I'm not cynical enough to question John Edwards' commitment to addressing the issue of poverty, but it certainly doesn't reflect well that he's been working almost exclusively on the issue for the last two years as the head of the newly established Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina but didn't realize that one of the proposals he's pushing has already been a pilot program at HUD for over a decade and has generated mixed results at best:

If there is a personal imprint on Edwards's plan, it is his argument for reducing racial and economic segregation -- that, as he put it in one speech, "if we truly believe that we are all equal, then we should live together, too." To achieve this, Edwards proposes doing away with public housing projects and replacing them with 1 million rental vouchers, to disperse the poor into better neighborhoods and suburbs, closer to good schools and jobs.

The idea sounds bold, but it faces a deflating reality: A major federal experiment conducted for more than a decade has found that dispersing poor families with vouchers does not improve earnings or school performance, leaving some economists puzzled that Edwards would make such dispersal a centerpiece of his anti-poverty program. Edwards said he was unaware of the experiment.

Later in the article reporter Alec MacGillis provides more details:

But there is extensive evidence that it is going too far to expect that replacing public housing projects with a million new vouchers will alleviate poverty. In 1994, the Department of Housing and Urban Development launched a program called Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing, under which 1,820 families living in public housing in five cities were given housing vouchers that they were required to use in low-poverty neighborhoods.

The results startled researchers. The families who moved reported improved health, and girls in the families fared better overall. But to researchers' surprise, boys in the families fared worse than those who remained in public housing, getting into more trouble with the law and feeling out of place.

Most notably, the families did not fare better economically, nor did their children's school performance improve. Among other reasons, many families did not move very far from their old homes, partly because of a shortage of affordable housing in better areas, while others reported missing the contacts they had used in their old neighborhoods to find jobs.

"In terms of breaking the intergenerational cycle of poverty, it's not a magic bullet," said Greg Duncan, a Northwestern University economist. Duncan brought up the findings at Edwards's November 2005 symposium; according to a transcript, no one responded.

It would be a gaffe for any politician to unknowingly propose an idea that's already in place as a government program, but it's even more embarrassing and less forgivable when it's a person who has spent the last couple of years devoted to a particular issue and makes that issue the centerpiece of their campaign for President of the United States.