US President Barack Obama (C) greets locals outside a restaurant in Rochester, New York, on August 22, 2013 during a two-day bus tour through New York and Pennsylvania to discuss his plan to make college more affordable, tackle rising costs and improve value for students and their families. Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

The city of Washington, D.C., stands as a rebuke to the notion of America as a land of equal social and economic opportunity. In the shadow of the nation’s great memorials to the struggle for political democracy, and just a few minutes away from some of the most affluent suburban communities in the nation, lies a city with many neighborhoods and residents who are largely shut out of the American dream.

Nineteen percent of the D.C. population (including 29 percent of children) is currently classified as impoverished by the federal government, though this figure does not factor in the high cost of living in the Washington area. And in any case the government’s official measure of poverty was designed more than half a century ago according to a crude and outdated formula that assumed households would spend one-third of their budgets on food.

In response to this problem, the Obama administration has developed a more accurate assessment of poverty — the Supplemental Poverty Measure — that attempts to correct for many well-known technical and substantive issues with the official measure. In another sign of President Barack Obama’s sensitivity to the problem, he chose to deliver a major policy speech on poverty and inequality last week at THEARC, a combination theater and community center in southeast Washington, off the beaten track of the city’s political class.

Sensitivity to poverty is commendable, but achieving effective results is what ultimately matters. Poverty has undoubtedly risen, not fallen, since Obama took office in 2009 (15.0 percent in 2012, compared with 13.2 percent in 2008 — an increase of 6.7 million people). Available studies, many of which were cited by the president in his speech, indicate that the trend of the top 1 percent capturing the lion’s share of income has continued unabated during his tenure. Nor is there any reason to suppose that social mobility — the traditional American answer to levels of income inequality that are high by international standards — has risen in the past five years. Indeed, as the president noted, “it is harder today for a child born here in America to improve her station in life than it is for children in most of our wealthy allies — countries like Canada or Germany or France.”

The good intentions and, in some important cases, good policies of the Obama presidency in addressing poverty and inequality have simply been overwhelmed by a much larger force: the near-cataclysmic economic crisis of 2008 and 2009 and the slow, painful and relatively jobless recovery.

Equally painful, and not fully appreciated, is the devastating practical impact of the Supreme Court’s 2012 ruling on the most progressive aspect of the Affordable Care Act: expanding coverage via Medicaid to persons below 138 percent of the federal poverty line. The court’s ruling allowed the states to decide Medicaid expansion for themselves. To date, only two southern states, the border states of Arkansas and Kentucky, have expanded Medicaid (though Obama ally Terry McAuliffe was just elected governor of Virginia on a platform of Medicaid expansion). Low-income families in the most regressive region of the nation stand to miss out on what was supposed to be the president’s greatest advance for social justice.

In that context, it is easy to be cynical about Obama’s effort to refocus his domestic agenda on poverty and inequality. Critics might argue that he’s simply giving liberal supporters like the Center for American Progress (the host of the speech) something to feel good about. The major policy measures he discussed as possible antidotes to rising inequality, such as a higher minimum wage and support for labor organizing, are themselves inadequate to arrest the trend — and even these limited steps are unlikely to be adopted by Congress. House Republicans are determined to gut the remaining federal social protections, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (otherwise known as food stamps), rather than take proactive steps to reduce inequality and restore social mobility.

The president spoke like a leader who fully recognized this impasse. Nonetheless, his remarks were quite forceful in calling inequality the “defining challenge of our time.” As liberal pundits like Paul Krugman immediately noted, the substance of Obama’s diagnosis of inequality also was more thorough and far-reaching than that in previous statements, placing the blame not just on skill deficits but on public policies that have punished the poor and working class over a period of decades. The president even cited my own favorite illustration of how a rising tide has not lifted all boats by pointing to the shocking disparity between the increase in productivity of American workers since 1979 and their pitiful increase in wages over that same period.

What will come of this move by Obama? Obviously, if this was just a one-time speech, then it was largely pointless. But if, as the president promised, he truly intends to keep hammering away at this theme over the remainder of his term, he might just succeed in moving the conversation (if not policy itself) beyond Washington’s typical complacency on the issue.