AROUND NEW HAMPSHIRE
1. Political Bits
Looking more and more like there will be a third, major Republican running in the First Congressional District.
NH Political Report, by Kevin Landrigan, nh1.com, November 20, 2015
Nothing public yet but we’re here to tell you - there will be a third, prominent Republican in the First Congressional District race in 2016.
It’s Rich Ashooh, who finished a respectable third in the 2010 primary that Frank Guinta won on the way to winning the seat for the first time.
Guinta got 32 percent in that race to 28 percent apiece for Sean Mahoney and Ashooh.
The Bedford Republican Ashooh has been meeting privately with longtime GOP activists and also collecting significant commitments of financial support.
Now, Ashooh already has a day job as the interim president of the University of New Hampshire School of Law in Concord.
Once, Ashooh publicly confirms that he’s in the hunt, he’ll have to step down. Don’t look for that to occur until next spring.
------------------------------
Before his opposition could turn it against her, Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-NH, decided to refund $43,100 to the donors of a questionable Turkish religious leader, Fetullah Gulen.
USA Today reported last month that the group had bankrolled more than 200 campaign junkets for members of their Congress and their staff.
The newspaper also talked to people who made large donations and found that they either were from very modest means or had no memory of giving any money.
Some of the 19 Turkish Americans donating to Ayotte on the same day seemed to know little about the one-term senator.
"He’s a good guy; he’s doing a good job so far," said one who gave the female Ayotte $2,000.
So in response to the inquiry, Ayotte’s campaign confirmed the senator was returning $43,100 of the donations and calling on other candidates to do the same.
"Out of an abundance of caution, the campaign has refunded the contributions in question," said Jon Kohan, Ayotte’s campaign manager.
The Democratic group, American Bridge, criticized Ayotte for getting $1.2 million in support from Americans for Prosperity and $2,500 from KOCH PAC, the super PAC founded by the Koch Brothers.
------------------------------
The special session proved to be a success for House Speaker Shawn Jasper and Rep. Dick Hinch, R-Merrimack, Jasper’s new majority leader.
This was the maiden voyage for Hinch who took over recently as the top Republican for Brookline GOP Rep. Jack Flanagan who stepped aside so he could further explore a Second Congressional District challenge of Democrat Annie Kuster.
Hinch led the negotiations with House Democrats that managed to get bipartisan support for the joint resolution to create a task force to study a legislative solution to the drug epidemic.
------------------------------
The left-leaning, League of Conservation Voters will examine the impacts climate change have on local wildlife.
The National Wildlife Federation segment will feature Pam Hunt with New Hampshire Audubon, Tim Moore Outdoors and Tom Ives with Trout Unlimited.
The event is Tuesday morning at New Hampshire Audubon.
------------------------------
Sen. Ayotte continues to promote issues that appeal to women voters.
Her latest, a bipartisan bill she introduced along with Democratic Senators Kristen Gillibrand of New York and Ed Markey of Massachusetts to provide targeted federal grants to bring more attention to postpartum depression.
Senate to provide targeted, federal funding to bringer greater attention to postpartum depression as well as support screening and treatment for maternal depression.
"Postpartum depression is treatable but unfortunately women struggling with this condition are often stigmatized, discouraging them from seeking treatment," Ayotte said in a statement.
"This should not be the case, and our bill will help bring greater awareness to this issue so that women can feel comfortable in coming forward to ask for help. Our bipartisan bill would also provide additional resources for the screening and treatment of pregnant women and new moms who need assistance, thereby improving the health of both the mother and her baby."
------------------------------
Guinta hosted a meeting Friday for local credit union executives to meet with the federal regulators that oversee them.
National Credit Union Association Chairman Debbie Matz attended the event.
“It was an opportunity for community lenders to voice their concern about an overreaching Washington agency, hurting small Granite State banks and economies,” Guinta said.
“We pressed Chairwoman Matz to stay true to her agency’s promised Year of Regulatory Relief. So far, results have been meager."
Guinta and others have been critical that the 2010 Dodd-Frank law lets the national regulators treat credit unions like big banks with far more resources.
------------------------------
Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
Once Gov. Maggie Hassan declared she was running for the US Senate, Republicans in the Legislature and on the Executive Council were bound to jump ugly with her on occasion.
And sure enough at the council table it’s been their rejection of public defender Dorothy Graham to one of six judgeship seats that Hassan brought to the council.
The past, 27 presidents of the New Hampshire Bar Association backed Graham as did the current and immediate past police chiefs from Manchester.
The Washington Free Beacon had done another hit piece on Hassan this one accusing the governor of nominating someone who had represented a child sex offender.
Councilor Chris Sununu had accused Hassan of trying to use "the bully pulpit" to ram through every nomination she wants.
------------------------------
The conservative Citizens for A Strong Conservative took out a full-page advertisement in the Union-Leader of New Hampshire calling on her to explain her position on closing t he Gitmo prison.
While there are currently over 100 dangerous individuals still at Gitmo, President Barack Obama vowed on Thursday to continue his push to close it despite delays. A review of possible U.S. sites for the prisoners is part of the plan the White House and Pentagon have been drafting for months, but it has been reported that facilities on the East Coast are being considered.
Governor Maggie Hassan told the New Hampshire Union Leader in an interview last month that "she would consider closing the Guantanamo Bay military prison," but she has not elaborated further on the issue since.
"If Governor Maggie Hassan truly supports closing Gitmo, it stands to reason that she also must have developed a position on what we should do with the more than one hundred dangerous detainees still being held there. It is beyond time for her fully convey that plan to Granite Staters,’’ said Derek Defresne, spokesman for Citizens for a Strong New Hampshire.
------------------------------
After several years of work, a longtime Republican activist has completed a new book on t he first-in-the-nation primary.
Granite Steps: Stumbles, Surprises, and Successes on the New Hampshire Primary Trail is a new history of the First-in-the-Nation primary focusing on the campaigns of 1992-2012.
Former Republican State Chairman Fergus Cullen said the book picks up where past primary historians Hugh Gregg and Charles Brereton left off: Bill Clinton's first campaign; George H.W. Bush's re-election struggle; Pat Buchanan's insurgent campaigns; George W. Bush's stumble; Al Gore and John Kerry as successful frontrunners; John McCain's two improbable victories; Mitt Romney's second chance; and the epic battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
"The premise is that the names and issues may change every four years, but the types of candidates stay the same: insurgent outsiders; frontrunners who stumble; frontrunners who prevail; incumbents who get in trouble; second chances; and water testers, also-rans, and drop-outs," Cullen explained.
------------------------------
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders didn’t get the national but he’ll take the state local of the Service Employees International Union backing his candidacy.
Sanders won the backing of Local Chapter 1984 which is the State Employees Association, the largest public employee union in the state.
Earlier this week, the national SEIU backed rival Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
“Bernie Sanders has a long history of fighting for working people,” said Richard Gulla, president of SEIU Local 1984. “He shares many of our members’ goals and values. He is not afraid to take on Wall Street and will fight against corporate greed and corruption. Bernie supports every worker earning a livable wage allowing them to care for and support their families.’’
------------------------------
He’s had a hard time getting traction in the Republican presidential race but ex-New York Gov. George Pataki got praise from campaign finance reform groups for backing tax incentives to encourage small donor political campaigns.
“We have lost control of the campaign process. One of the things I would do is … put in place a tax credit for up to $200 in contributions to presidential candidates to encourage small donations," a system practiced under President Reagan, Pataki said.
Pataki underscored the importance of small donor incentives "because that’s the people who should be electing the president, not somebody who could be writing a $30 million check to a Super PAC.”
The New Hampshire Rebellion praised Pataki for going on board with reform.
"Voters are disgusted by the amount of money flooding our elections from billionaires and special interests, and demand the presidential candidates commit to fix our broken campaign finance system," said Dan Weeks, director of the NH Rebellion. "We congratulate Gov. Pataki for taking a strong stand in support of public incentives to empower small donors instead of unaccountable Super PACs, and urge him and every other presidential candidate to support the full menu of good-government reforms."
------------------------------
Governor Hassan hasn’t come out in opposition to Northern Pass but continues to put up hurdles to it winning final approval.
The latest this week was her call for the Department of Energy to reschedule public hearings and to hold an additional hearing in northern Coos County.
"The siting of large-scale energy transmission can have implications for decades to come, and we must ensure a thorough and transparent review of proposed projects so that the most impacted communities have the opportunity to be heard," Hassan wrote.
"Rescheduling the December public hearings and including an additional public hearing in the northern part of the state will help ensure that all Granite Staters have an opportunity to attend and have their voices heard."
------------------------------
Quote of the Week:
"So we can all vote on something that makes us feel we all did something and we won’t have done a damn thing." – State Rep. Tammy Simmons, R-Manchester, speaks out against the task force on opioids that the Legislature approved in the special session this week.
2. Immigrants & NH's Economic Future
Economist: N.H. is growing well, but shortage of workers will become an increasing problem
by David Brooks, concordmonitor.com, November 21, 2015
Economist Dennis Delay grabbed the third rail of politics with both hands Friday during a presentation before the Greater Concord Chamber of Commerce, saying good economic times are coming our way but that extending them will require more immigration, including immigration from overseas.
Delay’s comments came in response to questions after he had presented projections that central New Hampshire will have a 9 percent growth in jobs through 2025, but will see a 6 percent decline in the workforce population during that same period, due to a shrinking supply of young people. The pattern is similar throughout New Hampshire.
One solution to what is sometimes called the “silver tsunami,” referring to the hair color of New Hampshire’s aging population, is to lure younger people from other states and other countries.
“We’re going to be better off if we let more people in,” said Delay. About 5 percent of New Hampshire is foreign-born, which Delay called “pretty low.”
As an example, Delay noted that parts of the Midwest are working harder to deal with their aging population.
“These areas are really trying to become more immigrant friendly. That’s something we should take more seriously in New Hampshire,” Delay said. “Immigrants are more likely to be of working age than the native population.”
Of course, there’s another solution he told the crowd: “You could create more children, and in 18 years you’d have a worker.”
The aging population is not affecting all of New Hampshire evenly, he added.
“If you’ve got a property that’s pretty close to the interstate, that’s a pretty hot market, but if you go two towns over, there’s nothing going on. That’s a very different pattern than what we saw in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s,” he said. “There’s a lot of desire to be very close to the major transportation networks.”
“There are a lot of smaller towns . . . that are starting to get very concerned about this pattern of growth, the fact that their population is getting older with the prices we have to pay for real estate. . . . Some are really starting to get concerned about who’s going to man the volunteer fire department,” he said.
In an interview after the session, Delay noted that immigration faces a problem of perception.
“Politicians have a fundamentally wrong idea of how the economy works. They think it’s like a fixed pie – if somebody takes a slice then there’s less for everybody else,” he said. “It’s actually like a book club, like a bowling league – the more people you have, the more there is for everybody.”
Delay’s talk was the centerpiece of the chamber’s annual Economic Forecast Luncheon, held at the Grappone Center before well over 100 people.
Much of his talk was upbeat, as he pointed to evidence that New Hampshire has fully recovered from the Great Recession and is heading into a period of growth, in part because the cost of energy, while high compared to the rest of the country, is less than it has been in recent years.
Construction of housing also looks set to take off, which Delay said is important because it’s the one major component of the state’s economy that has not recovered from the bad years of 2008 through 2011.
Delay said the most pressing need was for multi-family housing to meet the need for more rentals. The supply is so far behind demand that even during the recession, average rents in the state did not decline, which is startling when compared with house prices, which fell by 25 percent from 2004 through 2012, before starting to grow again.
The situation also looks better for workers, although not necessarily for bosses, because the low unemployment rate – 2.7 percent in Concord and 3.3 percent statewide – is likely to raise wages.
One interesting statistic Delay presented was the ratio of people who quit jobs to people who are forced to leave jobs, due to bankruptcies, layoffs or being fired. This year, half again as many quit a job as are forced to leave, whereas in the depths of the recession that ratio was roughly reversed.
AND NATIONALLY
3. Democrats and the White Working Class: Continuing Debate
Democrats and the White Working Class
by Martin Longman, washingtonmonthly.com, November 19, 2015
In the November/December 2015 issue of the Washington Monthly, our rising new star Nancy LeTourneau has a review of Stanley Greenberg’s new book: America Ascendant: A Revolutionary Nation’s Path to Addressing Its Deepest Problems and Leading the 21st Century. The book addresses a subject that Greenberg has tackled before, including here at the Monthly as recently as in ourJune/July/August issue.
Going back to his study of Macomb County, Michigan “Reagan Democrats” in the 1980’s, Greenberg has done research on what drives white working class voters’ behavior. He applied that research in the 1992 presidential campaign when he served as the official pollster in Bill Clinton’s War Room. His new research reveals that a surprising number of white working-class voters could potentially support the Democratic agenda, but won’t unless the Democrats convince them that they will reform the government that would carry that agenda out.
It’s a touchy subject. For many Democrats and progressives, the effort to woo working class white voters is a fool’s errand. When I recently wrote about seeing white working class angst (about opioids and Wall Street and campaign finance and our justice system) as an opportunity for the Democrats, some of the black commenters on my site showed some real skepticism. Here’s a typical response fromZandar:
Martin.
No. Fu*k this. I categorically reject this bullsh*t.
You know why? Here in Kentucky, a 92% white state, where the heroin and meth and painkiller epidemic has been wrecking the goddamn place for years, where the victims have overwhelmingly been working class white families, Democrats like Gov. Steve Beshear stepped up and said “Here is help. We have the money to help you and your families get healthy and stay healthy. We are going to invest in education and broadband and job training to help you, working-class white Kentucky.”
And working-class white Kentucky said “F*ck you, I ain’t takin’ no handout from no ni-CLANG! president. I’d rather die than take help from one-a them blacks that took our coal jobs.”
And last week they voted in Matt Bevin, who ran specifically on taking that help away from them. Jack Conway lost 80+ counties in Kentucky that voted for Steve Beshear in 2011. Every one of those counties got at least some help from Medicaid expansion and treatment anyway, and 400,000 people are going to lose that help now.
Matt Bevin ran on blaming Obama and unions and progressives and won by nearly 10 points.
And you’re telling me as a black Kentuckian, I have to come crawling to these racist country f*cksticks in order to save the country?
F*ck that, Martin. It’s not happening. And the more we try to “win back the working class white vote” the more we lose everyone else.
That’s real genuine frustration right there, from someone who isn’t naturally inclined to pull back their hand from a potential ally. There’s a feeling among many progressives, regardless of color, that with the spectacle of the Tea Party and Trumpism, there just isn’t any way to get through to white working class folks and we’re basically idiots if we keep attempting to do it.
But Greenberg’s research suggests otherwise. Remember, we don’t need to win a majority of the vote among white working class folks. We just have to avoid getting slaughtered. And we’ve learned from the hard experience of the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections, that the Democratic coalition of voters is not big enough to avoid catastrophic off-year defeats in federal, state, and local elections. Unless we’re satisfied with electing presidents who cannot get a Congress to work with, we need to do something different. Sufficiently boosting midterm turnout among our base seems like as much of a utopian idea as convincing an extra 5% of working class white voters that we’re on their side. Yet, we have to do one or the other, or at least a little of each.
Right?
Here’s what Nancy has to say about this:
If we are going to test Greenberg’s hypothesis about the possibility of growing the Democratic coalition by attracting more white working-class voters, it is imperative that we answer some questions that this recommendation raises.
First of all, it would be important to know whether white working-class voters think that no government programs work, or whether their concerns are limited to certain areas. We know from Greenberg’s focus groups that voters want politicians to protect Social Security and Medicare. Those two programs—which together make up over 35 percent of the federal budget—would therefore appear to be excluded from the category of “programs that don’t work.” The next biggest category of federal programs is defense, which comes in at 18 percent of the budget. When people talk about waste and abuse in government programs, however, they are often referring to the 11 percent that is spent on safety net programs. Of that amount, less than half (approximately 5 percent) is spent on benefits to the nonworking poor.
Going back to the post-civil rights 1970s, Republicans have attempted to fuel a divide between white working-class voters and African Americans by suggesting that government benefits were going primarily to the “undeserving poor,” i.e., those who had no work ethic. That message continues to this day when Republicans refer to Obama as the “food stamp president” and suggest that the Democrats are giving away free stuff to garner African American votes. To the extent that this is what fuels the mistrust that white working-class voters have for government, Democrats are unlikely to find a way to appeal to them.
To be clear, Greenberg acknowledges the racial component of this mistrust and is not suggesting that Democrats attempt to woo working-class voters in the Republican strongholds of the South and Mountain West. As he writes, “It is important to remember … that three-fourths of American voters live outside this GOP conservative heartland. In the rest of the country, the battle for the swing white working class and downscale voters is very much alive.” In other articles Greenberg has written on this topic, he has zeroed in on white working-class women in the East and Midwest.
But given that, it is important for Democrats to recognize that validating the concerns voters have when government programs don’t work for them is important, but insufficient. Democrats must provide voters with a message that they not only understand the problem but also have solutions. Otherwise we reinforce the Republican mantra that government is the problem, undermining our ability to implement the reform agenda Greenberg outlines.
Seems to me that between Zandar and Nancy, we’ve identified the challenges to implementing the strategy Greenberg recommends. I think the most important things to remember are that a) we don’t need to win over a majority of these voters, nor do we need to win over the hardest cases and the most hostile regions of the country, and b) that we don’t have much choice but to try since the alternative is to let the Republicans continue to dominate our Congress and state legislatures, and to have them commit unending acts of sabotage against our president and our economy.
4. The "What's the Matter with Kansas?" Problem
Who Turned My Blue State Red?
Why poor areas vote for politicians who want to slash the safety net
by Alec MacGillis, nytimes.com, November 20, 2015
IT is one of the central political puzzles of our time: Parts of the country that depend on the safety-net programs supported by Democrats are increasingly voting for Republicans who favor shredding that net.
In his successful bid for the Senate in 2010, the libertarian Rand Paulrailed against “intergenerational welfare” and said that “the culture of dependency on government destroys people’s spirits,” yet racked up winning margins in eastern Kentucky, a former Democratic stronghold that is heavily dependent on public benefits. Last year, Paul R. LePage, the fiercely anti-welfare Republican governor of Maine, was re-elected despite a highly erratic first term — with strong support in struggling towns where many rely on public assistance. And earlier this month, Kentucky elected as governor a conservative Republican who had vowed to largely undo the Medicaid expansion that had given the state the country’s largest decrease in the uninsured under Obamacare, with roughly one in 10 residents gaining coverage.
It’s enough to give Democrats the willies as they contemplate a map where the red keeps seeping outward, confining them to ever narrower redoubts of blue. The temptation for coastal liberals is to shake their heads over those godforsaken white-working-class provincials who are voting against their own interests.
But this reaction misses the complexity of the political dynamic that’s taken hold in these parts of the country. It misdiagnoses the Democratic Party’sgrowing conundrum with working-class white voters. And it also keeps us from fully grasping what’s going on in communities where conditions have deteriorated to the point where researchers have detected alarming trends in their mortality rates.
In eastern Kentucky and other former Democratic bastions that have swung Republican in the past several decades, the people who most rely on the safety-net programs secured by Democrats are, by and large, not voting against their own interests by electing Republicans. Rather, they are not voting, period. They have, as voting data, surveys and my own reporting suggest, become profoundly disconnected from the political process.
Disadvantaged and Disengaged
Here is how likely nonvoters, 57 percent of whom are white, compare with likely voters on finances and on their views of government and aid to the poor.
Surveys conducted Sept. 9 to Oct. 3, 2014, and Oct. 15-20, 2014. Comparisons are between those who were likely to vote in the 2014 election and those who were not.
Source: Pew Research Center
The people in these communities who are voting Republican in larger proportions are those who are a notch or two up the economic ladder — the sheriff’s deputy, the teacher, the highway worker, the motel clerk, the gas station owner and the coal miner. And their growing allegiance to the Republicans is, in part, a reaction against what they perceive, among those below them on the economic ladder, as a growing dependency on the safety net, the most visible manifestation of downward mobility in their declining towns.
These are voters like Pamela Dougherty, a 43-year-old nurse I encountered at a restaurant across from a Walmart in Marshalltown, Iowa, where she’d come to hear Rick Santorum, the conservative former Pennsylvania senator with a working-class pitch, just before the 2012 Iowa caucuses. In a lengthy conversation, Ms. Dougherty talked candidly about how she had benefited from government support. After having her first child as a teenager, marrying young and divorcing, Ms. Dougherty had faced bleak prospects. But she had gotten safety-net support — most crucially, taxpayer-funded tuition breaks to attend community college, where she’d earned her nursing degree.
She landed a steady job at a nearby dialysis center and remarried. But this didn’t make her a lasting supporter of safety-net programs like those that helped her. Instead, Ms. Dougherty had become a staunch opponent of them. She was reacting, she said, against the sense of entitlement she saw on display at the dialysis center. The federal government has for yearscovered kidney dialysis treatment in outpatient centers through Medicare, regardless of patients’ age, partly on the logic that treatment allows people with kidney disease to remain productive. But, Ms. Dougherty said, only a small fraction of the 54 people getting dialysis at her center had regular jobs.
“People waltz in when they want to,” she said, explaining that, in her opinion, there was too little asked of patients. There was nothing that said “‘You’re getting a great benefit here, why not put in a little bit yourself.’ ” At least when she got her tuition help, she said, she had to keep up her grades. “When you’re getting assistance, there should be hoops to jump through so that you’re paying a price for your behavior,” she said. “What’s wrong with that?”
Yes, citizens like Ms. Dougherty are at one level voting against their own economic self-interest, to the extent that the Republican approach on taxes is slanted more to the wealthy than that of the Democrats. This was the thesis of Thomas Frank’s 2004 best seller, “What’s the Matter With Kansas,” which argued that these voters had been distracted by social issues like guns and abortion. But on another level, these voters are consciously opting against a Democratic economic agenda that they see as bad for them and good for other people — specifically, those undeserving benefit-recipients in their midst.
I’ve heard variations on this theme all over the country: people railing against the guy across the street who is collecting disability payments but is well enough to go fishing, the families using their food assistance to indulge in steaks. In Pineville, W.Va., in the state’s deeply depressed southern end, I watched in 2013 as a discussion with Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat, quickly turned from gun control to the area’s reliance on government benefits, its high rate of opiate addiction, and whether people on assistance should be tested for drugs. Playing to the room, Senator Manchin declared, “If you’re on a public check, you should be subjected to a random check.”
IT’S much the same across the border in eastern Kentucky, which, like southern West Virginia, has been devastated by the collapse of the area’s coal industry. Eastern Kentucky now shows up on maps as the most benefit-dependent region in the country. The welfare reforms of the 1990s have made cash assistance hard to come by, but food-stamp use in the state rose to more than 18 percent of households in 2012 from under 10 percent in 2001.
With reliance on government benefits so prevalent, it creates constant moments of friction, on very intimate terms, said Jim Cauley, a Democratic political consultant from Pike County, a former Democratic bastion in eastern Kentucky that has flipped Republican in the past decade. “There are a lot of people on the draw,” he said. Where opposition to the social safety net has long been fed by the specter of undeserving inner-city African-Americans — think of Ronald Reagan’s notorious “welfare queen” — in places like Pike County it’s fueled, more and more, by people’s resentment over rising dependency they see among their own neighbors, even their own families. “It’s Cousin Bobby — ‘he’s on Oxy and he’s on the draw and we’re paying for him,’ ” Mr. Cauley said. “If you need help, no one begrudges you taking the program — they’re good-hearted people. It’s when you’re able-bodied and making choices not to be able-bodied.” The political upshot is plain, Mr. Cauley added. “It’s not the people on the draw that’s voting against” the Democrats, he said. “It’s everyone else.”
This month, Pike County went 55 percent for the Republican candidate for governor, Matt Bevin. That’s the opposite of how the county voted a dozen years ago. In that election, Kentucky still sent a Republican to the governor’s mansion — but Pike County went for the Democratic candidate. And 30 percent fewer people voted in the county this month than did in 2003 — 11,223 voters in a county of 63,000, far below the county’s tally offood-stamp recipients, which was more than 17,000 in 2012.
In Maine, Mr. LePage was elected governor in 2010 by running on an anti-welfare platform in a state that has also grown more reliant on public programs — in 2013, the state ranked third in the nation for food-stamp use, just ahead of Kentucky. Mr. LePage, who grew up poor in a large family, has gone at safety-net programs with a vengeance. He slashed welfare rolls by more than half after imposing a five-year limit,reinstituted a work requirement for food-stamp recipients and refused to expand Medicaid under Obamacare to cover 60,000 people. He is now seeking to bar anyone with more than $5,000 in certain assets from receiving food stamps. “I’m not going to help anybody just for the sake of helping,” the governor said in September. “I am not that compassionate.”
His crusade has resonated with many in the state, who re-elected him last year.
THAT pattern is right in line with surveys, which show a decades-long decline in support for redistributive policies and an increase in conservatism in the electorate even as inequality worsens. There has been aparticularly sharp drop in support for redistribution among older Americans, who perhaps see it as a threat to their own Social Security and Medicare. Meanwhile, researchers such as Kathryn Edin, of Johns Hopkins University, found a tendency by many Americans in the second lowest quintile of the income ladder — the working or lower-middle class — to dissociate themselves from those at the bottom, where many once resided. “There’s this virulent social distancing — suddenly, you’re a worker and anyone who is not a worker is a bad person,” said Professor Edin. “They’re playing to the middle fifth and saying, ‘I’m not those people.’ ”
Meanwhile, many people who in fact most use and need social benefits are simply not voting at all. Voter participation is low among the poorest Americans, and in many parts of the country that have moved red, the rates have fallen off the charts. West Virginia ranked 50th for turnout in 2012; also in the bottom 10 were other states that have shifted sharply red in recent years, including Kentucky, Arkansas and Tennessee.
In the spring of 2012, I visited a free weekend medical and dental clinic run by the organization Remote Area Medical in the foothills of southern Tennessee. I wanted to ask the hundreds of uninsured people flocking to the clinic what they thought of President Obama and the Affordable Care Act, whose fate was about to be decided by the Supreme Court. I was expecting a “What’s the Matter With Kansas” reaction — anger at the president who had signed the law geared to help them. Instead, I found sympathy for Mr. Obama. But had they voted for him? Of course not — almost no one I spoke with voted, in local, state or national elections. Not only that, but they had barely heard of the health care law.
This political disconnect among lower-income Americans has huge ramifications — polls find nonvoters are far more likely to favor spending on the poor and on government services than are voters, and the gap grows even larger among poor nonvoters. In the early 1990s, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky freely cited the desirability of having a more select electorate when he opposed an effort to expand voter registration. And this fall, Scott Jennings, a longtime McConnell adviser, reportedly said low turnout by poor Kentuckians explained why the state’s Obamacare gains wouldn’t help Democrats. “I remember being in the room when Jennings was asked whether or not Republicans were afraid of the electoral consequences of displacing 400,000-500,000 people who have insurance,” State Auditor Adam Edelen, a Democrat who lost his re-election bid this year, told Joe Sonka, a Louisville journalist. “And he simply said, ‘People on Medicaid don’t vote.’ ”
Republicans would argue that the shift in their direction among voters slightly higher up the ladder is the natural progression of things — people recognize that government programs are prolonging the economic doldrums and that Republicans have a better economic program.
So where does this leave Democrats and anyone seeking to expand and build lasting support for safety-net programs such as Obamacare?
For starters, it means redoubling efforts to mobilize the people who benefit from the programs. This is no easy task with the rural poor, who are much more geographically scattered than their urban counterparts. Not helping matters in this regard is the decline of local institutions like labor unions — while the United Mine Workers of America once drove turnout in coal country, today there is not a single unionized mine still operating in Kentucky.
But it also means reckoning with the other half of the dynamic — finding ways to reduce the resentment that those slightly higher on the income ladder feel toward dependency in their midst. One way to do this is to make sure the programs are as tightly administered as possible. Instances of fraud and abuse are far rarer than welfare opponents would have one believe, but it only takes a few glaring instances to create a lasting impression. Ms. Edin, the Hopkins researcher, suggests going further and making it easier for those collecting disability to do part-time work over the table, not just to make them seem less shiftless in the eyes of their neighbors, but to reduce the recipients’ own sense of social isolation.
The best way to reduce resentment, though, would be to bring about true economic growth in the areas where the use of government benefits is on the rise, the sort of improvement that is now belatedly being discussed for coal country, including on the presidential campaign trail. If fewer people need the safety net to get by, the stigma will fade, and low-income citizens will be more likely to re-engage in their communities — not least by turning out to vote.
5. Wolf in Loon's Clothing
Ben Carson, the Most Dangerous Candidate in America
by Steve Nelson, vnews.com, November 15, 2015
Dr. Ben Carson is the most dangerous man in politics. I’m not alluding to the facets of Carson’s campaign that seem most alarming.
And there are many such facets.
Carson is a climate change denier. He is an anti-evolution religious zealot. He has absolutely no political experience. He has compared Obamacare and abortion to slavery. He believes the great pyramids were grain silos. He thinks a Muslim should not be allowed to be president. He believes that prison makes people gay.
His campaign is based almost entirely on his apparently embellished rags-to-riches tale. He has the distinctive sociopathic characteristic of lying without a hint of self-consciousness. On last Sunday morning’s Face The Nationnews program, Carson appeared on a split screen — one side showing a prior interview during which he stated that he was offered a full scholarship to attend West Point. On the live screen he claimed that he never said he was offered a full scholarship to attend West Point. He didn’t even blink.
He is surely the only presidential candidate in history to boast of having attacked his mother with a hammer. When the story was questioned, he angrily denounced the “liberal media” for doubting that he attempted matricide.
As I scan back over this very partial summary of Carson’s presidential “qualifications,” I shudder to think that 25 to 30 percent of Republican primary voters believe he is the best candidate. But those things may not be what make him most dangerous.
The greatest danger is that Carson is a black man conservatives can love. An MSNBC analyst suggested that Carson, if nominated, might win as much as 25 percent of the black vote. Barack Obama received 95 percent of the black vote in 2008 and 93 percent in 2012. Al Gore and John Kerry received 90 percent and 88 percent respectively in 2000 and 2004. These statistics reveal the real challenge Carson might represent to the Democratic nominee.
Carson’s popularity among white and black conservatives is a dire threat to racial and social justice. Like Clarence Thomas and other black conservatives, Carson advances the myth that we live in a post-racist society. Aside from embellishments, his genuine rise from poverty to prestige is precisely the kind of narrative that keeps the foot of oppression on the necks of black men and women. His “up by the bootstraps” story is the very rare exception that allows conservatives to deny the rule. If he made it, anyone can. Carson is like a shipwreck’s lone survivor who is used to argue that the shoals of injustice don’t exist.
This presents a complex dilemma for the political opposition. Donald Trump trots out “political correctness” whenever diversity or racism is mentioned, but at least we can identify the source: a rich, white, clueless boor who insults everyone. When Carson calls anti-racist work “political correctness,” how might one challenge him? Who knows the black experience better than a black man raised in poverty? When smug white intellectuals argue that affirmative action is reverse racism, we can challenge them to consider how their own white privilege might have stunted their capacity for empathy. When Carson says black folks are playing the “victim card,” what can be said?
To some extent, Carson’s presence in the GOP campaign inoculates the entire party against accusations of ignoring racial and social injustice. It is the political equivalent of “some of my best friends are black” played out on a grand scale.
I suspect that much flows from his title and resume: Dr. Ben Carson, celebrated neurosurgeon. Unlike Barack Obama, who was roundly dismissed as a “community organizer” and has been subjected to vile explicit and implicit racist taunts, Carson is beyond reproach because physicians are de facto smart. This stature has skewed his sense of the world around him. Even in the down and dirty world of politics, commentators are careful to introduce him as “Dr. Carson.” He is granted a degree of automatic deference.
If Carson were neither black nor a physician, his candidacy would be a joke. Even among the pandering, far right, buffoonish collection of GOP candidates, his inexperience and irrationality would be glaring disqualifications.
In 1963, shortly after Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail, the more radical Malcolm X warned about black men whose stature within the white community afforded them a level of privilege, a phenomenon going all the way back to slavery. Such a man, he said, “doesn’t identify himself with your plight whatsoever,” and slows progress toward racial justice.
Fifty-two years later, such a man may stand at the threshold of the White House.
FINALLY
No comments:
Post a Comment