Editor's Note: The heart of the matter

Sadly, books will not determine the outcome of the Nov. 2 presidential election. Because if books still held the kind of influence that one imagines they once did, President Bush would be toast.

The Bush presidency has provided rich fodder for America's long-form scribes. Five books have been published in recent months that, in another era, would have run W. right out of the White House. Kevin Phillips' American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush tracks the rise of the Bush family to troubling levels of influence. Craig Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties outlines the deep ties--and inherent conflicts of interest--between the Bushes and the family that controls the Saudi government.

Ron Suskind details Bush's knuckle-headed behavior in The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O'Neill. O'Neill, the former Treasury secretary under Bush, describes the president's appalling lack of interest in or understanding of issues. Bob Woodward weighs in with Plan of Attack, in which he documents Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney's obsession with ousting Saddam Hussein despite zero evidence that the Iraq dictator was linked to the 9/11 terrorist attacks or that he posed any serious threat to the United States. The most high-profile of the five books, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror by Richard Clarke, gives a firsthand account of the Bush administration's lackadaisical interest in terrorism before 9/11.

These shocking exposés have been getting plenty of attention, and deservedly so. Yet the most important nonfiction book published so far this year barely mentions George W. Bush. It is called The Working Poor: Invisible in America, and was written by respected journalist David K. Shipler.

Shipler, a longtime New York Times foreign correspondent, is best known for his writing about other parts of the world: Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987, and Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams. His latest project focuses on the United States, yet, amazingly, the book often feels like he's reporting from some Third World country. It has that sense of cultural and physical distance, although everything he describes is happening in an urban neighborhood or rural hamlet near you.

Carefully and often for periods of several years, Shipler observes people living on the edge of poverty. He follows their ups and downs, their modest successes and frustrating failures. He profiles urban single mothers, sweatshop workers and migrant farmworkers, pointing out their personal faults and weaknesses as well as the societal and economic reasons for their plight. He doesn't skirt the reality that many people living in poverty are plagued by drugs and alcohol, laziness and stupid choices. But he finds, ultimately, that for millions of people, working hard is not enough to achieve the American dream. "Somewhere along this track that leads nowhere, a good many Americans give up on the dream," he writes.

This "forgotten America" that Shipler writes so insightfully about should be the focal point of this year's presidential debate. In vague ways, it is alluded to by Democratic candidate John Kerry when he calls for more job training programs and wider access to health care. But even Kerry's domestic agenda fails to appreciate the magnitude of the nation's poverty problem. Shipler finds migrant farmworkers in North Carolina living in horrid and unhealthful conditions, while sweatshop employees in Los Angeles work their fingers to the bone, for criminally low wages, under threat of a call to INS if they raise a complaint. "Few American demonstrators against globalization and the World Trade Organization seem aware that if they want to protect sweatshop workers, they don't have to look for exploitation in poor nations," Shipler notes. He finds families in Washington, D.C., unable to escape the cycle of welfare, drugs and child abuse. He follows single mothers--the most prevalent folks at poverty's edge--who work hard and still can't catch a break or make ends meet. And he finds them not just in the inner city but in places like rural New Hampshire. "An inconvenience to an affluent family--minor car trouble, a brief illness, disrupted child care--is a crisis" to the working poor, Shipler writes.

Above all, Shipler explains that "the economy" as it is commonly discussed in the mainstream media has little to do with the people who are the subject of his book. "The rising and falling fortunes of the nation's economy have not had much impact on these folks," he writes. "They suffer in good times and bad." In other words, the economic boom of the '90s didn't touch their world, nor did the subsequent recession. And, interestingly, Shipler notes, few of the working poor he interviewed blame anyone other than themselves for their situation: "They do not usually blame their bosses, their government, their country, or the hierarchy of wealth, as they reasonably could."

Shipler does not provide a detailed set of solutions to America's poverty problem. The scope is just too big and complex to lend itself to easy answers. He does make some fairly mundane (yet important) points, such as that higher wages, better job training programs and more vocational education could pull increasing numbers of people out of poverty. Generally, he advocates "holistic remedies" that take into account all of an individual's needs in order to advance in society. Amid the depressing tenor of the book, he finds occasional reasons for hope that it is possible to escape poverty and for well-designed and managed programs to aid that process.

Americans are rightly concerned about, if not outraged by, President Bush's botched Iraq occupation. Understandably, with more than 700 dead U.S. soldiers and counting, it has become the top campaign issue. The economy, which Kerry had been counting on as the issue to boost his candidacy, seems to be losing ground of late. But any reader of The Working Poor will find economic issues immediately returning to their personal front burner. As Shipler notes, "Nobody who works hard should be poor in America."

--GEOFF SCHUMACHER