My father, who worked in a western Pennsylvania steel mill for more than 40 years (he died this past spring at 75) was a faithful Steeler fan. But that also meant a highly critical one, and when former head coach Chuck Noll – who had guided the Steelers to 4 superbowls in six years – began to struggle his last few seasons, I can remember my dad’s booming voice echoing out of the TV room every Sunday: ‘Fire him. Football’s passed him by.’ No sympathy for the 23 years Noll put in as head coach or his legendary 4 Superbowl rings, just middle class instinct that Noll was now in over his head, made all the more plausible by a dismal 7-9 record.
I couldn’t help thinking of my dad’s appraisal when watching GW try to slither back out of the doghouse Thursday night, his inner dialogue percolating under forced sobriety - “Jeezus Karl, I hope this f***in’ works,’ - while uttering un-Bush-like platitudes like: ‘Let us all restore what we have cherished from yesterday, and let us rise above the legacy of inequality.’
Maybe even Dubya has realized Rove and company are not only off their game, but have their plum-tuckered presidential spokesmodel reading from an entirely different playbook now. If you closed your eyes you could have sworn it was Bill Clinton or maybe even LBJ giving that speech.
You know ‘football has passed them by’ when they’re so obviously rattled as to who they have to ‘con’ now to get Bush’s dismal approval numbers back up. Is it his base, who according to most polling is coming up about 15-20% short these days and ain’t too crazy about giving all that Federalis cash to people who aren’t going to vote Republican anyway. Is it independents, who always had a shaky, as-long-as-you-protect-our-butts-we’re-with-you secret handshake going (we know that’s out the window with Katrina). Is it the more passive American bystanders who Nixon famously called ‘the silent majority,’ also referred to as the forgotten middleclass (or in post-Katrina vernacular those who prefer to lie low until it’s their shit floating in 20 feet of water). We’re getting closer.
The loudest wake-up call may be coming from what economists call the paycheck-to-paycheck’ sector of our society. Those people whose personal savings are non-existent, and live in a state of silent dread that if they lose their job or - Karl are you listening – become victim to some catastrophic illness or calamity, they too, will end up like the hundreds of thousands Katrina evacuees now shipwrecked with no place to call home.
The politics of self preservation – the one tenet Bushies exploited like no other - is indeed a powerful force, especially when it turns on a government who wielded it like a 50 megaton Taser. When paycheck-to-paycheckers watched in disbelief as Katrina made keystone cops out of the same Federal government who promised – for four years running – we got your back – you could make a bet the game was over! When they saw disabled Grandmothers being floated in cardboard boxes – or read about scores of citizens left to die in an abandoned hospital, not accounted for until days later – they realized in the most visceral way possible that – No – you don’t have our backs – and you just lost our hearts and minds too.
There was never any doubt prior to Katrina that, statistically, the paycheck-to-paycheck sector were the truly forgotten middle class, much poorer than 40 years ago, and according to a recent AC Nielsen survey, ranked a sorry #1 in the industrialized world when it comes to not having enough money left over after covering essential living expenses. 28% of Americans now claim to be living paycheck to paycheck, in worse shape than economic fiefdoms like Portugal (24%), and Brazil (23%), with an astounding 42% of Americans now making less than $25,000 a year. Most in that pay-grid (a favorite Cheney term, not mine) don’t have insurance or are woefully under-insured (new meaning has been given to that term by insurance carriers refusing ‘flood’ claims as separate, non-covered events in their hurricane policies) and a recent USA Today/Harvard School of Public Health survey revealed that 62% of Americans who consider themselves ‘struggling’ to pay medical bills are doing so despite having health coverage.
Ignored by the Bush administration (and the Reagan and Bush juggernauts before Dubya) you better believe this sector is now angry and on the hunt for someone to blame. It was the great HL Mencken who said ‘criticism is prejudice mad plausible.’ Bush may get a bump in the numbers from miming LBJ, but he’ll never again regain the full trust of the millions of Amercians scraping by for a living. Because there’s no image more ‘plausible’ in the American landscape now than the thought it could be ‘my Grandma’ who gets shipwrecked next.