Corrente

If you have "no place to go," come here!

And we get?

Submitted by lambert on Sat, 11/06/2010 - 10:26am

Harold Mayerson:

Plainly, the one mega-group in the electorate that Barack Obama has the most trouble reaching is the white working class. In the 2008 primaries, Hillary Clinton clobbered Obama in this group, which is why she defeated him in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana. Tuesday, it was in these states - our former industrial heartland - where the Republicans made their greatest gains.

[T]he Democratic coalition is strong among Americans with post-graduate degrees [that would be the "creative class," who are doing fine, just fine, thank you very much, sucking off some rent to pay for the symbol manipulation*] and working-class people of color. That's enough to ensure their victories in the Northeast and on the West Coast. But in the South and the Midwest, it's not enough.

Obama was never going to appeal to working-class whites by virtue of his cultural affinities with them. In the Midwest - the most downwardly-mobile American region - his prospects have hinged on his ability to stop the economic slide and mitigate the desperation of an economically hopeless people. These are things he hasn't done, and his party paid for that big-time yesterday.

Exactly.

The Ds threw the economically desperate under the bus in 2008. Now they're paying for it. As indeed they should.

NOTE Query: It would be nice to know if The Screwing That Was HAMP affected some regions and classes more than others. Best I can find is this visualization, which isn't detailed enough.

NOTE * Making their productive relations identical to those of the winger apparat, oddly. Or not. The narcissism of small differences....

0
No votes yet

Comments

CMike's picture
Submitted by CMike on

I haven't looked at the underlying data but this Ray Teixiera and John Halpin exit polling summary was worth reading. (Sorry for the redundancy if someone else has provided this link previously here at Corrente.) Talk about screwing the pooch, I thought the following was especially important:

Then consider this result from a general question in the same poll about whether you’d rather have the federal government provide more services even if it cost more in taxes or have the federal government cost less in taxes but provide fewer services. A slight plurality (49 percent) preferred the first government-expanding option over the second government-cutting option (47 percent). Even more interestingly, these sentiments are notably less hostile to government’s role than has been the case at a number of points in the past. Only 28 percent selected the government-expanding option in 1994, while 57 percent preferred the government-cutting option.

And what does the public say they want their representative in Congress to do—fight for more spending to create jobs in their district or fight to cut government spending even if that means fewer jobs in the district? It turns out that, by 57 percent to 39 percent, they want their representative to fight for more spending to create jobs. There is again no evidence here of an overriding commitment to cut government. And again we see a less hostile attitude toward government’s role than was seen back in 1994 when, by 53 percent to 42 percent, the public came down on the cutting spending side of the choice.

Here are some of Teixeira and Halpin's prescriptions with my question marks in brackets:

But progressives should fight tooth-and-nail against conservative attempts to drastically[?] slash government services for working and poor families, efforts to radically[?] alter major programs such as Social Security, and any attempt to repeal the health care bill.

How about replacing the adverbs "drastically" and "radically" with the word "any" as a start?

In a related matter, even as he is finally coming around to explicitly saying that rank-and-file Democrats have to be willing to sit out elections if they want to have influence, Glenn Greenwald defends the progressive/liberal wing of the Democratic Party against Corporate Approved Democrat (CAD) Lawrence O'Donnell in the Morning Joe clip here.

zot23's picture
Submitted by zot23 on

Like it's some great discovery that unemployment increasing from 6% to 10%, household incomes crashing, and illegal foreclosures slamming through the roof pisses working class people off. Who could have thunk it?