Celinda Lake made three points in Spotlight's forum that I found particularly important and compelling: 1) It is essential to explain how the economy—and, as a result, poverty—isn't just a force of nature "like the weather", but something that is actively created, and can be changed, through the choices made by voters and elected officials. 2) If we want to be successful, "poverty is probably the second worst word we could use rivaled only by welfare." We need "new frames … new language … and new questions." 3) We shouldn't be too impressed by poll numbers saying that 88 percent of voters want to hear more about poverty (or any other particular issue). As Lake notes, "voters think it's important to talk about everything." What really matters to candidates is whether they think they might win or lose because of their position on something. Lake sees little evidence that candidates today see poverty as this kind of issue. (Also worth noting here is that only about 1 percent of Americans currently volunteer poverty, homeless or hunger as one of the most important problems facing the nation.) I think most of the sophisticated opinion and framing research that has taken place on these issues over the last decade supports Lake's conclusions. What we need most now is more really innovative thinking and discussion about the kinds of "new frames and language" that would convince candidates that the set of issues that we short-hand as poverty are ones that they can win or lose on, and, just as importantly, mobilize voters.On this front, here's an extremely simple idea, one that's so old it's new. Just as Michael Harrington helped re-discover and redefine poverty in good economic times, we should re-discover and redefine "the working class" in our current bad ones. While few candidates are likely to view poverty as a make-or-break campaign issue anytime soon, the economic security and mobility of the working class is something that we know already has political resonance.But today's working class isn't just the white, retired industrial workers that the term is generally used to refer to in political circles. They're pretty much the whole bottom third of the income distribution—they're racially and ethnically diverse and mostly people who work or have worked in poorly compensated service jobs. Some may argue that "the poor" are really distinct from the working class (and the middle class). But this isn't what people with incomes below the poverty line actually say. When asked in surveys, they mostly identify as working class rather than poor.This doesn't mean that we should never talk about poverty. But it does mean that we should talk about it differently than Michael Harrington did. Instead of as an intrinsic condition or identity—something that happens to "poor" people or a dubiously defined "underclass"—today's poverty is something that mostly happens to working-class people who have been harmed by economic policies over the last three decades that undercut their security and mobility.