(It's a Times Select piece, which one is supposed to pay for- shhhh, don't tell Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr.)

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
The New York Times

July 31, 2007 Tuesday
Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section A; Column 0; Editorial Desk; OP-ED COLUMNIST; Pg. 19

LENGTH: 756 words

HEADLINE: Edwards, Obama and The Poor

BYLINE: By DAVID BROOKS

BODY:

Suppose you were going to decide your vote for president entirely on the
issue of who could best reduce poverty. Who would you vote for?

You'd start by focusing your attention on the candidates who have invested
the most time in the issue, John Edwards and Barack Obama.

You'd find that both have a multilayered view of poverty. We used to have
debates in which liberals emphasized the lack of jobs and conservatives
emphasized personal behavior. But in the post-welfare-reform world, it's pretty
obvious that everything feeds into everything else. For Edwards and Obama,
poverty flows from a lack of jobs and broken families, bad schools and bad role
models, no training and no self-control.

For both candidates, you have to attack everything at once. You have to
holistically change the environment that structures behavior. The question is
how to do it.

Obama and Edwards agree on a lot, but in this matter they emphasize
different things. As Alec MacGillis of The Washington Post observed, Edwards
emphasizes programs that help people escape from concentrated poverty. Obama
emphasizes programs that fix inner-city neighborhoods. One helps people find
better environments, the other seeks to strengthen the environment they are
already in.

Edwards would create a million housing vouchers for working families. These
would, he argues, ''enable people to vote with their feet to demand safe
communities with good schools.'' They'd help people move to where the jobs are
and foster economic integration.

The problem with his approach is that past efforts at dispersal produced
disappointing results. Families who were given the means to move from poor
neighborhoods to middle-class areas did not see incomes rise. Girls in those
families did a little better, but boys did worse. They quickly formed
subcultures in the new communities that replicated patterns of the old ones.
Male criminality rose, but test scores did not.

Obama, by contrast, builds his approach around the Harlem Children's Zone,
what he calls ''an all-encompassing, all-hands-on-deck anti-poverty effort.''
The zone takes an area in Harlem and saturates it with childcare, marriage
counseling, charter schools and job counselors and everything else you can think
of. Obama says he'll start by replicating the program in 20 cities around the
country.

The problem here is that there are few historical examples of neighborhoods
being lifted up at once. There are 4,000 community development corporations
around the country and they have not lifted residents out of poverty. The
positive influences in the center get overwhelmed by the negative peer
influences all around.

The organizations that do appear to work, like the Harlem Children's Zone
(there's no firm data yet), tend to have charismatic leaders like Geoffrey
Canada who are willing to fight teachers' unions and take on bureaucracies. It's
not clear whether their success is replicable, let alone by the federal
government.

What we have, then, is two divergent approaches, both of which have
problems and low odds of producing tremendous success. If you find that
discouraging, welcome to the world of poverty policy.

If I had to choose between the two, I guess I'd go with the Obama plan. I'd
lean that way because Obama seems to have a more developed view of social
capital. Edwards offers vouchers, job training and vows to create a million
temporary public-sector jobs. Obama agrees, but takes fuller advantage of home
visits, parental counseling, mentoring programs and other relationship-building
efforts.

The Obama policy provides more face-to-face contact with people who can
offer praise or disapproval. Rising out of poverty is difficult -- even when
there are jobs and good schools. It's hard to focus on a distant degree or home
purchase. But human beings have a strong desire for approval and can accomplish
a lot with daily doses of praise and censure. Standards of behavior are
contagious that way.

A neighborhood is a moral ecosystem, and Obama, the former community
organizer, seems to have a better feel for that. It's not only policies we're
looking for in selecting a leader, it's a sense of how the world works. Obama's
plan isn't a sure-fire cure for poverty, but it does reveal an awareness of the
supple forces that can't be measured and seen.

Last week I cited data on rising earnings among the working poor. I should
have made it clear that the data referred to poor households with children,
since poor households without children did not enjoy those gains.