 Sanders listens to a speech at the State House in Columbia, S.C. on Jan. 18. (Sean Rayford/Getty Images) By Max Ehrenfreund As Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders prepared to campaign across the South a couple of months ago, there was a moment when it looked as though the senator from Vermont had found an opening in a region with some of the country's poorest places. Clinton had supported the 1996 welfare reform effort during her husband's presidency. Sanders said the legislation had doubled extreme poverty, creating hardship for millions of Americans. "What welfare reform did, in my view, was to go after some of the weakest and most vulnerable people in this country," he said in South Carolina in February. Sanders did not continue to press the issue, however, and while he has campaigned as a champion of the downtrodden and a nemesis of inequality, Sanders has not proposed many policies that would directly address the law's negative consequences, such as an expansion of the food-stamp program or a tax credit that can be converted to cash. Now that his presidential campaign may be drawing to a close, some on the left are disappointed. "It's unfortunate that Sanders didn't put anything on the table," said economist Dean Baker, a director of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research. Read the rest on Wonkblog.
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