I just finished rereading Nickel and Dimed. We like to think - we're taught to think - of issues like poverty as discrete things that happen in vacuums as the result of easily definable, blame-able actions. You're poor because you won't get a job. It's upsetting to consider what effect a lack of winter heat might have on a child's ability to achieve in school, and therefore on his ability to pull himself up by his fabled bootstraps.

And it's not as if we lack for alternatives to the easy out of blaming the victim. Yet, that's what we did in 1996, and we did it for votes. No, that's not right - we didn't blame the poor. We fucked the poor and then blamed them for their own fucking, all in the name of a desperate hope that the right wing would stop being mean to us.

So, how's that worked out for us? As a party, as an ideology, as a nation?