Presidential candidate Barack Obama was fresh from delivering a rousing speech in Southeast Washington when he decided to take a few minutes to greet three news media types.
After the Illinois senator jokingly expressed envy about our casual attire, radio talk-show host Joe Madison of WOLB reminded the senator that in his line of work, he really didn't have to wear anything.
I was trying to get the picture of a naked Madison sitting in a radio studio out of my mind when Obama walked up, looked me straight in the eye and shook my hand.
"Gregory Kane, Baltimore Sun," I introduced myself. "I noticed you invoked Martin Luther King quite a bit in your speech."
"Of course," the senator answered.
Obama did more than invoke King. For the duration of his 20-minute speech at the Town Hall Education, Arts & Recreation Campus in the nation's capital. Obama seemed to channel the very spirit not only of King but also of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.
And if you're a liberal Democrat who's running for president and giving a speech about how to help lift up America's urban poor, you can't do much better than to channel the spirits of King and Kennedy.
Obama started his speech by telling the audience about Kennedy's memorable trip to the Mississippi Delta in the 1960s. Kennedy saw firsthand the poverty that Mississippi's blacks had endured for decades. According to Obama, a teary-eyed Kennedy looked at reporters traveling with him and asked, "How can a country like this allow it?"
In Southeast D.C., Obama continued, poverty still exists.
"Here, on the other side of the [Potomac], ... every other child in Anacostia lives below the poverty line," Obama said. "Too many do not graduate and too many more do not find work. Some join gangs, and others fall to their gunfire. ... How can a country like this allow it?"
Obama answered his repeat of Kennedy's question of 40 years ago the way Kennedy would have: "We can't," the senator said to cheers from the crowd. Then he outlined the details of how an Obama administration would fight its own war on poverty.
If elected president, Obama said, he would sign legislation raising the minimum wage; fund programs that support poor families with children; fund not only job-training programs but programs that help workers get promotions; give incentives to bring businesses back to the inner cities; and make affordable housing more accessible in "mixed-income neighborhoods."
