Billy Shore always seemed too sweet to be in politics.<\/p>\n
I met him way back when pols and officials had the decency to creep away if they were caught doing something shameful.<\/p>\n
Shore was an aide to Gary Hart<\/a> in the Senate and in his presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988. Hart dropped out in 1987 after a sex scandal but later got back in the race, pursuing a lonely quest with his wife, Lee, and a handful of reporters (including me). Shore was also Bob Kerrey\u2019s chief of staff in the Senate and helped with his losing presidential run in 1992.<\/p>\n But even before his two candidates came a cropper, Shore had another passion: eradicating hunger. In 1984, when a brutal famine in Ethiopia<\/a> was killing hundreds of thousands, he founded Share Our Strength, a hunger relief organisation, with his sister, Debbie Shore.<\/p>\n \u201cKnowing that I was going to spend another four years on the road doing campaign stuff, I also wanted to have a more immediate, direct, hands-on way of trying to make a difference,\u201d Shore, now 70, said on Wednesday at his Washington office.<\/p>\n He realised he\u2019d rather help hungry children than politicians hungry for the White House. He used to wrangle reporters on the campaign trail. But he decided he would rather spend an afternoon, as he once did, wrangling 101 children, including 20 from a homeless shelter, dressing them up in black-and-white spotted costumes and taking them to see the movie 101 Dalmatians.<\/p>\n Lately, Shore is more focused on striped rodents than spotted dogs. Actor and Share Our Strength patron Jeff Bridges<\/a> had put him in touch with the producer of the Alvin and the Chipmunks movies who was producing a Chipettes cover of Golden, the hit from K-Pop Demon Hunters, and wanted all proceeds to go to the organisation.<\/p>\n The organisation, which began in the basement of a row house on Capitol Hill, is now an intrinsic part of the fight against hunger across the United States, waged at the local, state and national levels. In 2010, it started its \u201cNo Kid Hungry\u201d campaign. That is a mission that everyone agrees with, yet one we somehow fail to achieve in an America larded with billionaires cavorting in a new tech-driven Gilded Age. Billionaires who are, Shore said, only \u201cgiving away a very small percentage of their revenue\u201d.<\/p>\n Hunger, Shore added, \u201cis a solvable problem, relative to so many other things we care about. You don\u2019t even need facts or figures. People know it intuitively\u201d.<\/p>\n [\u00a0Maureen Dowd: My brother believes that America will never buy socialismOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n Here\u2019s a shocking figure anyhow: according to the latest data, from 2023, nearly 50 million Americans, including one in five children, are food insecure.<\/p>\n The Trump administration\u2019s Dickensian gutting of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programme (Snap) benefits during the government shutdown this autumn showed how easy it is for millions of Americans to slip back into choosing between heating their houses and feeding their families.<\/p>\n Shore said there is no ideological bent to his operation. \u201cI think both parties are almost equally to blame,\u201d he said. \u201cI think people at the bottom of the economic ladder are just politically invisible. They\u2019re voiceless. And even a lot of my favourite politicians don\u2019t pay attention to them the way I wish they would.\u201d<\/p>\n