Now that we finally have a Democratic nominee, a burning issue is how Obama can win the voters who went overwhelmingly to Hillary Clinton. It's a complicated topic. This blog will offer a game plan over the next few weeks. (I will speak to Obama, egghead to egghead, providing the book titles Democratic strategists should be reading if they want to understand the white working class.)
Let's start simple. Democrats are mystified about why working class voters resent them - who have such good intentions - but not Republicans, whose chief goal (as the Dems see it) is to protect the capitalist class. The hard truth is that the white working class distrusts professionals but admires the rich.
Joseph Howell's Hard Living on Clay Street found hostility towards college students, and that professional people were generally suspect. Lawyers were most disliked - many blue collar workers felt had cheated or overcharged them (typically in divorce cases). But doctors fell not far behind: "Doctors will screw you every time. Prescribe medicine for you you don't need and then charge you double for not helping you one goddamn bit."
Annette Lareau's Unequal Childhoods found tremendous resentment against teachers. No wonder. Lareau tells of:
*a working class child with learning disabilities who never gets properly diagnosed;
* a college student who is never counseled to drop a course she is failing, thereby jeopardizing her future;
*a seriously ill woman who refuses to go to the doctor because she feels she is tread like "white trash" when she does.
Elite children "learn to think of themselves as special and as entitled to receive certain kinds of services," Lareau notes, but working class kids learn a sense of powerlessness and resentment towards professionals, whom they often see as uncaring, arrogant, and exercising unchecked power over working class lives.
In sharp contrast, Michelle Lamont's The Dignity of Working Men found little resentment of the affluent. Some quotes:
I "can't knock anyone from succeeding." (Laborer)
"There's a lot of people out there who are wealthy and I'm sure they worked darned hard for every cent they have." (Receiving Clerk)
"You can't associate money with happiness, but I would sure like to give it a try." (Electronics Technician)
White working class people rank income above education in evaluating people's worth; they rank formal education below competence, knowledge, and common sense. "I'd rather have common sense than an education" is a common saying among steelworkers in Trenton.
All this is expressed to a T in Maureen Dowd's New York Times column. Dowd tells us she grew up working class, and reminds us that Obama did not - that his mother "got her Ph.D. in anthropology, studying the culture of Indonesia." Then she lights in, faulting Obama for appearing to be "observing the odd habits of the colorful locals" in Rocky country. Americans don't mind some elitism: "the great tradition of the millionaire who was cool enough to relate to the common man--like Cary Grant's C.K. Dexter Haven in 'The Philadelphia Story.'"
In others words, we admire the rich. "What turns off voters is the detached, egghead quality that they tend to equate with wimpiness, wordiness, and a lack of action--the same quality that got the professorial and superior Adlai Stevenson mocked by critics as Adelaide." Be rich and you are manly. Be intellectual? What a wuss.
Being an egghead is another professional identity the white working class distrusts. This is the chasm we need to bridge. How? Stay tuned.
Just because a white, working class democratic voter voted for Clinton in the primaries does not guarantee that they'll vote for McCain in November as you all but insinuate. Voting democratic in the Primary is a pretty good indicator that they'll vote Democratic in November too.
You're also more than insinuating that people who have less than a college education don't want a smart, educated person as president. That's pretty insulting to those voters to assume that they don't have enough sense to want a smart, well-educated person as president.
Most of the voters of whom you speak voted for Clinton over Obama because of one simple thing: Name recognition. They'll still vote Dem in the fall, including most of Appalachia (the remaining hardcore racists there excepted of course.)
As far as other professionals go, I feel that teachers for the most part deserve our admiration and could use some monetary compensation for what they are trying to accomplish. The problem is NCLBH and 2 months of standardized test preparation each year. In my little Midwestern community we have 15 or 20-year teachers making half of what I make. Teachers are living just above the poverty line. Doctors seem to be in such a time crunch because of the corporate healthcare business and are also constrained by insurance companies. Lawyers on the other hand….
I think perhaps now would be a good time for another New Deal. Our infrastructure is crumbling and we need real jobs. Alternative Energy incentives could also create real jobs.
If we create a sytem in which people have the freedom to build their own futures, they can and will do it. Take New Orleans for example. Why store people in sardine cans on wheels while contracts are handed out to builders, when you can put tools into the hands of people whose homes were destroyed, provide supervision, and they can rebuild their communities? That's what Habitat for Humanity is all about, and this concept has been promoted for years by the UN and World Bank. It works because it empowers people to solve their own problems.
Out in the real world, fear is the great motivator among this group, which tends, anyway, to vote in small numbers, compared to other demographics. Those who do vote, tend to vote on hot-button issues: abortion, gays and raising taxes, that last issue being inextricably tied to race, with the built-in implication that Democrats will raise their taxes, giving their hard-earned money to minorities, who are already, in their eyes, robbing "white" jobs through affirmative action programs. Republicans have successfully exploited these fears over and over to draw the white working class vote.
The Democrats, on the other hand, have failed to speak to their real issues, with most poverty-related agendas (education, health care) targeting minorities over whites. Much as I agree that the white working class tends to distrust higher educated "eggheads" I think the cure is in the poison: educate the white working class on what the Democrats plan to do for THEM. John Edwards' poverty tour will be a strong influence, as the Democrats spread light into the dark places conjured by the Republican propaganda for the past 30 years.
It's lost on most of these voters that the US government hands out corporate welfare hand over fist, going so far as to even subsidize corporations who outsource jobs to cheaper overseas labor at the expense of the working class. But bait them about welfare queens and they are fired up and ready to charge Washington with their pitchforks; forget the fact that the amounts are triffling in comparison.
Bottom line is that the GOP blows on the embers of their distrusts while at the same time undermines their best interests. A simplistic world view makes all this possible.
How does the opposition party overcome this? Short of a better education system, I have no idea.
However, I don't understand the logic in the way they think.
The most promising and fastest growing job market available to exurban communities is nursing, a profession that requires formal education and certification. The kinds of manufacturing jobs that will stay in America are mostly middle-class jobs, but the bottom half of the service sector can only sustain poor and near-poor standards of living. It's becoming more clear than it ever was that education is the key to breaking into the top half of the service sector where a middle-class lifestyle is affordable.
Obama can win the white working class by passionately explaining that the best way to ensure continued prosperity and competitiveness in the global economy is to reaffirm our commitment as a society to the idea that education is our fundamental engine of growth. He has to make the connection between education and the economy.
McCain doesn't really want to dwell on the economy in general, but I really doubt that he wants a debate on education. That's the sleeper issue in this election.
Frankly, I think we need a new discusion about economy; one that asks what is an economy, what is it for and who does it support. Jane Jacobs has defined economy as a system of survival, a system whereby we get a living. This view puts the individual and his/her community at the center of economy. Economies are local first, then expand outward to the global. Such a view allows the blue collar workman to be seen as the integral and necessary part of the economy that he is. In fact, it allows us all to be seen in that way. I would love to hear Obama or one of his surrogates ask that question and to start chipping away at the supplyside thinking elevated during the Reagan Administration.
If the *sshole doesn't exist the whole body fails.
The goal should be to value every part of our economy equally. In time this will lead to social equality.
It amazes me how the 'white working class' could admire rich people who may have stole, lied and cheated to get rich but hold in contempt professionals like doctors, lawyers and teachers who are just trying to help their fellow man and live a decent life.
I have never seen this dichotomy in the black community. My mother's biggest dream was that I obtain my college degree. I am working on my second master's degree.
By the way, I think you have your definition of "working class" wrong. The kinds of people you describe are not the working class. They are "daily survival class" people.
Quotes like
""I'd rather have common sense than an education" is a common saying among steelworkers in Trenton."
don't select for the working classes. They select for the stupid of the working class. A favorite quote from those people (I heard this in Germany a couple of times) is:
"I don't want my son (daughter) to be smarter than me. He (she) would lose respect for his (her) parents."
This has nothing to do with working for a living and everything to do with being a moron. You will never hear this from a Chinese or Indian parent.
And they are citizens of this country who deserve respect regardless of the lack of apparent wisdom in their comments. They also deserve to have their views heard and understood by the people who want to run their governement.
Everyone matters!