Hi Rick,
I think that your article in today's Voice (http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0445/perlstein.php) was exactly right to shift the emphasis away from "values" toward economics. You write:
>>Pundits blow hot air. Political scientists crunch numbers. On his blog Polysigh, my favorite political scientist, Phil Klinkner, ran a simple exercise. Multiplying the turnout among a certain group by the percent who went for Bush yields a number electoral statisticians call "performance." Among heavy churchgoers, Bush's performance last time was 25 percent (turnout, 42 percent; percentage of vote, 59 percent). This time out it was also 25 percent—no change. Slightly lower turnout (41 percent), slightly higher rate of vote (61 percent).
Where did the lion's share of the extra votes come from that gave George Bush his mighty, mighty mandate of 51 percent? "Two of those points," Klinkner said when reached by phone, "came solely from people making over a 100 grand." The people who won the election for him—his only significant improvement over his performance four years ago—were rich people, voting for more right-wing class warfare.
Their portion of the electorate went from 15 percent in 2000 to 18 percent this year. Support for Bush among them went from 54 percent to 58 percent. "It made me think about that scene in Fahrenheit 9/11," says Klinkner, the one where Bush joked at a white-tie gala about the "haves" and the "have-mores": "Some people call you the elite," Bush said. "I call you my base."<<
However, your article fell short on the all-important question of Kerrynomics. While it is true that the poorer you were, the higher the likelihood that you would vote for Kerry, there is no reason to believe that these votes were made with the same conviction of a millionaire's vote for Bush. My guess is that many low-income people voted for Kerry for the same reason that they buy lottery tickets or keep velvet paintings of JFK or MLK Jr. on their living-room walls. Such harmless gestures are acts of faith intended to shore one up in a hostile world.
You write:
>>Around the time of the Democratic convention, John Kerry began making that very point. Using the word "values" more and more often, he argued (if obliquely) that morality did not come down merely to who you slept with, how often you mention God, or whether you oppose abortion and support any war the president decides to prosecute; that values also reside in being straight with the American people, in fighting for economic justice ("Faith without works is dead," he said in the third debate, quoting James 2:20), in tolerance, in running the government transparently.<<
Well, there is "fighting" and there is "fighting". Every time I think about the Kerry campaign, I am reminded of the patsy basketball teams that played the Harlem Globetrotters. If Kerry was capable of putting 1/10th the energy and conviction into promoting economic justice that Bush put into cutting taxes for the wealthy, the elections might have turned out differently.
Today there is huge anxiety about jobs. In yesterday's Washington Post, there was an article about nomadic IT workers that really hit home. It focused on a network technician who was dragging his wife and child around the country, living out of motels, just to survive on temporary contract jobs paying $17 per hour. The Post commented that these "new economy" workers were now going through the same wrenching changes that factory workers went through in the 1980s and 90s and still go through today, as evidenced by Ohio.
What could Kerry possibly say to such workers? He has voted for every single trade bill facilitating the export of jobs in a race to the bottom, using the same neoliberal justifications as the Republicans. Despite some populist rhetoric early on in his campaign likening outsourcing to treachery, Kerry soon made it clear that he was committed to Clintonomics. With people like Robert Rubin and Roger Altman serving him as economic advisers during his campaign, Kerry made it crystal-clear that he would reinstitute the economic policies of the Clinton era.
Now I know that Clinton is hugely popular with some liberals, who mistakenly associate job growth during his 8 years as a function of government policy rather than market forces. But for economists like Robert Pollin and Michael Meerpol, the Clinton era was simply an extension of what had been going on under Reagan. There is one key difference, however. Reagan never would have been able to get away with eliminating Aid to Dependent Children. It took a liberal to stick the knife into poor women's back, just as it took a Republican to open up diplomatic relations with China.
Who knows. With an aroused liberal community, it might be all the harder for Bush to push through the privatization of Social Security. However, as Robin Blackburn pointed out recently in Counterpunch, Clinton himself gave it the old college try until the Monica Lewinsky scandal forced him to backpedal.
Yours truly,
Louis Proyect
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