America's ambivalent electorate seems to reflect the paradoxes of our times: hunger amidst prosperity, a monumental and growing wealth gap, and record-high employment while millions of workers struggle to make ends meet. Yet no unifying policy framework commands broad support, and no strategy exists to convey a new vision in popular terms. In the mid-1990s, the progressive community was so tethered to the status quo of admittedly flawed income-support policies that it lost to those who proposed to "end welfare as we know it." While that marketing slogan was less a new policy framework than a cleverly manipulated disemboweling of a central element of the New Deal, it underscores today's dramatic policy void.