty.

Blaming the poor along while stroking the ego of the successful is proof that politicians should not talk about God and scripture. They would not know Christ if he stood before them and showed them his wounds. Heaven forbid if the Lord does not show up wearing the finest suits, sporting the most expensive accessories, and traveling in opulence.

This is the problem with politicians. The poor are not a constituency that anyone cares about. They have no money to donate to the political process. Their presence gets in the way of happy clappy talk about prosperity. The social safety net is a big pot of gold that could go for welfare for the wealthy, corporate interests, and defense contracts. The political process sucks the compassion right out of you, even when you arrive with good intentions.

We have two political parties in today's America. There is a party that promises to only help the rich and pray the rich will be benevolent. Let's call them the pigs. There is another party that promises to help the rich and the poor, but the poor always get the short end of the stick. Let's call them the chickens. People of faith can cite commandments from Deuteronomy to Revelation to serve the poor, but the pigs and chickens are not going to listen. The political barnyard preaches the virtue of self-interest. All hail the self-righteous rich.

Let's stop asking who Jesus would have us vote for and start asking who he would want us to serve. It is certainly not the rich. That is crystal clear.

Here is reality. Leadership and innovation in addressing poverty is critical, especially because many politicians are working hard to kick out the ladders of public education, job training, infrastructure, and community investment. Innovative and effective approaches to poverty are not going to come from politicians. Nor are they going to come from corporate interests. Their games of greed have added to the ranks of poor. This presents a challenge and golden opportunity for people of faith to demonstrate the love of God through servant leadership.

Prove me wrong, Mr. President. I dare you.

By the way, Mr. President, the few billion dollars that the program you talked about to address urban poverty is trivial in comparison to what will be spent on elections this year, the annual cost of subsidies to oil companies and banks, and the tax breaks given to the rich.