Monday, 05.19.08
Straight Talk and the Working Class
EMMANUEL DUNAND - AFP - Getty Images
America's forgotten majority
June 2000
Joe Sixpack's revenge
17 May 2000
The phantom menace
April 2007
There was every reason to believe that the primaries in Oregon and Kentucky would end with Senator Barack Obama winning a majority of pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention, reinforcing the widespread sense that Senator Clinton is at this point running a vanity campaign, a highly expensive effort to enhance her self-esteem. Thoughts naturally turn to the general election, in which Oregon and Kentucky (and states very much like them) will prove crucially important to building an electoral-college majority. Both have an unusually high proportion of white working class voters, as Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz note in a brilliant report on the changing class composition of the American electorate, and this represents a challenge to Obama, who has (as Clinton reminds us incessantly) had a hard time connecting with these voters.
In the United States as a whole, non-college-educated whites have gone from 86 percent of adults over 25 to 48 percent. In Kentucky, however, the number is 66 percent, which is closer to West Virginia's 72 percent than the national number. So you can see why Clinton is doing well against Obama in Kentucky. In Oregon, Obama is believed to have an edge, thanks to the large number of college-educated whites and the state's supposed cultural liberalism. But non-college-educated whites are 64 percent of the population over 25, and one can imagine a savvy Republican campaign doing well in Oregon by mobilizing the state's working-class majority. The 75,000 Obama supporters who gathered in Portland this past week are a very good sign for the Democrats. Yet turnout at rallies can be misleading.
Moreover, apart from Florida and New Mexico, which both have large Latino populations, working-class whites are overrepresented in all of the so-called battleground states. So although the white working class's numbers are declining as Americans grow more educated and immigration changes the country's demographics, our political system magnifies its power. At the same time, our political elites are largely drawn from the college-educated mass upper class. This combination - a political class that's out of touch with a demographic whose votes both party desperately needs - produces a deeply uninspiring working-class politics, defined primarily by crude pandering. The shot-downing, duck-hunting aspects of this pandering get the most attention, but it's the policy pandering that does the most damage - from the extraordinary sums spent propping up agribusiness, which actually undermine our economic, environmental, and even physical health, to the disproportionate attention paid to declining sectors of the economy, particularly traditional manufacturing, when questions that relate to needs of the far larger service economy - such as how to make the education and health care sectors more productive - are far more pressing over the long run than whether or not we should "protect" America's steel industry. (It's also worth noting that the obsession with pandering to white working class keeps the black working class - and young black men in particular - off the national radar screen. In particular - despite the fact that closing the opportunity gap between black men and non-black men would go a long way towards alleviating poverty and revitalizing our cities.)
A better pitch to the working-class vote - better as policy in the short run, and probably better as politics in the long run - would offer solutions to the real problems facing blue-collar Americans, but it would also deliberately reject these kind of panders, and with them the idea that government can save every industry and prop up every local economy. But who will tell the white working class that it is not a class of victims? Certainly not Hillary Clinton, who has presented herself as a therapist who is eager to heal the psychic wounds of the white working class by fighting against foreigners who dare to sell manufactured goods. Barack Obama has a gift for arrestingly frank public speaking, but it's hard to Imagine Obama telling voters in Michigan that the old manufacturing jobs are never coming back (as John McCain did during the Republican primary), or telling Iowa voters that ethanol represents a grave threat to the environment and even to global security (as McCain has done throughout his career).
Obviously there are risks associated with this sort of truth-telling - McCain lost in Michigan and Iowa, after all. But a politics of pity usually loses out to a politics of opportunity, and there is an opportunity, in an election that will likely turn on how states like Oregon and Kentucky vote, for a candidate who treats working class voters not as victims but as the masters of their own fate, who need to take responsibility for the revitalization of their neighborhoods and of this country.
A shifting middleAlan Abramowitz and Ruy Teixiera report on the "decline of the white working class and the rise of a mass upper middle class." |
Ideologies of the richLarry Bartels argues that it is not small-town voters, but "affluent, college-educated people...who are most exercised by guns and religion." |
Another speech?David Moberg suggests that Obama "needs to make his campaign a crusade to overcome economic inequality and class divisions." |
Jacksonian countryJonathan Tilove argues that in culture and temperament, Obama's political type is "totally out of place in Appalachia." |
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...it's hard to Imagine Obama telling voters in Michigan that the old manufacturing jobs are never coming back
That bit of nonsense might be forgivable if it weren't for the fact that perhaps the best known example of Obama's straight talk came in that very state, Michigan, and in front of its biggest industry, auto:
"Senator Barack Obama of Illinois delivered a stern message to Detroit auto companies on Monday, saying they had done little to lessen the nation’s dependence on foreign oil and needed to improve the fuel efficiency of their vehicles."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/08/us/politics/08obama.html?ref=politics
It is amazing to me that "white hardworking men" declare themselves to be "conservatives" without a clue of what conservatism is, which is the creation and preservation of an aristocracy with the consent of the lower classes who consciously or not agree with tham. They see no connection between the fact that the rich keep getting richer while the "white hard working men" get the short end of the stick. There seems to be less and less need for "white hard working men" in an information economy, which incidentally is becoming less and less the private preserve of the U.S. (China and India are rapidly catching up,e.g. they are graduating hundreds of times more scientists and engineers than we do) When we shipped the manufacturing base abroad, we are left pretty much with big agribusiness and the vestiges of what was once the industrial model for the rest of the world and the ethanol hoax.
Typical isn't it? When people are having a debate some low-life interjects with rubbish. I refer to tabingins911.
While I agree with the analysis in this piece for the most part, I think it's worth pointing out that Obama seems to have taken so-called "white working class" votes pretty decisively in Oregon. I am not sure that this is really an issue of white working class voters or blue dog Democrats or whatever. I think Obama has an Appalachia problem. While he seems to have a problem picking up less-educated, less-affluent, white voters in Appalachian states, he does not seem to have a problem picking up the same votes elsewhere. I don't think this distinction comes through enough in much of the analysis floating out there on the web, or on TV. And it adds a wrinkle, doesn't it? Maybe it's less about economics than this or other articles suggest. Ask yourself, why would a highly articulate, accomplished young African American man have a hard time picking up the white vote in Appalachia, but not elsewhere? Hmm...
Obama will win enough white working class voters west of Mississippi (NV, CO, NM and IA).
The question is will he win the brown working class voters that decide elections in the southwest where Obama is extremely competitive.
Pennsylvania should not be a problem. Let me put it this way. If Pennsylvania is a problem then we're doomed. But in a closed democratic primary Obama only lost by 9% to Hillary and Rendell. If Kerry carried PA why, in this climate, would Obama lose it?
And when he supports the gas tax holiday, as he has been quite vocal about, is that the straight-talk you prize? Is that his "sterner stuff" speaking? You should really read your colleague Matt Yglesias more often; he's kept an impressive catalogue of how McCain's "straight talk" is just more pandering politics-as-usual. Honestly it's amazing how a writer as bright as you can so willingly do the kind of selective hearing necessary to believe that McCain "tells it like it is." He's a career politician, he panders constantly, he changes his position and rhetoric constantly to please his base, and he has absolutely no standing whatsoever to be considered more "straight-talking" than Obama or Hillary. None at all.
Posted by Lifafa Das | May 20, 2008 2:53 PM