Seeing Hillary’s reference to the fact that her supporters are the “hard-working” Americans has aroused in me an indignance I have suppressed for a long time and feel must be expressed. Here is Hillary’s quote from USA Today:

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.

Hard working? Why does what I do not count as “hard working”? And if hard working is more noble and better than what I do — if it deserves a greater political voice than mine, why did everyone tell me to focus my energies, what I thought was my “hard work” but apparently is not, on education and people skills and all of the rest?

I thought I worked hard. I certainly did what I was told to the best of my ability. I took the classes and the preparations and the tests and played the sports and wrote the essays and went to class and got a job and did what my boss asked and so on and so on. I am in school again now and I do what they tell me to do as well as I can do it and I get paid very little to do it. And for what, so morons could ruin the country and render useless my personal actions? And then I am told that my voice doesn’t count because I am not “hard working”?

I suspect that some people will object: “But Drew, you already have someone who represents you and your interests in government. The government is filled with ‘elites’ with similar backgrounds to yours making decisions that will serve you.”

All I can say in response is: No. I don’t, and no, they don’t. My interests are represented when, and only when, the leaders of this country make good decisions, decisions that make sense for the country as a whole.

Reconfiguration

It is somewhat silly to speculate on these kind of things right in the middle of them, but I wonder if we are experiencing one of those political transformations that comes along every so often and alters the identity of the parties. As we recall from our history books, Republicans were once the party of liberal northerners. Then they became the party of big business (which is what those liberal northerners did for a living). You have FDR winning the working class to the Democrats, Reagan winning the white southerners back to the Republicans etc.

I say this because I see a deeper split in this country than the basic Democrat vs. Republican or Obama vs. Hillary. I think Hillary has tapped into something real — a political block that is large and will have sway but which does not, for the forseeable future, have a path to a majority. This block is, as far as I can tell, progressive in the sense that they care about economic fairness and reject right wing religious and culturalist ideologies, but they are conservative in that they do not like what they see in the new world and will hold onto the older modes of living. Hillary’s “Scranton Lace Factory” ad speaks to them. They disagree with the reform minded voter who wants to change things, though they may not agree on how to change them.

The key point is that this tension between the need/desire for reform and the need/desire to keep things fair and under control does not seem to, nor does it seem reasonable to expect it to, map onto the conventional constituencies of the parties as currently configured. Many Republicans have much to gain from updating and many Democrats much to fear. We talk of Obama as having “crossover appeal” and struggling with the “white, working class base” of the Democratic Party. At what point to we decide that Obama and Hillary are really representing two different parties? Just an idea.

What do you think the problem is?

Earlier this week I wrote about how the issue of class division and elitism is based on a false assumption that the problems we face as a nation only affect “average” Americans (see here).  Here are two columns from today’s NYT that I think really highlight this point.

Maureen Dowd writes here about how Obama’s difficulty being a “regular guy” is hurting him with voters.  My favorite is this quote of Bill Clinton:

“The great divide in this country is not by race or even income, it’s by those who think they are better than everyone else and think they should play by a different set of rules,” the former president said. “In West Virginia and Arkansas, we know that when we see it.”

I disagree, Bill.  The great divide in this country is between those who realize we need to get serious and challenge ourselves, as individuals and a collective, to change, and those who want to blame others for our problems.  As Jamie wrote here, there is no “they” that is holding us back.  The “they” is we and what is holding us back is a lack of committment to solving problems.

Here is Tom Friedman making a similar point.

Sorry, we don’t need a president who is tough enough to withstand the lies of his opponents. We need a president who is tough enough to tell the truth to the American people. Any one of the candidates can answer the Red Phone at 3 a.m. in the White House bedroom. I’m voting for the one who can talk straight to the American people on national TV — at 8 p.m. — from the White House East Room.

It’s the Economy, …

It occurs to me that my last post was a bit misleading. Specifically, I painted the problems we face as multifaceted, which they are, but as though they are wholy distinct, which they are not.

In particular, I think it is critical that we Americans recognize that the problem in our economy is substantially, though not entirely, caused by our unsustainable relationship to our environment. This is the fundamental point made by scientific scholars such as Jared Diamond, but this view is also shared by religious thinkers and leaders like Mike Huckabee.

The One America where none of us are going to be ok

This whole election mess has made me realize something of which I have always been kind of aware but which is more stark and vivid for me now. I do not control the fate of this country, but my fate is very much controlled by it.

I was going to write about how I am “tired” of Democrats pandering and of the news spewing garbage and generally of the low level of discourse in this country. But being tired of such a thing is a luxury that I no longer feel I have. To say you are tired of something is to suggest that it no longer holds pleasure or charm for you but that it once did, and that this former pleasure/charm was the reason for your attention to it. In other words, we say we are “tired” of things that we can walk away from, and then we do just that.

But we are facing problems that we can’t walk away from. And I don’t mean “can’t” here as in “can’t, in good conscience as concerned citizens,” I mean “can’t” as in “not physically possible, we lack the ability.” We can’t walk away because these are systemic problems. That is, if you participate in the system, they are your problems. This means that even for those who are “wealthy” or “elite” there is no escape.

National Dialogue [buckle up for]

I am feeling more and more like this Wright stuff is a good sign in terms of the election, though not necessarily in terms of the presidency. As I said in yesterday’s post, I feel like this is “what it is going to be like” if we have the first black president. The media, including Fox, is treating him like he is the president. I mean, the fact that this story, which is really about race relations in America, keeps growing, and growing inconclusively, shows that the country wants to hear about and talk about race. In the media yesterday there was this “let’s really milk this” attitude that they reserve for issues the figure are going to be around for a while and are worth chewing over. I think the media are starting to see their role in an Obama administration. Exploit the juiciness of racial issues and politics for 4 years. Fox especially is likely to welcome this, though it will make them clownish and will ultimately rob them of their relevance once he is out of office.

So I think the media is on board with Obama ‘08, though not necessarily in a way that will make it easy for him to govern. And clearly, racism — the ability to harness and defuse it — is going to be the key to politics in the Obama era. I think Democrats get overly concerned about this issue. They think it is a third rail, and I think Jamie is right that it’s not. The key is that racism cuts both ways — it can scare people away from Obama but it can also make people think that his critics are unreasoning hate-mongers who put race ahead of national interests. Race is merely the means of debating the real issues — which are what should we do as a nation and who do we trust to do it. I think Obama has the ability to win this debate within discussions of race.