Look at the large, member-driven organizations, he argued. Groups such as MoveOn.org or True Majority. They're all in favor of efforts to address poverty, but it's not the core item on the agenda, and that's because their constituencies fundamentally aren't poor... Conversely, the groups that spend a lot of time on poverty—think the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, or Families USA—aren't member-driven. They're advocacy organizations, they tend to rely on foundation grants or endowments, and they tend to play a bit more of an inside Washington game, because they don't have funding sources or a membership structure that lends itself to grass-roots pressure... People living just above the poverty line don't tend to send in $100 when you tell them subsidies in a bill are about to be cut.

YESTERDAY Ezra Klein had a great post noting this Alec McGillis article about the fact that few politicians, even liberal ones, want to talk about poverty, and that few Americans want to hear about it. Mr Klein summarised a conversation he'd had with a "smart social-policy advocate" about the structural reasons for this.

This is true. But the fact that poor people don't have the money to back membership-driven political organisations isn't the only reason there aren't more such groups. For example, if there is one group in America today that is most like a national membership organisation of poor people, it would probably be ACORN. ACORN got started as an alliance of Arkansas community groups in 1970, and by the early 1990s it had 350,000 member families across the country. Its funding doesn't come from members, because they're poor. The funding mainly comes from SEIU, foundations, and occasionally from the government, on certain projects. But the group has concerned itself exclusively with poor people's issues—first welfare rights, then affordable housing, the minimum wage, and so forth.

It also conducts voter registration drives among poor people. And we all know the rest of the story. Over the past eight years, the Republican Party has systematically attempted to destroy ACORN with accusations of voter fraud. The accusations are without merit. Some of the $8-an-hour voter registration workers ACORN employs sometimes fill out made-up names because they are too lazy to register real ones. The organisation itself vets and discards these fake names to the best of its abilities; no one has ever found a case in which anyone voted under a fake identity registered by ACORN. In 2006 David Yglesias, the US attorney for New Mexico appointed by George Bush, refused to prosecute ACORN on these charges. He was removed from his job after complaints by Republican party officials and lawmakers. A cottage industry of ACORN-smearers has sprouted up across the internet, and the group's name now evokes the same fearful loathing amongst the conservative right that organisations like the Trilateral Commission and the ACLU did in earlier eras. It even figures in the insane blackboard charts Glenn Beck uses to try to prove that Barack Obama is a secret Communist.

I have no doubt that conservative commenters will respond to the above statements with outrage. But the fact is that ACORN does not commit voter fraud. The worst one can say about the group is that it is sometimes a bit astroturfy, that it ought to do more to stop lazy temps from filling out fake voter applications, and that the founder's brother embezzled a lot of money before he was found out in 1999. But basically, ACORN is one of the few authentic national poor people's groups in America. The Republican attack against ACORN grew out of the party's efforts to stop it from registering poor people to vote, because most poor people vote for Democrats. And that's what is missing from Mr Klein's analysis. Poor people lack a voice in American politics not just because they do not have money, but because many people who do have money don't want poor people to have a voice in American politics. Just try signing up a few million poor people to vote, and see what happens to you.

Boy, am I going to enjoy the comment thread to this post.

(Photo credit: AFP)