Clinton to Focus on Poverty Ahead of Ohio Primary

[Clinton Crusader]

ZANESVILLE, Ohio -- With less than a week until Ohio holds its Democratic primary contest, Sen. Hillary Clinton is traveling to the poorest parts of the state in an effort to highlight her poverty agenda and draw in low-income voters.

Today, in the town of Hanging Rock, in the state's southeast, Sen. Clinton will for the first time devote an entire campaign event to poverty. She is expected to lay out plans that include giving impoverished new parents support and training to promote healthy child development, increasing access to early education and universal
prekindergarten. She is also advocating for adoption of abused and neglected children and a further rise in the minimum wage, which will increase to $7.25 an hour next year and to $9.50 by 2011.

Poverty hasn't been a dominant issue in the campaign since the withdrawal of former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina. Mr. Edwards hasn't endorsed a candidate, and both Sen. Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama have been courting his supporters. "He made poverty a centerpiece in his campaign, and it needs to be a priority," Sen. Clinton has said of Mr. Edwards.

The candidate who best connects with the poor could have an edge in the Ohio contest on Tuesday. Parts of the state have poverty rates as high as 27%, according to the 2000 Census. The state is poorer than the national
average, and Cleveland is the nation's poorest large city, with nearly half its children living in poverty. A string of impoverished coal-mining towns run through Ohio's Appalachian region, where Sen. Clinton is making campaign stops this week. The region has long been a destination for Democrats pushing an antipoverty agenda. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson delivered a speech from a mining town in neighboring Kentucky. In 1999, President Bill Clinton spoke about the area in an address he gave about poverty.

The poverty plans of Sens. Clinton and Obama aren't vastly different. Sen. Clinton focuses on early child development, an issue she has been involved with since the 1970s. Sen. Obama bases his plans around his
experience as a community organizer in Chicago.

more - http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120415806846298101.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

[displacedtexan]

1. Did you catch the Obama supporters slamming Clinton for this?

They accused her of stealing Edwards' campaign platform.

As if fighting poverty isn't a core Democratic party principle.

Heavy sigh.