The "conservative caricature"

Rob links to what he characterizes as Stephen Webb's "bright-line definition of liberals":  "You know you are a liberal if you think that the poor need money more than they need moral discipline."  And, he suggests that this statement is "astounding" for what it reveals about conservatives.

It seems to me, reading Webb's entire post, that the line about "moral discipline" is not at all offered as a "bright-line definition" of liberals, but is instead a throw-away in a long-ish post about what Webb regards as an interesting phenomenon, namely, that because of the lingering view among academics and professionals that liberalism, unlike conservativism, is "cool," many academics and professionals with views that Webb thinks are "conservative" -- and he focuses not on views about the poor, but on views about academic politics and abortion -- nonetheless recoil in horror from the suggestion that they might be, or might be talking like, "conservatives."

Here is the paragraph from which the "moral discipline" bit is taken:

. . . I came of age in the sixties, since most of the sixties happened in the seventies. The earnest rejection of institutional authority in the sixties became, when mainstreamed, a cultural and moral mess in the seventies. It is one thing for a few alienated college students to read Norman O. Brown, but it is another thing for the middle class to embrace the liberating promise of promiscuity. In the nineties, the middle class recovered its senses, but the poor, who are always more vulnerable to the ravages of immorality, paid the price for the seventies slide into recklessness. You know you are a liberal if you think that the poor need money more than they need moral discipline.

Now, should we regard as "astounding" the claim that "the poor . . . are always more vulnerable to the ravages of immorality"?  I guess I don't think it is so bizarre to note that those who are materially well-off are able, through wealth and connections, to protect themselves from many of the bad consequences of those those behaviors that Webb associates with Norman Brown and the seventies.  Strictly speaking, Webb does not say that "liberals believe that poor people need money more than they need moral discipline," but that "if you believe that poor people need money more than liberal discipline, you are a liberal."  Liberals and conservatives alike can agree -- as do Rob and I -- that the poor need money, and that we all need moral discipline.  I am happy to join Rob in rejecting the "conservative" view -- the scare-quotes reflect my skepticism that Webb, or indeed many conservatives at all, actually hold this view -- that the poor are poor because they lack moral discipline and that this discipline is sufficient to escape or avoid poverty.  (Though, again, it hardly seems strange to suggest that "moral discipline" -- along with functioning schools, a good job, affordable health care, etc. -- might be useful to someone struggling to escape poverty.) 

I do not mean to be pedantic, but I do not think it is fair to frame Webb's claim as -- in one commenter's words -- "get a job, hippie!", or to say that it is the "sentiment of all conservatives towards those struggling just to survive" that "if you are poor, it's because you are lazy."  Let's stipulate, for the sake of discussion, that the contemporary "conservative" political program emphasizes excessively the need of poor people for "moral discipline", at the expense of their need for money.  Is it fair to say -- not as part of a "definition", but simply as an observation -- that the contemporary "liberal" political program makes the flip-side mistake?