‘The white working class’
Posted inPolitics: National

‘The white working class’

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After the stunning defeat of Hillary Clinton, progressive mandarins are calling for a complete rebuilding of the Democratic Party. Here, for example, is Robert Reich's eight-step program. Unlike the Republicans after defeat, who double down on their ideological convictions and nihilistic congressional maneuvers, it may well happen. And it may be for the good. I don't know.

One thing I doubt is that the Democrats can win back the vaunted white working class. Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, who is challenging Nancy Pelosi for House Minority Leader, said, “We need to speak to their economic interests, that we get it, that we understand, that we talk about those things and we try to fight hard for those things.”

Well, how? President Obama saved General Motors, including the Lordstown, Ohio, assembly. Yet that county supported Trump over Clinton by six points. Obamacare provided more health insurance for whites than for blacks and Hispanics combined. Yet exit polls show whites voted 58 percent for Trump vs. 37 percent for Clinton, who had detailed policy proposals to help working Americans. As you can see from the map above, the Rust Belt states that went for Trump have plenty of counties that were doing well. The same thing with the hard-red South. (Although, as I wrote in the Seattle Times, blue states are the economic superstars for reasons that most red states shun).

Perspective is important. Hillary Clinton has won a larger majority of the popular vote than any candidate in modern history who did not also win the Electoral College. We vote by states, but even here it was a near-run thing. Trump won Michigan's 16 electoral votes by two-tenths of a percentage point (how'd that protest vote work out for you?). In the end, she couldn't get the low-single-digit additional points in key states that Obama had previously won.

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Hillary’s moment?
Posted inPolitics: National

Hillary’s moment?

Hillary_Clinton_March_2016Imagine how social media, cable "news," and talk radio in a misinformed nation would have portrayed some candidates in the past.

A failed one-term congressman, wishy-washy on his party's most important moral issue, no executive experience, too homely for television — and despite the media campaign to make him out as a simple, honest frontiersman, in reality he was a highly successful lawyer for the nation's most powerful industry. His own law partner noted, "his ambition was a little engine that knew no rest." You know him as Abraham Lincoln.

An elitist intellectual, hotheaded, jingoist warmonger, impetuous and too young to be even vice president. Otherwise known as Theodore Roosevelt. The white privilege dandy who concealed his crushing disability and constant pain, running on a balanced-budget promise but in reality holding no fixed ideology and depending on a coalition that included Southern segregationists. That was TR's cousin, Franklin Roosevelt.

On the other hand, there was "the great engineer," a self-made man, the rightly lionized savior of refugees in World War I — the only man who came out of the Paris peace conference of 1919 with his reputation enhanced, according to John Maynard Keynes. This progressive and pragmatic man seemed ideally cut for his time. Yet Herbert Hoover as president was overwhelmed by catastrophe.

You see how it goes. How the digital age distorts. How contingency and crisis reveal character. Now, with the republic facing its greatest danger since the eve of the Civil War, Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton steps forward to claim the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Turning and turning

We are told repeatedly by our rulers in business, politics and the media that the big hurdle to addressing climate change and health care is cost. Somehow war without end, the global effects of climate change and the towering costs of health care even as more Americans do without it are "free." And so it goes.

This is how we live now. There was indeed one conservative in last fall's presidential election and he now sits in the White House. Barack Obama fits the Burkean mold of slow change, respectful of tradition and custom, seeking to preserve the best of existing arrangements. Unfortunately, thirty years of right-wing revolution (represented by Mr. Obama's opponent, the wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III) have driven these laudable benchmarks so far to the extreme that Mr. Obama's innate restraint is exactly the wrong temperament for this pivotal moment in history.

On health care, one wonders if his heart was ever in it. This has been a colossal failure of the Democratic Party. The New Deal was not the product of a single, 2,000-plus page bill, but of scores of pieces of legislation over years. It delivered nearly instant relief to the nation's suffering, in both substance and confidence-building, helping to ensure continued Democratic majorities to keep it going. Under Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, we have a massive dog's breakfast that will come to no good, and be undone by the Republicans because its good elements will take too long to kick in. Why, for example, not one bill that outlawed the savage practice of denying insurance based on pre-existing conditions, or charging outlandish premiums for it — and having it implemented the moment the president signed the legislation? Another could have instantly required pharmaceutical companies to bid for Medicare drugs, lowering costs at the stroke of a pen. Yet another would have eliminated antitrust protections for the big insurers. And another still would have been a public option, if not Medicare for all — and let the filibuster happen and its instigators pay the fearsome price in the next election.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Job One for America

As America faces its worst run of job losses since the Great Depression with no end in sight, one thing should be clear. Our federal government is being run by a coalition of the financial sector, lobbyists for entrenched interests and a disciplined Republican opposition of dubious loyalty. Barack Obama is not only very close to being a failed president, he could be on track to be a one-termer if the GOP snags an opponent such as Gen. David Petraeus or even a rehabbed Mitt Romney. (The Nobel will only hurt Obama without substantive achievements for average Americans).

Perhaps the problem is centered on Obama and the cowardly Democrats in Congress (Memo to Blue Dogs: You'll lose anyway, so do the right thing and maybe you can pull a Harry Truman; oh, wait, Truman wasn't getting millions from the moneyed interests and hoping to get a job with them after politics). Could Hillary have done better? Or is this just the latest evidence of a quiet coup and no individual can change America's trajectory to self-immolation. Read Jeff Sharlet's The Family and David Wessel's In Fed We Trust (and throw in Maggie Mahar's Money Driven Medicine) and you begin to see the financialized theocracy we have become. One facing unsustainability on every front, including in a military whose quiet evangelization by the Christian right should raise alarms never before heard in America (were it covered by the media).

As for unemployment, the best Washington can do is become aroused over a tax credit for job creation. This won't work — it's not tied to real demand. And it will lower tax revenues, adding to the deficit. It's a stunning sign of America's enervation and institutional corruption that President Obama is not rolling out a crash program to modernize our rail system. It could be done now. It would create huge numbers of jobs, not only for construction but also for operating and maintenance. Real jobs that would last. And an infrastructure whose benefits would repay the Treasury many times over.

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Posted inPolitics: National

The gas tax ‘holiday’ and magical thinking

How can we explain the latest Wall Street Journal/MSNBC poll that shows only 27 percent of respondents have a positive view of the Republican Party yet the Democratic presidential contenders are, at best, tied with President-elect McCain? Is it the inanity of the corporate media? Is it is ignorance of the American voter, who has been brainwashed to believe the right-wing tool McCain is a "maverick"? The next several months will tell.

It’s surely not a good sign that the nation sits paralyzed before multiple crises while people distract themselves with an evil pervert in Austria and some celebutard girl posing semi-nude in Vanity Fair. The corporate media would not cover this stuff if Americans didn’t tune in, in huge, denial-soaked, distraction-addicted numbers.

Obama must show he is "an average guy" — how’d that work out for us with W? We need a president who is average with Washington, Lincoln and FDR — our crises are that dire. And Jeremiah Wright — must keep that front-and-center. Did Obama do enough? Was he too late? Is he damaged? Has the cow jumped over the moon?

Nor is it a good sign that the "gas tax holiday" of President-elect McCain and Sen. Clinton (perhaps running as his vice president?) has not been laughed off stage. How many ways is this a ridiculous idea? And Yet Obama is the "elitist…out of touch with average Americans" who is the party pooper by refusing to endorse it.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Is it already over for Obama?

For everyone who was stirred and moved by Barack Obama’s inspiring and intelligent speech this week — one of the finest of my lifetime  — I have bad news. He will not be the next president. He may not even be the Democratic nominee. I pray and hope that I’m wrong. But the evidence is not good.

Why? Maybe it will be because, as Matt Bai pointed out in the New York Times Magazine, Obama only wins urban areas with concentrated black voters and states with few blacks — not enough for an electoral majority. He loses in the critical places with real (segregated) diversity, such as Ohio:

What this suggests, perhaps, is that living in close proximity to other
races — sharing industries and schools and sports arenas — actually
makes Americans less sanguine about racial harmony rather than more so.
The growing counties an hour’s drive from Cleveland and St. Louis are
filled with white voters whose parents fled the industrial cities of
their youth before a wave of African-Americans and for whom social
friction and economic competition, especially in an age of declining
opportunity, are as much a part of daily life as traffic and mortgage
payments.

Maybe it will be because Hillary Clinton has shown she will destroy the party rather than lose the nomination. Maybe it will be because Obama is such a threat to the community of interests that wants things to stay as they are (no need for conspiracy theories).

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