General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Mitt steps in it again. "I'm not concerned about the very poor. They have a safety net." [View all]karynnj
(59,522 posts)- and very few people are not like him.
Very few politicians ever were so poor that the safety net caught them as they fell. There are many who grew up middle class or lower middle class - like Gephardt, the son of a milkman, or Edwards, the son of a mill foreman. But, all of them succeeded early - getting good educations and almost immediately becoming upwardly mobile - even if they sought used furniture to furnish their first apartment. (The two politicians that were genuinely in impoverished families that I can think of are Bill Clinton and Scott Brown - and Brown has voted against the very programs that allowed him to go to college and get ahead.
On the other hand, consider the words and actions of politicians from very comfortable or wealthy families - like FDR, who started Social Security, LBJ, who started Medicare, Kennedy, who had a hand in every social welfare program for 4 decades and who (with Hatch and Kerry - 2 more wealthy Senators) wrote the SCHIP program.
I was young when George Romney ran, but form memory he was a far more compassionate person than his son.