Johnson was driven from office in 1968, not by the failure of his War on Poverty but by the failure of his war in Vietnam. The next two presidents, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, were Republicans who had never worried much about the poor. Yet despite that fact, the War on Poverty continued after Johnson went back to his ranch. Democrats retained control of Congress for another twelve years, and many of them remained committed to reducing poverty.
As a result, some of today’s most important antipoverty programs, such as food stamps, Supplemental Security Income (a guaranteed minimum income for the elderly and disabled), and Section 8 rent subsidies for poor tenants in private housing, were either launched or dramatically expanded between 1969 and 1980. Had Johnson not put poverty reduction at the heart of the Democrats’ political agenda in 1964, it is hard to imagine that congressional Democrats would have made antipoverty programs a political priority even after Republicans regained control of the White House. This is the big story about the War on Poverty, which provides the setting within which the war’s specific programs need to be assessed.
Given that the War on Poverty was a commitment to eliminating it, the most obvious measure of the war’s success or failure is how the poverty rate has changed since 1964. Bailey and Danziger argue that just looking at changes in the poverty rate is a “simplistic” approach to assessing the War on Poverty, and in one sense they are right. If you want to know how well programs like Head Start or food stamps worked, or how many full-time jobs they created, the reduction in poverty over the past half-century is not a sensible measure.
But Bailey and Danziger’s argument is more fundamental. They object to using trends in poverty as a measure of the war’s success because the prevalence of poverty depends not just on the success or failure of policies aimed at reducing it but also on other independent economic and demographic forces, like the decline in unskilled men’s real wages and the rising number of single-parent families. They are right about this. But Johnson’s promise to eliminate poverty was not contingent on favorable or even neutral economic and demographic trends. His promise was “unconditional,” because he wanted his country to make a moral commitment to end the suffering that poverty causes.