“So what can Democrats do to win back at least some of those voters?” asks the New York Times‘ Paul Krugman (11/25/16)—and answers his question, not much.
In the wake of a disastrous Election Day, does the Democratic Party need to present economic policies that have more to offer the majority of voters? Don’t bother, argues New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (11/25/16).
Krugman begins by acknowledging what some have denied—that class played some role in what happened on November 8: “What put Donald Trump in striking distance was overwhelming support from whites without college degrees,” he writes. “So what can Democrats do to win back at least some of those voters?”
The columnist says that Bernie Sanders—not one of Krugman’s favorite people—suggests it needs
candidates who understand that working-class incomes are down, who will “stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industry.”
But Krugman doubts this would do any good. First off, there’s the media:
Any claim that changed policy positions will win elections assumes that the public will hear about those positions. How is that supposed to happen, when most of the news media simply refuse to cover policy substance?
The corporate media aversion to covering substantive election issues that Krugman cites is very real; FAIR has been documenting it for decades, and it was in full effect in 2016.
But as for how voters might hear about parties’ economic proposals despite media disinclination to cover them, the roughly $300 million the major party candidates spent on campaign advertising—three-fourths of which was spent by Hillary Clinton—provides an obvious answer. Candidates’ self-serving policy claims are no substitute for independent media examination of issues from the voters’ point of view, but ads do give well-funded candidates an opportunity to deliver any kind of message they choose.
Clinton, as it happens, mostly chose not to deliver messages about issues. UCLA political scientist Lynn Vavreck did an analysis of 2016 presidential campaign advertising that she wrote up in the New York Times (11/23/16), and the results were striking:
Both candidates spent most of their television advertising time attacking the other person’s character. In fact, the losing candidate’s ads did little else. More than three-quarters of the appeals in Mrs. Clinton’s advertisements (and nearly half of Mr. Trump’s) were about traits, characteristics or dispositions. Only 9 percent of Mrs. Clinton’s appeals in her ads were about jobs or the economy. By contrast, 34 percent of Mr. Trump’s appeals focused on the economy, jobs, taxes and trade.
But from Krugman’s point of view, it doesn’t matter that Clinton mostly chose not to make economic arguments to the voters; his larger point is that economic arguments don’t really matter in politics:
The fact is that Democrats have already been pursuing policies that are much better for the white working class than anything the other party has to offer. Yet this has brought no political reward.
His example of the political uselessness of improving people’s lives is Obamacare:
Consider eastern Kentucky, a very white area which has benefited enormously from Obama-era initiatives…. Independent estimates say that the uninsured rate [in Kentucky’s Clay County] fell from 27 percent in 2013 to 10 percent in 2016. That’s the effect of the Affordable Care Act, which Mrs. Clinton promised to preserve and extend but Mr. Trump promised to kill.
Mr. Trump received 87 percent of Clay County’s vote.
Now, one of the basic ideas behind Obamacare is that people who think that they can’t afford health insurance should be forced through increasingly heavy fines to buy it anyway. While this may or may not be good economics, it shouldn’t be surprising that it’s bad politics: When asked for their judgment on the ACA, people tend to disapprove more than they approve by about a 10 percentage point margin.
Yet this is Krugman’s main example of the help Democrats have delivered to ungrateful workers.
Let’s look at the bigger picture: Over the past 40 years or so, median income in the US has stagnated while income going to the very wealthy has soared; inequality of wealth has climbed to the point where the top 0.1 percent own as much as the bottom 90 percent. This has proceeded under Republican and Democratic presidencies alike; the US’s GINI coefficient, the standard measure of inequality, has shown a more or less constant increase since the late 1960s.
It’s hard to imagine a population so disinterested in material wealth that this kind of dramatic redistribution of resources would not have an impact. And indeed, there are signs of profound trauma among the white working class, in the form of increasing mortality from addiction and suicide (FAIR.org, 2/3/16).
But Krugman joins in the widespread presumption that, in fact, these large-scale economic shifts have had no real political consequence. “Let’s be serious here,” he says assuredly. “You can’t explain the votes of places like Clay County as a response to disagreements about trade policy.” Based, apparently, on the fact that voters in Clay County weren’t excited about being compelled to buy health insurance.
You get rather a different picture if you look at the exit polls—which, imperfect as they are, are the best evidence we have for who voted for which candidate. The results for 2016 are not too surprising: Like a typical Republican, Donald Trump did better with voters who were white, male, older (45+) and more affluent ($50,000+/year).
Trump did much better among whites than with voters of color—but doing less poorly with non-white voters is why he won and Romney lost. (graphic: New York Times, 11/8/16)
The more interesting results come if you compare the exit polls for 2016 with those for 2012—in other words, a year where the Republican won the electoral college vs. one in which they lost. (The New York Times has a handy interactive feature that allows you to see shifts in voting patterns from election to election.) Here we see that the changes that gave Trump the victory are not the ones you’d expect: Among all white voters, he did only 1 percentage point better than Romney—who lost the popular vote by 3.9 percentage points. This is because Trump’s 14-point gain among whites without college degrees was almost canceled out by a 10-point loss among college-educated whites.
No, the real secret to Trump’s success is that while he did poorly among voters of color, he did less poorly than Romney did—he was beaten by 7 fewer points among African-Americans, 8 less with Latinos and 11 points less with Asian-Americans. This is despite running a campaign that echoed white supremacist themes and was openly endorsed by neo-Nazis. Why? As Christian Parenti, a progressive journalist who watched weeks of Trump’s speeches, related (Jacobin, 11/22/16):
Contrary to how he was portrayed in the mainstream media, Trump did not talk only of walls, immigration bans and deportations. In fact, he usually didn’t spend much time on those themes…. Choppy as they were, Trump’s speeches nonetheless had a clear thesis: Regular people have been getting screwed for far too long and he was going to stop it.
Was it that message that resulted in voters making less than $30,000 shifting by 16 percentage points in the direction of Trump? Or was it the lack of a compelling economic message from Clinton that caused left-leaning poor people to stay home, allowing Republican gains by default? Either way, the striking class-based shifts in voting are glossed over by analyses like Krugman’s, which prefer to see working-class voters as driven by entirely irrational resentments.
The flipside of economics not causing the Democrats’ problems, of course, is that you don’t have to change economic policies to solve those problems. In part, this is because the economic woes of working-class America are insoluble; as Krugman says:
Nobody can credibly promise to bring the old jobs back; what you can promise—and Mrs. Clinton did—are things like guaranteed healthcare and higher minimum wages.
This is a very attractive cop-out. The reality is that the loss of jobs and upward transfer of wealth were the result of conscious choices by Washington policy-makers, and those policies could be changed. (Economist Dean Baker has written a book about this, aptly named Rigged.) But acknowledging this means abandoning the Democratic Party’s attempts to build a winning electoral coalition of wealthy whites and people of color—serving the economic interests of the affluent and addressing only the social and cultural concerns of people of color.
“Clintonism” is the future, Michael Lind argued in the New York Times (4/16/16). (photo: New York Times)
As Michael Lind put it in a New York Times piece (4/16/16) declaring that this new coalition (dubbed “Clintonism”) was the future:
The Clintonian synthesis of pro-business, finance-friendly economics with social and racial liberalism no longer needs to be diluted, as it was in the 1990s, by opportunistic appeals to working-class white voters.
As I pointed out at the time, though (FAIR.org, 4/25/16), voters of color are interested in economics as well as civil rights issues—suggesting that “corralling [Democratic voters] up again for a Clintonist future is going to be more difficult than Lind and his colleagues in corporate media want to believe.”
Krugman ends his column with a shrug, presenting the attraction of Trump for working-class voters—characterized as “white working-class” voters, the better to pigeonhole them—as a mysterious phenomenon that needs to be puzzled over:
Democrats have to figure out why the white working class just voted overwhelmingly against its own economic interests, not pretend that a bit more populism would solve the problem.
It’s far from clear what “figuring this out” this would do for the Democrats—give them clues for better “messaging,” enable them to deploy the right celebrity endorsements? When you get down to it, to attribute voters’ choices to irrational resentments is to put them beyond the reach of rational persuasion—in other words, to give up on them.
To do the opposite—to refuse to concede working-class voters to the right wing—does not mean ignoring the role of white nationalism in Trump’s victory. Racism and xenophobia are key ideologies in Trump’s coalition, which disproportionately attracts believers in racial superiority.
Finding racial and cultural enemies is the natural tendency of far-right movements that gain strength from economic dislocation. They will likely continue to grow without a strong counter-argument from the left that solidarity and not scapegoating is the solution to workers’ problems. Only if we see economic stratification and racial resentment as interrelated—rather than presenting them, as Krugman does, as mutually exclusive explanations—do we have a viable strategy for dealing with either one.
Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org. You can follow him on Twitter at @JNaureckas.
You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com, or write to public editor Liz Spayd at public@nytimes.com (Twitter:@NYTimes or @SpaydL). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
It seems like the unspoken reality here is really that the Trump voter is both ignorant and gullible, and doesn’t want to hear about it or face up to it … certainly not called any names, like deplorable.
On the other side, Democrats for some reason do not even bother to vote, fail to realize all they have to do it show up and they win the election. The problem with that is that it is a hole in our system as far as the establishment goes, so it seems like if they were smart, and they are – they’re winning bigtime – they would be ready for various levels of tactics to take down that vote, dissuade voters, long lines, fewer voting places, vote rigging and finally media lies.
The 21st century is the century where our illusions are smashed, and those on take lose all of their shame. All in all not a good combination.
They’re winning *widely*, but not *deeply*. We should take hope from that, but we don’t.
Dems don’t vote because they keep waiting for their dream candidate who will openly support everything they want RIGHT NOW. They don’t realize that by staying home, they simply become *unlikely voters*, and candidates don’t spend much time trying to sway unlikely voters.
Hillary lost because she ran a campaign based on insulting Trump (who pretended to offer most of what people want RIGHT NOW) rather than proposing a vision of ANYTHING they want RIGHT NOW…
Hillary had a huge and deep pockets and yet every ad she ran in the last few weeks , and there were a lot of them were all “I am not Donald Trump”. Nothing about minimum wage or trade deals or everything Sanders ran on, So please don’t say you have to depend on the media, Some how Sanders, attacked as he was, got that message across. The third way dems just don’t care – tone deaf and thinking there was no one else to vote for. And acting like they had it in the bag, did not do anything to get dems out to vote forthem, they have to act like every vote counts and it is not a blow out.
Clinton campaign one of the worst run in history, they sabotage themselves/
You intentionally misstate both the main goal of the ACA (force ppl who think they can’t afford it to buy it, which the ACA doesn’t do…because subsidies) and also it’s popularity (or lack thereof) when called anything but Obamacare it polls well, but when named after it’s creator it doesn’t…hmmm…
Kentucky is a prime example of voters who went in a partisan/racist direction waking up THE VERY NEXT DAY and worrying that their healthcare coverage was going away, both in gubernatorial and presidential races…
“Because subsidies” just about sums up the problem. It’s a definitive statement that shows your lack of awareness and concern for the working class. You live in an elitist bubble and fail to understand that subsidies don’t provide enough incentive to purchase insurance. A single white male, without a high school diploma making 60k in gold Coast Connecticut is doing okay but factoring in an 8k “tax” puts a person in a bad position and in fact the person I know took the cheaper penalty option. There are a alot of holes in your subsidies.
The major GOAL of Nixon/Heritage/Romney/AHIP/Big PhRMA/Obama-“care” was to expand the control and profits of the corporations who run the sick care industrial complex ..
This is mostly off the top of my head, and I’ll probably offend everybody, but
I’ll take a cultural rationale. DJT is an expert sales person and Hillary is deemed a
condescending elitist. DJT is for guns, anger at liberal greens, even less dishonest than
Hillary. DJT won because he was able to play a good ole boy—really, while Hillary
comes across as a phony church lady. Apparently she is so disliked that to the majority
of those voters, she was not credible. ( I don’t know how she did in the Primary, and perhaps
she beat Bernie.) The GOP has been bashing her so long the folks pretty much
believe them. Kentucky elected a new GOP governor who is anti-Obamacare.
It may take another serious recession to win back the whites. These people apparently
despise Hillary, and are very indulgent re DJT: personality dynamics, I’ll venture.
To understand the Trump voter, it might help to consider our instinct for fairness. Laboratory monkeys can be induced to trade or work for cucumber slices. But if they see that their neighbours are getting grapes (much preferred to cucumber) for the same task, they not only refuse to participate, but they protest violently. Is the Trump phenomenon based on the fact that the 1% have been running away with all the grapes, leaving only cucumber for the 99%? Voting for Trump may simply be the equivalent of a temper tantrum by the America electorate.
Social Comparison theory describes human (and now, ape) responses to inequality. Animals and humans are constantly comparing themselves to others, right or wrong. Social norms arise. People generally behave according to thr expectations of others in the society.
What Democrats would be smart to point out is that as it gets easier and easier to make money in this country without the help of numerous other individuals on a payroll, we’ll have to develop a new paradigm which allows everyone a chance to share in that fortune while using free time to gain skill and knowledge and express themselves creatively. Technology sent millions of farm laborers into the cities in search of factory jobs. Robotics and offshoring is taking those positions away from their descendants. Artificial intelligence is going to put countless knowledge workers out to pasture. Why in the world should “progress” make a very, very few stinking rich while the rest compete for scraps and wonder if their children will have any opportunities at all? At the end of every Monopoly game is always a sad half hour as the weak are devoured first, then those who’d once seemed to have a chance to win are battered to their knees and dispatched without mercy. Is this a Monopoly game we’re living? Those who favor that aren’t truly human. And those who think the victims of progress deserve only handouts or hands up into underpayed, overly-subservient roles are little better. We need to create a new world in which a lack of work in a land of riches means better lives for everyone.
Well said, Jon Williams. Perhaps it’s time for an entrepreneur to develop a new, improved version of Monopoly 2017, where, as the game concludes, the losers are evicted from their homes and hotels, forced to live on the street, starve before turning to cannibalism, and even give up their boots, thimbles and top hats. And there never wasn’t the option of sending them directly to jail.
“Fairness and Accuracy?” You’re joking right? You guys have the most transparent agenda ever. This is the leftist equivalent of the No Spin Zone.
I suspect you are so used to hearing propaganda and lies that you don’t recognize the truth when you hear it.
“…the rest of the world rarely appears in the American media. Indeed, it is virtually impossibile in most American cities, even though often more than a hundred TV channels are fed into living rooms, to get any kind of regular flow of international news. It is a shocking fact that one can be better informed on the state of the world while sitting in a hotel room in Africa than in a hotel room anywhere in America. From extensive personal experience, I can make this claim confidently. For all practical puposes, America could well be on a different planet, so cut off are Americans from flows of information about events outside America.” Kishore Mahbubani: Beyond the Age of Innocence. pg 167
http://www.gopiswrong.com/media.htm
Nonsense. PBS, NPR, and thru them the BBC, CHC, and many other foreign news sources are available free almost everywhere in the US. Plus with the Internet there is a world of news sources for no additional charge beyond what one pays for access. Add in newspapers and magazines (free at the library or for generally low subscription price) and there are plenty of ways Americans can follow world events, if they so choose.
Most choose not to, They are too busy watching Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty
PBS and NPR very rarely report on the rest of the world either, and to add insult to injury, the BBC nightly bulletin now shown on the former is no longer the standard BBC world one but a “special edition for our American viewers” which, surprise, surprise, only focuses on issues directly related to the U.S…
False, false, false! I listen to it & it’s very international.
Add to that, CSPAN on 3 channels.
Spoken like a loyal Fox viewer. Did they send you here to troll?
Not sure what you think FAIR’s “agenda” is, but you should take a look at their About page before jumping to any more (grossly false) conclusions.
Excellent piece and insightful analysis! I knew Clinton’s ads only attacking Trump and not offering policy could hurt. I’ve been disgusted with the claims by “The Daily Show”‘s Trevor Noah that jobs aren’t coming back as a way to excuse corporate liberals’ actions — which Krugman once decried as the disingenuous statements of “Very Serious People”, especially Bill Clinton.
I have sworn off The Daily Show and the rest of the programs that carry corporate water.
Used to be propaganda was limited to “news” programs. Now propaganda has been extended into comedy. After looking into John Stewart and The Daily show’s influence on young voters the Power Elite determined they needed a voice in comedy. No thanks.
Any corporate-owned outlets need to be viewed with a critical eye. That includes cable channels owned by Viacom (i.e. Comedy Central) or Time Warner (i.e. HBO).
Propagandists acting as comedians acting as newscasters.
John Oliver is another one who tried to influence the election outcome with his Jill Stein bashing, even though he is not even a US citizen. He’s a Brit in the US on a work visa (a good reason for immigration reform if ever there was one).
Krugman is a DNC hack.
And like the DNC, he obviously has contempt for working class people.
They don’t “perform” to his expectations (vote for his candidate) so he has no use for them.
His Bernie bashing is a significant part of why we now have Trump.
I agree wholeheartedly, Lester. I have had about enough of the Krugman BS.
I blame Putin.
You’re right don’t bother. Every time one of you journalist says” non college educated white male” you lose more votes. That is a class racist slur that infuriates us. Us along with African Americans and Hispanic people and many others too are the reason your life is so comfortable. You and everyone like you should line up on your knees and kiss every one of our butts for doing your dirty work. I never went to college but I’m a machinists welder journeyman plumber and carpenter. You couldn’t do what I do with 15 college degrees pal. I’d love to see you try it.
Don’t blame the journalists.
The working class in this country decided it wasn’t interested in self-determination 60 years ago when it purged all the communists and socialists from the unions and cut deals with the capitalists. Ever since, the capitalists have been slowly stripping away everything that the labor movement won, and what exactly did the workers expect would happen? And when Daddy Reagan came along and told the working class that government was the problem, even though government was the tool the working class used to negotiate their rights, they went along with it because Daddy Reagan was strong and handsome and he wasn’t afraid of homosexuals and blacks. So they let him cut taxes and deregulate and set the country up for the next 40 years of economic hardship.
And what exactly did you expect the Democrats to do after Reagan pounced them two elections in a row by slashing taxes on the rich and deregulating? They moved away from the working class into a coalition they could actually win, and they gave up trying to fight for the working class cause the working class didn’t seem to care much.
And now, we have to listen to the working class drag everything out into the public, and complain, and moan about how things didn’t work out the way the expected. And now they are about to get burned again, because they can’t seem to figure out that when you vote for someone who’s main plan to bring back jobs is to devalue the workforce and slash social spending, it’s probably gonna hurt the working class.
Plain and simple, if the working class in this country wants to actually change their position, they need to form a mass movement like they did in the early 1900s when they overcame obstacles far greater than what they face today. You know, like banning child labour laws, securing the 40 hour work week, pushing for unemployment insurance, every workplace benefit you have now was won by the working class. They need to stop thinking that their problems will be solved by a politician and start organizing. And yes, that might mean the working class throwing aside 60 years of anti-red fervor and dealing with the fact that capitalism is the problem. NAFTA didn’t force companies to ship jobs to Mexico, it was the bosses that decided it was worth making the extra profit. If you want to get at the heart of the problems afflicting the working glass, attack the capitalist, not the government and certainly not the journalists.
Yep — the oligarchy has been fighting for the return of the Gilded Age since FDR’s first term.
It sounds like you are hating the wrong people.
Don’t blame the white collar people who are slaving away 80 hours a week in an office for the challenges in your life. Lots of them understand what you go through: About half of them grew up in families where dad had that kind of job. And as one of those white collar people, trust me, we don’t enjoy it, we’re just trying to do what we can to make a living. The TV image of what white-collar work looks like is just as wrong as the TV image of what blue-collar work looks like.
If you want to hate somebody, I’d suggest figuring out who is getting rich off of your hard work. A good place to start would be your boss.
Mr. Naurekas won’t concede that it is a possibility that these lower class angry whites’ resentments are beyond reason. I agree with Kevin Williamson, who has visited desperate towns in Appalachia, comes from Texas originally,and has been writing about the conditions and attitudes in these troubled places(economically, family-wise, health-wise and booze and drug and depression-wise for at least three years before 2016 in National Review, much of his writing is online. Williamson is a conservative who hates Trump and basically regards the misery in these unhappy places as self created, a moral and character failure. It’s easier to expect a mindless job, that pays well only because of previous labor movement strikes against sometimes lethal opposition by the owners, to last forever, and support your family with physical strength(mining) or repetitive tasks(assembly line) that anyone can learn than use your mind and study. It is much harder to learn math, science, history, get ambition, and get trained with higher skills to improve one’s life. Conservative opposition to quality public schools doesn’t help(my comment, not Williamson’s). I am an Independent(liberal most of the time) but here I’m with Williamson. All humans must survive under the conditions they are born into, and some thrive regardless of terrible luck in which family they were born into. Some take the easiest way, or settle for very little, both economically and in variety of experiences and cultivating one’s body and mind. Some always blame external factors or other people for their dissatisfactions. History cannot stagnate technologically just to please these people. Nor can human rights progress(the end of white supremacy) be halted forever. Before, Jews, Blacks, Latinos and women were deliberately kept out of decent opportunities. Once they could compete somewhat more fairly, the whites did not like it, that is, whites of a certain mental level. To me, the perfect metaphor is Galileo and the Catholic Church. Galileo’s intellect was far superior to the superstitious nonsense and magical thinking of the priests, but they won at that moment, he had to recant. Magical thinking and RESENTMENT of Galileo WON for a while. No majority of voters who are able to critically think would vote against their economic interests repeatedly, and choose terrible presidential candidates(granted, not many wise, upright types to choose from usually) twice in 16 years. Sorry, Mr. Naureckas, they are beyond reason. Right wing radio & TV, denial of reality, and slogans without substance and hate speech have zero effect on critically thinking people. The problem is in the human species. It overbreeds and the strong keep the weak down, always. The US has a long tradition of anti-intellectualism. The gut instinct of the manly everyday citizen is superior to the effete liberal intellectuals, one of the many preposterous myths developed to feed the egos of the “rabble” as John Adams called the uneducated masses. Something is rotten to the core in this country. The rise in mass shootings by pissed off angry loners is not too far from what the angry, resentment filled whiners did in this election. One giant irrational flipping of the bird. It’s never my fault—-say the TRump voters, and SHE is a monster. I usually like what FAIR’S editor sas, but not this time.
We need LESS intellectuals and MORE doers sir with all due respect. Too many thinkers getting paid alot for nothing while others shoulders the actual workload for both themselves and the do nothing intellectuals. And when the people wake up , which seems to be happening BTW, the doers are going to take what is rightfully theirs in the first place and the ” intellectuals” can live in the street where they belong. I would listen to the winds of change if I were a ” college educated person ” before it’s too late.
FEWER not “less”. And I can’t be bothered to fix the multiple other grammar and spelling mistakes in your comment.
Sorry, but you aren’t going to turn the clock back on globalization and the rising powers in the developing world value education and knowledge.
And if you engaged your brain for just one second, you would realize that f it wasn’t for those “thinkers” you despise so much, you wouldn’t have the internet and a computer on which to type your idiotic and hateful comment…
Sorry, but this is typical holier-than-thou blather. A brilliant job of completely missing the point of the article. As always, in almost all things- history, politics, whatever- it is about ECONOMICS. How convenient that the slow bleed of income from so many for so long is not the cause, it is racism, or ignorance, or a lack of character. When those who are already struggling get pushed even closer to a looming abyss, they will grasp for anything, especially when only an idiot thinks the system is in any way in their corner. And you wonder why they viscerally despise the vapid, economically secure intellectual left poo-pooing and telling them how stupid they are. Guess what, dippy, intelligence is actually not uncommon outside the beltway. Most who live one bad economic turn from disaster, for themselves, their children, their friends, would argue the stupid move is to blindly follow a lying plutocrat and her venal, money-grubbing party yet again and hope for the best. And guess what, these folks would have voted for BERNIE IN DROVES. They just want some damn honesty, specifically someone who agrees that yes, the system is rigged, and rocketing toward some sort of oligarchic-plutocratic militaristic nightmare, not that we aren’t already there. Perhaps we should bring back the property requirement to vote, hmm? Tut tut, harrumph harrumph!! The rabble, the damned rabble, always f-ing things up…
Trump wins as a reaction of the white conservatives again the left as a threat by black hispanic and non christian-arabic, hebrew media+ bankers.
By 2030 hispanic and black population reach 240 mil. Some force will use them to win leadership. UsA will be splitted.
While watching Chris Matthews prior to the election I realized that Trump was “stealing the niche” the FDR cultivated. Chris M mentioned that at abandoned factory sites people had placed votives, flowers AND Trump signs. On Chris Matthews own show a year earlier Obama actually said those factories are not comming back! WTF this from a Democrat? So we are all to be retrained huh? Not when white collar jobs are being off shored also. What was worse is that Hillary Clinton supported the H1-b program whereby outside outsourcers destroyed what off shoring left behind.
Corporations would outsource their computer departments to TaTa and other Indian temp agencies. These would bring in H1-b workers to take the computer jobs but first American Hi Tech workers would train their replacements. So this is what Obama had in mind when he spoke about “retraining”? That is NOT “change we can believe in.
Could Hillary Clinton say the word “Tariff”? What about Obama? Folks do you remember when Obama took office we had control of BOTH houses of Congress. Remember CARD CHECK? Obama would not twist arms to push this and save the unions. He would not go to Wisconsin to stand with the unions against their GOP Gov. Yet he found the testosterone to push for FAST TRACK of TPP. And you wonder why we got Trump?
Stop making excuses for Obama. Every expert told him that health care costs were going up. Yet he did not protect his plan by pushing for 1. Public Option and 2. Releasing Medicare to bargain for drugs which would have driven costs down. Instead he allowed restrictions on importing cheaper Canadian drugs. Now surprise… SURPRISE healthcare costs are still rising but NOW the concept of Government intervention is being blamed -WTF?
Obama never used the bully pulpit. Folks imagine a President Trump being accused of not being an American? Imagine Trump’s reaction if he were accused of setting up death panels? Do you think he would just SIT THERE like Obama did? He would attack the news media for allowing death panel lies to be made. So what is worse?
1. The birther lies, death panel idiocy, GOP obstructionism OR
2. Barrack Obama’s marathon celebration of the testosterone free political lifestyle?
And you wonder why we got Trump? Americans will vote against their own self interest but never against their own SELF CONCEPT. We make heros of ACTION FIGURES. Just look at how Obama has failed us Progressives and stop making excuses for him.
FoxNews was TERRIFIED when Obama took office. This is because Obama:
1. Was supposed to be a fiery liberal
2. Was passionate about a liberal agenda AND
3. HAD THE RHETORICAL SKILLS to bring about that agenda by using the BULLY PULPIT
And the result folks – be honest.
meow….Meow….MEOW!
So up steps Hillary Clinton with her Goldman Sachs hidden speeche$,
her usage of white sound machines to block the news media from hearing her talks to the rich donor class,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-static-noise-speech_us_570930dae4b0836057a16748
And through all of this we are supposed to make believe that a Sec of State does not know that an email server in her home is a security violation. Plus look the other way at her foundation.
Trump University is bad also but I expect the successor of FDR to be for working Americans not the 1% and I will NOT look the other way!
By the way folks does the high cost of Trump University got you down? Why not take out a PAY DAY LOAN TO PAY FOR IT. With interest rates a Mafia loan shark would not even ask. But you can get these rates. Just ask our own dear sweet DEBBIE WASSERMAN – SCHULTZ. Yes the DNC Chair and friend of loan sharks. This was Hillary’s compatriot. And yet you wonder why Trump won? I am for BERNIE SANDERS IN 2020.
GO BERNIE GO and if not him then Elizabeth Warren. No more tin shinny objects! No more CHANGE CORPORATIONS CAN LIVE WITH.
Stop the CUT AND RUN CAPITALISTS who ship our jobs off shore while both blue and white collar workers get screwed!
Best post on the entire thread.
To say that Sanders is not one of Krugman’s favorite people is a gross understatement. Krugman spent the entire primary season castigating and belittling Sanders, even to the point of once suggesting that he was no different than Trump. I thought that this was due to some kind of personal animosity, but after reading this latest Krugman column, I have to believe that he simply does not understand either populism or the plight of the working class. Perhaps he should stick to economics and leave politics to others.
Krugman is a know-it-all who actually knows very little.
He has parlayed his fake “Nobel Prize” in economics into a podium from which he now pontificates to millions of people on pretty much anything and everything.
I say “fake” because it is not a real Nobel prize.
It is a basic fact that There is no Nobel prize in Economics). The award was started in 1968 as a “marketing ploy to celebrate the Bank of Sweden’s 300th anniversary.”
“The Economics Prize has nestled itself in and is awarded as if it were a Nobel Prize. But it’s a PR coup by economists to improve their reputation,” “It’s most often awarded to stock market speculators …. There is nothing to indicate that [Alfred Nobel] would have wanted such a prize”, said Nobel’s great great nephew Peter Nobel
The prize is not based on any sort of objective criteria and has been given to many individuals who were demonstrably (in some cases, spectacularly) wrong .
It is interesting that one recipient of the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”. Friedrich von Hayek, in his acceptance speech of 1974 expressed his concern
end of quotation
In other words, von Hayek warned us about the very real possibility of an egomaniac like Paul Krugman getting the prize
Even if there was Hacking and election Fraud and everything else – Millions and Millions of Americans voted for a Racist evil KKK NAZI Bastard with the morality of a sewer Rat. What if the 2/3 of the German people who did NOT vote for the New Chancellor in the 1930s had decided they WOULD ‘sink to the level of the NAZIS’ and had prevented the Holocaust and WWII? Pakistan was ‘Partitioned’ from India because Muslims and Hindus could not live together without killing each other. I do not see how I can ‘Coexist’ with people who voted for Trump any more than if I were a German Jew trying to ‘Get Along’ with the 1930s NAZIS
There’s an implied pecking order in Republican rising tide messaging that after the rich have had their fill of the feast then the middle and working class will be served next, eating their fill before the underclass of poor, minorities, and immigrants. All expect the underclass to reap little if any benefit from the scraps that are left. Rather, they are expected to raise up through hard work by their bootstraps. It’s an understanding that reinforces ideas of hard working independence, opportunity, privilege, and exceptionalism that have been long baked into American culture. It’s an idea of special license for the middle and working class that allows them to ring fence opportunity with the local institutions of government, religion, and education, holding economic opportunists at bay.
Democrats also have a rising tide theme, one that addresses a social agenda of equality and assimilation. There’s also a pecking order expressed in a bottoms up approach that takes care of the neediest people first. The rational is that human and real cost of not lifting these people is far greater than the costs of the social programs. Correct or not, the progressive agenda runs up against those notions of hard working independence, opportunity, privilege, and exceptionalism. What the working class experiences is that while patiently sitting at the table waiting for their turn, poor and immigrants populations are being served before them and that runs against their sense of self-worth, self-interest, and dignity. So they stake out defensible territory, ring fence opportunity, declare the privilege of their place in line, and justify protection of perceived rights.
The nature of economic scarcity is that unless overcome by a greater sense of collective hope it finds reason to justify defensive preemptive actions in the name of community value. Long held attitudes become normalized and the de facto unconscious social position of a community – a community value. Community value is not subject to justification, proof or logic, it is an accepted context for the majority of that group of people. Racism, misogyny, bigotry, and all the other isms of assertiveness become manifestations in defense of boundaries. Such notions beg for champions, amplification, and greater resonance. They found their man in Trump.
As to the election, Obama delivered a powerful message of hope that resonated across classes. His candidacy offered an opportunity to right millennium of wrongs, a step toward purging national consciousness. The rights of women in society, arguably of equal value, did not resonate with the same force among women voters. While Obamacare brought relief for many, Obama was unable to more fully address the economic pain of the white working class, therefore deflating expectations of change and creating resentment. Regardless of which party is at fault, anger is a justifiable reaction.
Clinton needed to diverge and try to become the candidate of change; she didn’t. Failing that she needed to blunt the anger, delivering a powerful, trusting, inspirational message of opportunity, one strong enough to overcome inherent economic defenses and Obama administration disappointments with the working class, and hopeless complacency from minority voters. She failed to deliver. Would they have listened; probably not. Could Sanders have done better; a moot point. Failing that she positioned as the lessor of two evils. Unfortunately, that leaves it up to individual voters, many of whom lack clear understanding of the issues, to measure the difference and determine if such difference is sufficient to matter. Trump may be an odious choice; yet it seems that for many Obama voters decided it did not matter. Perhaps, if both candidates are evil, given the extreme dysfunction in Washington, it was determined that any change is better than no change at all.
WHY MAMA IS MY FAVORITE ECONOMIST
Mom and the kids.
Mom makes chits which she gives to the kids when they do their chores.
In order to make sure the kids value the chits, mom requires that the kids pay her a chit every week in order for the kids to have privileges to play with friends and watch TV.
No chit, no TV, no friends.
Mom is taxing the kids chits she created.
The kids are willing to do chores to get chits because they need to be able to pay mom’s taxes.
It costs mom nothing to create a chit. She’s not chit-limited. She can put as many chits into the family economy as she wants, without limit.
If she offers to buy more chores from the kids than she collects in chit taxes, she is deficit spending.
As mom’s deficit spending accumulates, the kids are able to acquire more chits.
If the kids find the chits to be useful in settling accounts with each other – say, if one child is busy one week, she could buy her brother’s performance of her chores with a chit, rather than begging him to do so with a promise of doing the same for him later.
With chits, there is no child’s promise of something in the future. When she pays her brother a chit, the deal is done. She’s not promising to do his chores later. She has made final payment when she hands him the chit.
Now, if mom is “fiscally responsible” and insists that her chit budget balance, then she will spend only one chit per child per week, and collect the same in taxes.
If she does this, the kids have no net chit assets. Even though each child may have a chit in hand, they owe it all back to mom at the end of the week, and cannot accumulate chits.
If mom insists on running a chit surplus and collects in taxes more than she is willing to spend, the kids will eventually run out of chits. First they will be unable to trade with each other, other than by bartering promises (credit), and ultimately they won’t be able to pay their taxes and will lose their TV and friend privileges.
It is only if mom deficit spends that the kids can save chits and have chits to spend.
For a kid, it is important to manage her budget. She must make sure that her outflow of chits is no greater than her inflow. For a kid, that is financial responsibility.
Mom’s rules are different. As the sovereign provider of chits, mom MUST deficit spend or the kids will not be able to save chits or spend them for anything but taxes.
For mom, being fiscally responsible means making sure that the kids have enough chits available so that THEY can behave with financial responsibility.
It’s not just an option for mom to behave differently from the kids, it is necessary, if she is to enable financial responsibility among her children.
(written by Laura Elizabeth Teller)
Did Hillary Clinton ever use the word “rigged” in her campaign speeches? Trump and Sanders did. I just can’t remember if Hillary did?
The best way to let low-information working class voters know your policies actually favor them is to do something for them that makes it obvious! If Obama had pushed, by directly appealing to the populace rather than the insurance companies, for a simple Medicare-for-All policy rather than the bureaucratic nightmare of the ACA, Trump would never have even won the primary. Moreover, he’d have built up such an enthusiastic constituency that no Republican administration would’ve dared touch it; even Trump hasn’t proposed to cut Social Security, for example. So personally, I put 90% of the blame on Obama himself; Krugman is merely his apologist.
It is only difficult figuring why the white working class voted for Trump because to the white liberal, admitting that the heritage of racial prejudice still exist undiluted among the majority of whites in all demographics is an anathema. The fact is, the message that he will deal with “blacks” sternly and support the police abuse of power that result in the killing of unarmed blacks, resonated strongly with whites, who now had the opportunity to vote for a Republican Presidential Candidate who did not hide his racist inclinations.
For African Americans, to whom white electoral and social behaviors have been something they had become experts on after centuries of experience, there was no puzzlement about why and how Trump won. They did not buy into the disingenuous crap about white disenchantment because of their economic circumstances.
The fact that rolls glibly off the tongues of white pundits on both sides of the political fence, when blacks, whose experiences over the centuries dwarf any similar circumstances for whites, indicate how deeply entrenched racism is in the US. How deeply entrenched and spontaneous the element of privilege affects the views of the media. It is like someone making an excuse for the antics and behavior of someone who touched a hot stove, while completely ignoring the person who was on fire from head to toe.
The US looses any moral authority, from here on out, to become indignant over leaders elected in other Countries. When in your country it is possible for someone with the misogynist, racist and mendacious characteristics to become President, you loose that moral pedestal to climb on and point at others.
That some people resent ACA requirements does not even begin to refute Krugman’s points that the media mostly ignore candidates’ economic policies, and that much of Trump’s support was motivated by the racial animosities of poorly educated whites.
Naureckas’s “rebuttal” of Krugman’s Clay County argument is a non sequitur.
Nor is there the scantest evidence that “solidarity” will solve US workers’ problems. Huge social and political forces in the US have destroyed the worker solidarity movement of a hundred years ago. In more enlightened and less racist countries—for instance in Scandinavia—worker solidarity has evolved into sophisticated, worker-friendly cooperation amongst unions, employers and governments. To get that to happen in the US, you’d first need to tear down most of the country’s economic and social order.
If you look down from thirty thousand feet, you can clearly see that the approach this article suggests that Hillary Clinton should have taken IS the approach Sanders took, and it brought him from less than twenty percent was it to a dead heat? And look what happened; the Clinton campaign along with skewed/minimal media coverage and the DNC assured that he didn’t get the nomination. The Democratic party elite and media status quo sold the American people down the river knowing full well that the best chance at the presidency was Sanders, who was offering the same level of revolutionary fervor that Trump was, which is what people were looking for, only in a rational, sane manner. Why do you think Sanders’ primary gains against Clinton were so staggering and fast in spite of the distortions mentioned above? The Democratic elites don’t give a rats ass about you, your kids, your healthcare, your retirement…you name it. It’s all about self preservation. Bernie should have run as an independent so he was not at the mercy of the DNC. I bet he’s kicking himself. The Dem elites got exactly what they deserved. They are the real enemy of the people. The only true difference here is that the Republican party apparatus finally was not able to contain the rabid white supremacist/alt-right movement they themselves purposely created, nurtured, and exploited ever since the disgusting ‘Southern Strategy’ was put into place to play on racism and hatred as a way to attract voters, but the Democratic party apparatus WAS able to crush the dissident wing of its party (Again, Sanders should have run away from the Democratic party as fast as he could). Too bad the rest of us now have to live with it.
There’s no mention of the 3rd party candidates this year, nor Bernie Sanders, nor write-ins – all of whom were very much discussed & promoted in various ways.
For the 2012 general election, none of the several non-traditional party candidates had any hoopla or affect, nor were they talked about or noticed much.
So, comparing the 2 elections, in any way, is not appropriate, in my opinion.
In fact, 2012 had a popular incumbent for one party. Then add the changes in society & social media in 4 years, and you further reason to make the 2 elections incomparable.
Paul Krugman is a propagandist for the DNC, was probably promised a position to the Clinton camp so became a traitor to the progressive cause and was a cheerleader for her while the past few years was an Obama apologist even though Obama didn’t implement the policies he put forward and had the crooked Banksters in his cabinet. His smearing and hit pieces on Bernie Sanders along with a majority of the corporate media be it TV or print is why Trump won. I don’t even get why AlterNet still reports on what this corporate media economist hack has to say. As Mark Twain said “if you don’t read the newspapers you’re uninformed, if you do read them you’re misinformed”.
People know that politicians lie and make promises they can’t keep. People know they are being screwed by a system rigged for the rich. Trump spoke to them plainly and said that. Clinton is just the kind of typical politician people don’t like or believe, so it didn’t matter what she said. And to top it off, she promised to keep things the way they were, and build on them to make them better, when people feel things aren’t right. So what would you do? Vote for what you hate, or vote for what might be better?
By design, the constitution gives rural rightwingers a huge advantage in elections.
A large majority of “white” Americans voted a racist con man into the presidency.
A large majority of “white” Americans continue to vote into office many more rightwing, racist Republican state governors and legislatures. Most of thse Repulican governments gerrymander to Republican advantage, suppress non-white voting.
Since Johnson lost this large racist white cohort in 1965, the main way Democrats have won federal office, except on the coasts, has been to pretend they’re republican-lite. By making Republican white supremacism explicit, Trump defeated this game.
Democrats have a very big problem: persuade white Americans to give up white supremacism.