The Presidents and the Poor: America Battles Poverty, 1964–2017 by Lawrence J. McAndrews (review)

The United States has lost its war on poverty. Many a scholar has sought to understand why, given the tremendous resources that the nation has at its disposal. Indeed, as McAndrews tells us, poverty has declined far more slowly since President Lyndon B. Johnson declared that “we shall not rest until this [war on poverty] is won” than it did in the years before. At the beginning of his exploration of American poverty, McAndrews acknowledges the books, from rhetorical to sociological studies, that offer valuable analyses of how federal policy has contributed to poverty’s persistence. What distinguishes his text is a president-by-president exploration of the role of the executive office in antipoverty policy, from Lyndon Baines Johnson to Barack Obama.

McAndrews defines antipoverty policy broadly, accounting for presidential approaches to welfare, hunger, “urban development,” homelessness, health care, and more. Each element receives individual attention, but the analysis makes careful links across administrations and political parties. “Enterprise zones,” for example, originated in the Republican Reagan administration as an idea to revitalize urban areas by encouraging private investment and job creation through tax relief. Democratic president Barack Obama unveiled his version, “promise zones,” in 2013. Administration after administration tried to make adjustments to federal cash-assistance programs until President Bill Clinton “signed into law the most radical welfare reform since the New Deal” (161). McAndrews traces this lineage in detail, employing archival materials, media coverage, and interviews with people directly involved in crafting and negotiating these policies to reveal the complexities involved in antipoverty policymaking.

In addition to accounting for the intricacies of the process, McAndrews offers analyses of each president’s approach. He bases his assessments not on the administrations’ reputations but on a series of more concrete metrics. What policies successfully passed? Did employment increase? Did the poverty rate decrease? For example, even though President Ronald Reagan received heavy criticism for his approach to homelessness, McAndrews concludes that poor Americans were better off at the end of the Reagan administration even if “he could have done so much more” (134). McAndrews also looks to factors like presidential rhetoric and media coverage of poverty during a given administration. Did the president compromise too much? Did he talk about poverty too little? President George H. W. Bush made poverty a national talking point, whereas President Obama rarely mentioned it.

The Presidents and the Poor concludes with a list of barriers that McAndrews believes to have prevented presidents from achieving victory in the war on poverty—political partisanship, economic shifts, structural racism, an apathetic electorate, and more. The book would have been more effective if it had started with this analysis, using these elements to frame the decades-long antipoverty narrative. Doing so would have created space for more in-depth treatments of key factors like race, which generally receives only fleeting mention until the book’s conclusion. Readers looking for a critical/cultural studies approach to antipoverty policy will want to look elsewhere. McAndrews clearly cares about power, but this text takes a more traditional approach to political history.

The book excels in its comprehensive review of the details of anti-poverty policymaking in the White House. It is a valuable resource for scholars writing about poverty and/or presidential rhetoric, regardless of their discipline, because of its meticulous treatment of a wide array of policy negotiations.