EW YORK - Suddenly, in a time of plenty, the candidates for president have put the poor back on the national agenda.
The issue is back in symbolism - witness Vice President Al Gore strolling last week down First Avenue, a beat-up street in the Mohawk River town of Amsterdam, N.Y., or George W. Bush appearing yesterday in Harlem.
And the issue is back in substance - with Bush's demands that the nation adopt new goals for poor students; with rival health care plans put forth by Gore and Bill Bradley; with Steve Forbes's and Gary Bauer's proposal to help low-income families via a flat tax. And those are just a few of the proposals.
''I love the fact that we've got all the major candidates at least now beginning to talk about poor children,'' said Marian Wright Edelman, the founder and president of the Washington-based Children's Defense Fund.
''The issue is: What are they going to do?'' Edelman said. ''Poor children and their families can't eat words.''
Edelman's show-me attitude extended to the street.
''At election time, the same record gets played over and over again.... It sounds scratched to me now,'' said William Cobb, a 52-year-old maintenance worker from Harlem. ''When it comes to elected officials, I feel like we get lost in the shuffle every time.''
The agenda for the poor and nearly poor has been noticeably absent from recent presidential campaigns, which targeted their appeals at the middle-class. In 1992, when Clinton was running for president, he emphasized a middle-class tax cut as the centerpiece of his campaign. In his inaugural address in 1989, President Bush said America had ''more will than wallet'' to fight poverty and other social ills.
But now that America's wallet is fatter, and the federal budget is balanced, the political rhetoric has begun to change. A post-Great Society era that crested with Ronald Reagan's conservative revolution, the ensuing budget deficits, and Bill Clinton's promise to ''end welfare as we know it'' may be giving way to a different tone in the post-welfare-reform era.
It's not that the voters are becoming more liberal. Ed Goeas, a GOP pollster who worked for Ohio congressman John Kasich before he dropped out of the presidential race, said ''there is a very thin line'' that candidates have to walk when seeking solutions to help the poor.
''They have to be careful of not projecting government programs that people see as ineffective and which become an additional burden on those people who are working hard,'' he said. ''That's where you have to be cautious, whether you're a liberal Democrat or a conservative Republican.''
But as payrolls and family incomes swell for wealthy and middle-income Americans, the roaring economy has left a seemingly irreducible class among the poorest Americans, and a growing group of people who are working and yet lack such essentials as health insurance.
The juxtaposition of poverty amid plenty is something that the candidates have begun to address, from actor Warren Beatty's challenge for the Democratic Party to return to its roots, to Bush's hymn of ''compassionate conservativism,'' to Bradley's expected speech tomorrow on work and families.
Though the candidates are just beginning to get specific about their ideas, political analysts say it is significant that they have begun to talk about the problem at such an early stage. What's more, Republicans are jumping into what, for the last 30 years, have been Democratic waters.
Robert Teeter, a Republican pollster who ran Bush's '92 reelection campaign, said that because the booming economy has failed to lift all boats, '' there's a growing feeling on the part of the middle and upper class people that this is a national problem.''
Teeter added, ''It's not a matter of appealing to poor people. This is a national problem and people want to see someone address it.''
Isabel V. Sawhill, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, would agree. ''I don't think there's anyone from either party who believes that having reformed welfare that that's the end of the story,'' she said.
Robert B. Reich, Clinton's former labor secretary who now teaches economics at Brandeis University, said Bush's claim to be a ''compassionate conservative'' may help explain the sharper focus on poverty.
''He hasn't defined what it is,'' Reich said of Bush, but he has ''indirectly legitimized more debate about these things.''
Just last week, Bush stunned House Republicans by warning its leaders not to ''balance their budget on the backs of the poor'' by delaying tax payments to the poor. And he wins plaudits from liberals like Edelman who note his success in narrowing the gap between rich and poor students in Texas.
While Bush has been most specific about education - vowing to withhold federal money from poorly performing schools that ''cheat students,'' and giving it instead to parents to spend on other education options - he also plans to unveil a proposal to provide tax relief to families living from paycheck to paycheck, and a plan to encourage people to buy health insurance, said his spokeswoman, Mindy Tucker.
Robert Rechtor, a senior policy analyst on welfare and poverty issues at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, said Bush was ''100 percent correct'' to challenge House Republicans on their plan to delay tax payments to the poor under the Earned Income Tax Credit.
''The EITC is really unique; it is the only government welfare program that is tied to work and rewards people for working more,'' Rechtor said. ''It's therefore important to make stronger, and not to weaken.''
Bauer and Forbes, meanwhile, have suggested that the GOP target tax cuts to court the poor in the form of flat tax proposals that would virtually wipe out the tax burden for low income families.
Over in the Democratic campaign, Bradley has championed ''a deeper prosperity'' that ''touches people who have been left out'' while Gore's lodestar is ''change that works for working families.''
Bradley has proposed a 10-year, $650 billion program of government subsidies and tax breaks to help individuals pay for health insurance. He estimates his plan would extend insurance coverage to at least 95 percent of the population.
Gore, for his part, has proposed a more incremental approach to providing health insurance, estimated to cost $110 billion over 10 years. He says he would expand an existing federal and state program that helps provide health insurance to bring as many as 15 million uninsured Americans into the system by 2005.
While applauding both proposals, Edelman said, ''As a mama, I wouldn't want to wait until 2005 to have health care for my child who gets sick.''
Rechtor, however, said Bradley's health care proposal was too costly and is ''really almost a retrograde motion.''
''We've already spent $7.9 trillion on aid to low income families since the beginning on the War on Poverty. ... The notion that all we need is more of the same thing really takes my breath away,'' said Rechtor.
Gore also favors expanding the government empowerment zones to create more economic activity in depressed neighborhoods, and like Bush, favors involving faith-based institutions in the delivery of services to the poor. In addition, he has proposed offering pre-kindergarten education to all children.
Whatever the course, Marshall Mitchell, chairman of the board of the Sisulu Children's Academy - a charter school named for Walter Sisulu, Nelson Mandela's deputy in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, which Bush toured yesterday - is glad the debate is taking place.
''This is going beyond symbolism and is extremely substantial,'' Mitchell said. ''All of what we are hearing is reasonable coming even from the more extreme candidates this time around.''
