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(Bloomberg) — U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan and several Republican presidential hopefuls appeared at an anti-poverty forum in South Carolina on Saturday, hoping to counter the notion that only Democrats care about non-whites, single mothers, the unemployed, and the working poor.

The Kemp Forum on Expanding Opportunity was a chance for the Republicans to display compassion and ideas at a time they risk becoming, in the words of former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, “a minority party.” 

 “We can launch a conversation in this country about truly fixing this problem,” Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican, said at the event in Columbia, which he moderated with Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, an African American.  

“Poverty isn’t just about deprivation, it’s about isolation,” Ryan said. “We’re isolating the poor. We have to reintegrate the poor. What we’re doing here today is starting that conversation” and “bringing attention to this issue.”  

South Carolina holds the nation’s third nominating contest, on Feb. 20, after Iowa and New Hampshire. The Republicans leading the polls, billionaire reality-show host Donald Trump and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, skipped Saturday’s event to campaign in Iowa.  
Bush, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie spoke during the first panel, while Florida Senator Marco Rubio, Ohio Governor John Kasich and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee  also appeared.  

Between predictable talking points – blaming government handouts and teachers’ unions for holding back the poor, promoting marriage, and calling for shifting more funding and decision-making to the states – came calls for compassion and criminal justice reform that sometimes echoed the rhetoric of one of Republicans’ chief targets, President Barack Obama.
“People are stuck, they’re stuck in poverty,” Bush said. “And the notion of some that somehow they want to be there is just totally ridiculous. It is totally wrong. In fact, we’ll never win elections if we send any kind of signal like that. We’ll just be, we’ll become a minority party.”  

Christie called for increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit, saying that some welfare recipients now face an “ugly truth” that “if they did get off their couch and go to work, they’d make less.” The “war on drugs” of the past several decades hasn’t worked and first-time, non-violent offenders should be sentenced to treatment, not incarceration, Christie added. 

He also said Republican candidates need to “show up and campaign in places where we’re uncomfortable” and that “we need to be going into African-American churches. We need to be going into the Hispanic communities and the barrios. What they want is to be listened to.”  
After sparring for days in New Hampshire, Bush and Christie put their differences aside, offering encouragement for one another’s positions. Carson, meanwhile, said he hopes his rivals to adopt the forum’s “tone of camaraderie.”  He told reporters, “It’s a tone of `let’s get together and use our collective abilities to solve our problems.’ That’s a tone that we need to try to spread.”  

Carson, recounting his childhood in Detroit’s inner city, spoke about the merits of self-sufficiency, promoting home schooling over public schools and a flat tax over further engineering of tax credits. He said the Bible and tithing inspire his support of a flat tax.  At the same time, Carson said successful individuals should do more to mentor and guide the poor. “It’s our duty. We are our brother’s keepers,” he said, a line Obama also often uses. 

“As a kid growing up in poverty, I hated poverty,” Carson said. “I was absolutely certain that I was born into the wrong family.” He also told a joke in which a plumber gives a neurosurgeon a bill for $2,700 and the neurosurgeon says he doesn’t bill that much for a procedure, and the plumber says, “I didn’t get that when I was a neurosurgeon, either.”  

Carson said his point was that “there’s a wide variety of different types of skills that are necessary to make a society like ours flourish.”  

Huckabee said in his own experience with childhood poverty in Arkansas, “If you grew up poor, I guarantee you didn’t want to grow up that way.” He also said government should focus more on treating addiction than incarcerating addicts.

Ryan said criminal justice reform  is one area where bipartisan cooperation seems possible, and where religious conservatives can play a significant role. “We’ve got a chance at making a big difference so that we can honor redemption,” said Ryan. 

To contact the authors of this story: Margaret Talev in Washington at mtalev@bloomberg.net Michael C. Bender inWashington at mbender10@bloomberg.net To contact the editor responsible for this story: Ros Krasny at rkrasny1@bloomberg.net