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Observations on the complexities of REALLY toasting Obama Fred Feldman ffeldman at bellatlantic.net Wed Apr 16 12:10:49 MDT 2008 Previous message: [Marxism] CNA responds to Doug Henwood query Next message: [Marxism] MRZine and polling the Iranians Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Following is a article from American Prospect, a liberal magazine on the hoo-hah around Obama's comments on small-town Pennsylvania whites. The article is a purely liberal analysis of the problems Obama, himself a liberal, touched on in his comments on Pennsylvania. But I think that this article also highlights my growing sense that the Democratic Party is closer to a real, deep split than at any time since 1948. This is not a split between Democrats and labor and/or Black and Latino supporters. This is a split between liberals and those genuinely committed to the course that they and the Democratic Party The fact is that today Hilary Clinton is campaigning for John McCain as the "lesser evil" if not actually "good vs. evil" against Obama. The similarity of the campaign themes cannot be missed. Guns. Religion. Anti-immigration! Hooray. No crooked politics would really be involved (though both are crooks) since in principle they represent a fusion course, against the proposals for change that center on having a Black president Clinton's attacks on Kerry and Gore -- on Gore, who WON the 2,000 election fa'r and squar and was counted out -- show how triangulation has led her, from a starting point of seeking to counter the appeal to Reagan Democrats, to placing herself on the side of the Republicans as the Reagan Democrats seep away. The mask has become the face. The liberal tactically adapting to the right-wing has become a right-winger heading for an irreconcilable break with the liberals. If Obama wins the nomination, I think McCain should offer her the vice presidential nomination on his ticket. This would be a better alternative to Condolezza Rice. Of course, he would have to challenge his machine to do this, which has been raised in certain anti-Clinton traditions. The McCain-Clinton ticket, which has already been tested extensively on the road, would be a powerful opposition to Obama. The only block to certain victory would be precisely the white Reagan Democrats and their children and broader families, who have abandoned the Republicans and moved to the left of McCain-Clinton. Contrary to Ruthless Critic, Clinton is now in danger in the Democratic primaries of losing precisely those white workers who have decided that they need change, not pats on the head for politics, prejudices, religious beliefs, and so forth that are assigned to them PARTLY by stereotyping. A McCain-Clinton ticket would be hard to beat for its appeal to everything conservative in America plus feminism, but, because of changes I see happening in working class attitudes outside the electoral process (I have been working in industry for 20-odd years, and part of my "softness" as well as my "hardness" on the white workers comes from that experience.) Personally, I think Ruthless should change his moniker from the absurd Ruthless Critic of All That Exists, to the more actually descriptive The More Things Change, the More They Remain the Same" to express the consistently conservative thrust of his "thought experiments" about the United States. Although I originally thought that Hilary Clinton was the sure-fire nominee, I noted that she seemed to instinctively triangulate ONLY to the right. She seemed to assume that the new base the Democrats were gaining among Reagan Democrats -- workers who had supported Republicans on racial and other grounds -- could not now be moving leftward, not just accepting her acceptance of their former positions, and that she might have to adapt to the left to keep them. I think that this has turned out to be a fundamental weakness of her campaign. The Clintons are unreconstructed Reagan Democrats at the core, and they apparently CANNOT make the shift that a modest leftward motion among white workers requires today. Fred Feldman http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=whats_the_matter_with_bitterness The American Prospect What's the Matter With Bitterness? Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are battling not just over the working-class voters of Pennsylvania but over the legacy of the Democratic Party. Mark Schmitt | April 16, 2008 | web only Behind the controversy over whether Sen. Obama's description of rural Pennsylvanians as "bitter" about their economic circumstances was condescending, there is another argument, one that's been lurking, unspoken, since the beginning of the Democratic campaign. It's a debate about the legacy and meaning of the last 16 years of the Democratic Party, and both candidates have said some highly provocative things, putting cards on the table that they've been holding for months. First, Sen. Clinton. In the "Compassion Forum" Sunday night, she tried to depict Obama as comparable to the last two defeated Democratic nominees: "Large segments of the electorate concluded that [Al Gore and John Kerry] did not really understand or relate to or frankly respect their ways of life." That's quite a nasty dig at two nominees who did, after all, win 4 million and 12 million more votes, respectively, than her husband's best performance. And while it is true that the perception of Kerry as somewhat aloof and WASPy may have had something to do with his not doing well enough to win, it's a lot harder to say that about Gore. Yes, Gore's loss of the Appalachian belt running through West Virginia, his home state of Tennessee, Kentucky, and southern Ohio probably had something to do with guns and social issues trumping economic concerns. But is that because Al Gore himself did not "respect their ways of life"? Or because he was the vice president in an administration that advocated gun control and ended in a tawdry scandal? And, further, an administration that did little to turn around the economic prospects of that region? Gore lost because he was paralyzed in deciding how to define himself independently of the Clinton administration, which would have meant renouncing some aspects of the administration. He couldn't do it, out of a personal dignity and loyalty that was not reciprocated at the time, and evidently is not reciprocated now. But Gore was just collateral damage in the story that Clinton is trying to tell, in which she and Bill Clinton, alone among national Democrats in the last three decades, had the secret formula to reassemble the New Deal coalition that connected working-class whites, minorities, and educated professionals. According to this account, Bill Clinton brought the "Reagan Democrats," who abandoned Mondale and Dukakis, back into the fold, but Gore and Kerry lost them again. Unfortunately, Hillary Clinton has lost much of the 1990s coalition already, and is, forgive the word, "clinging" to what remains. It's a hard case to make, because there is no real reason to believe that the working-class white voters who vote in Democratic primaries in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere have much of a predictive relationship to the working-class white voters who will decide the outcome of those states in November. Few of those who turn out to vote in a Democratic primary are likely to reject the Democratic nominee in November, whatever they say now. Meanwhile, Obama has assembled a robust new coalition that adds, for example, the fifth-generation Republicans who are re-registering as Democrats in the Philadelphia suburbs. Obama, meanwhile is telling another story about the recent Democratic past. His remarks in San Francisco have been taken as a version of Tom Frank's argument in What's the Matter with Kansas, that working-class whites are drawn to Republicans or conservative social causes because they are distracted from their true economic interests. There are several good responses to Frank. One is to question why people's economic interests should be seen as more legitimate than their spiritual or social commitments; this is the essence of the Clinton/McCain counterattack. The other is to ask why working-class whites, especially those in once-prosperous, now dying towns should see Democrats as supportive of their economic interests. What has the Democratic Party offered that would really address the economic crisis of, say, Hazleton, Pennsylvania? (A town I pick because it was the locus of an immigration controversy a couple years ago, and as it happens, the birthplace of both my father and the third Mrs. Rudy Giuliani.) While Tom Frank's claim was that Republicans had, in effect, tricked voters, Obama was suggesting something different -- that the Democratic Party had tricked them as well. "They fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not," he said, in the context of explaining (to a supporter who was planning to go to Pennsylvania on his behalf) why people might be cynical about another 10-point plan or promise from a politician. That's an indictment of the Clinton years as sharp as Clinton's indictment of Gore and Kerry. Obama is basically arguing that the 1992 campaign that promised "Putting People First," with a sharp, substantive agenda of public investment and health care -- the basic Truman/New Deal package -- instead put the bond market first, delivering balanced-budgets, NAFTA, welfare reform, and symbolic appeals to the suburban middle-class swing vote. The near-full employment economy of the Clinton years was a boon for many poorer areas and families -- many cities recovered from the crisis of the late 1980s, African Americans did well, and much of the Rust Belt economy improved. But it did very little for the coal, steel, and textile towns in the region that Gore lost, areas dependent on transferable industries disproportionately affected by globalization. Why not bring that critique out more sharply? If Obama could spell that out in Pennsylvania, rather than in the comfortable confines of a Bay Area fundraiser , the controversy over the word "bitter" -- which Clinton answered first with a cheery salute to the can-do spirit of rural Pennsylvanians -- could be turned to his advantage. The problem is none of us have answers that are adequate to the economic circumstances of the depressed Appalachian belt. Trade deals were no answer, but a moratorium on trade deals, or an insistence on environmental and labor standards in trade deals, won't do much for these towns, either. The "skills-based technology change" theory, which presumes that education alone will connect everyone to the manufacturing jobs of the future, explains much less than David Brooks would like to believe. A robust universal health-care system, not tied to employment, would mitigate the consequences of economic insecurity and job loss but would not create jobs where they don't exist, especially if coupled with the kind of health-care cost controls that will inevitably reduce some of the entry-level service-sector jobs that our wasteful health system creates. If unionization rates had not declined as far since the 1960s, much might be different, but they are not going back up, and you can't unionize without jobs. Obama has the makings of a meaningful economic agenda for the depressed corners of our country: A "National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank" that would invest $60 billion in public roads and bridges, a "green jobs" initiative to capture the next big economic wave. All these can help. (Clinton has her own, slightly smaller, versions of the same.) But to give voters like those in rural Pennsylvania a real reason to believe that their economic circumstances could be different, he will have to couple the critique of Clintonism that was implicit in his San Francisco remarks with a much bigger vision, a kind of new New Deal, tied to his communitarian appreciation of the significance of rebuilding all the bonds of a community -- economic, social, educational. And then he will have to convince people that it's not just another trick. And if other issues have a higher priority in their lives, so be it. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
