By Jakob Nielsen, US Correspondent, Washington

If you’re looking to see American life at the bottom of the ladder, the Front Street soup kitchen in Youngstown is a good place to start.

Last year, the town was singled out as the poorest city in the nation, and it is here that you meet some of those for whom middle class America is a remote and almost unattainable dream.

People like 47-year-old Frank, who sleeps on the veranda in front of an abandoned house. His own house was pulled down when he had to give up paying the bills. “I like to work. But there are no jobs here,” he tells Politiken.

Frank and some 200 other poor people, who are given a hot meal six days a week at the St. Vincent de Paul dining hall, are probably the most neglected group in an election campaign in which both Democrats and Republicans only address the middle class.

But as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney prepared for their second live TV debate, the Christian dining hall in the middle of Ohio’s Rust Belt unwittingly caught the attention of the entire country.

On Saturday afternoon, the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Paul Ryan paid a short visit to the dining hall for a photo op with his wife and three children as they helped doing the dishes.

The only problem was that serving had ended. The kitchen had already been scrubbed clean. Frank and the other homeless people had all gone. Now the director of the Mahoning County St. Vincent de Paul Society has criticised the Vice-Presidential candidate for using the diner for political reasons.

“They showed up there and they did not have permission and it’s against our bylaws to do that sort of thing. We are apolitical because the majority of our food is from private donations,” Brian Antal told the Youngstown Vindicator.

DOCUMENTATION: See the photo gallery of the people Ryan didn’t want to meet

Infuriation at the episode has certainly not been mellowed by the fact that Paul Ryan’s own economic plan sees cutbacks in Federal subsidies to charitable organisations such as the one which runs the Youngstown dining hall. Last year, the hall received some DKK70,000 in Federal support, while private donations totalled about DKK1million.

“It’s a bit hypocritical to put it mildly,” Antal says.

“We cannot accept seeming to support the Republicans by letting them use our premises for photo-ops,” he adds.

A Ryan spokesman told the US media that the visit to the dining hall had been a good opportunity to pay tribute to the voluntary work carried out by millions of Americans every day.

Each year, the Front Street kitchen serves some 100,000 meals in Youngstown, where a quarter of the population lives under the poverty line.

“Most Americans have no idea how many people live,” says Skip Barone, a retired salesman who has been dining hall manager for the past 12 years.

Frank dreams of leaving Youngstown – which he calls ‘an evil jungle’. But first of all he wants to vote in the Nov. 6 elections.

“I’ll vote for Obama,” he says.

“If that other guy wins, people like us will end up in a hell,” he concludes.

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