Just to Elaborate on the “Clinton Didn’t Connect with Working-Class Americans” Thing . . .

Part 1 of 2, and this will be relatively short:

Post-election, a meme quickly sprang up saying Hillary Clinton lost because she did not have a strong, clear message for America’s working class. The subtext was, “We told you so! You should have nominated Bernie!” Bernie himself said:

“The working class of this country is being decimated — that’s why Donald Trump won,” Sanders said. “And what we need now are candidates who stand with those working people, who understand that real median family income has gone down.”

Responding to an audience member who asked how she could become the second Latina U.S. Senator, he went on to say:

“I have to know whether that Latina is going to stand up with the working class of this country and is going to take on big money interests. It is not good enough for somebody to say, I’m a woman, vote for me. No, that’s not good enough. What we need is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industry.

“In other words, one of the struggles that you’re going to be seeing in the Democratic Party is whether we go beyond identity politics. I think it’s a step forward in America if you have an African-American CEO of some major corporation. But you know what, if that guy is going to be shipping jobs out of this country, and exploiting his workers, it doesn’t mean a whole hell of a lot whether he’s black or white or Latino.”

That middle quote was pretty clearly a shot at Clinton, and, to my mind, a cheap one.

Now, as I will point out in Part 2, Donald Trump did not win “because the working class of this country is being decimated.” I will also say I agree that Dems in general need to be more direct and clear about how they’re going to help average Americans. But the lack of that message isn’t why Clinton lost the electoral vote. There were other reasons.

Here, I will remind readers that Hillary Clinton won more than 2 million more votes than Donald Trump and may well end up receiving one of the highest popular vote totals in history. So it’s not like he mopped the floor with her. True, the distribution of those votes did not put her over 270, so, in practical terms, unless the Electoral College does something truly historic, it’s not going to matter. But it should matter in terms of how we view these results and how we plan for future elections. I would also note that two of the states she lost were narrow losses: Michigan by something like 10,000 votes and Wisconsin about just over 22,000, though there’s a recount apparently happening. Pennsylvania was a more lopsided loss.

It should not go unnoticed that Hillary Clinton also won a majority of voters with incomes under $50,000 a year. There’s a growing body of evidence, in fact, that education and race, not income or income inequality, were major drivers of Trump voters. Check Nate Silver, for example. What I still have to figure out is why minority turnout, especially Hispanics, wasn’t stronger for Clinton.

As far as “identity politics,” since I worked for him, I know Berne’s basically a 30s socialist/progressive, for whom everything pretty much reduces to class. I’m familiar with that thinking; I’ve read Marx and Marcuse and the others. But I also know it’s wrong. Ask Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. if his class protected him from being arrested by a white Cambridge police officer. Class doesn’t explain how women and minorities make less money than white males. Class doesn’t explain why union members would vote for an anti-union candidate for president. Class didn’t have anything to do with a 62-year-old white man gunning down a 15-year-old black man and referring to him as “another piece of trash.”

I would add that one of the weaknesses of Sanders’ own campaign was a lack of effective outreach to minorities. Cornel West, speaking to the NY Times for a piece that appeared in April:

“Cornel West, one of Mr. Sanders’s most visible African-American surrogates, said that he thought that Mr. Sanders could win the nomination but that the senator should have fought to be “well-known quicker and much earlier” among voters, especially blacks.”

People sometimes vote their race (you don’t think Trump wasn’t whipping up “identity politics”?) and their gender, and we have to account for that.

I think, as he often does, The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein has a thoughtful piece we should read carefully. Clinton’s electoral vote loss may have a lot more to do with faulty campaign mechanics than any messages she may or may not have sent. Tara Golshan, on VOX, has has her own piece on how Clinton might have been undone by lousy information. Ponder all this before jumping on the class warfare wagon.

Later,

For All Y’all Who Think Clinton’s to Blame Because She Didn’t Connect w/the Working Class . . .

The Guardian reported that, of the one in three Americans who earn less than $50,000 a year, a majority voted for Clinton. A majority of those who earn more backed Trump.

And check out The New York Times’ exit polling interactive graphic showing Clinton won 53 percent of voters with incomes under $30,000 and 51 percent of voters with incomes between #30,000 and $49,999. Not a big win, but she had the majority.

I’ll have more on this.

Later,

A Peaceful and Happy Thanksgiving Wish . . .

And, thanks, Arlo!

later,

Thoughts from One of Our Greatest Presidents:

Wonder who Booth would have voted for?

Later,

Did Somebody Say, “Rude”?

So Donald Trump deftly deflects attention to his $25 million settlement of the Trump U fraud suit by going on social media demanding an apology from the cast of “Hamilton” for having rude temerity to read a statement to Mike Pence after a performance:

“We have a message for you, sir. We hope that you will hear us out. Vice President-elect Pence, we welcome you, and we truly thank you for joining us here at Hamilton: An American Musical. We really do. We, sir, we are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir. But we truly hope this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us, all of us. We truly thank you for sharing this show — this wonderful American story told by a diverse group of men, women, of different colors, creeds, and orientations.”

Now, considering all the racist bile thrown at the Obama family over the last 8 years, including the recent reference to the First Lady as “an ape in heels,” and considering the obnoxious and offensive emanations from Trump’s own mouth about women, Muslims, Mexicans, and people with disabilities, oh please . . .

Later,

A Shout-Out To (and From) the Cast of “Hamilton”

We need art to be brave and tell the truth:

http://www.ew.com/article/2016/11/18/hamilton-mike-pence-booed-broadway-musical

Later,

I Don’t Cry Very Often, but Kate McKinnon Did It to Me

Later,

Will History Repeat Nov. 8th?

Nov. 7th is the 100th anniversary of Jeannette Rankin’s being elected to the House of Representatives, the first woman to win federal office, several years before women could even vote.

Tomorrow, we may reach another milestone.

Later,

Now Matter What the Outcome of the Election, THIS is a Big Deal

It is a picture of America’s future..

God Bless you folks.

Later,

Racism is Out in the Open

To me, it’s painfully ironic that this eve-of-the-election weekend is also the opening weekend for “Loving,” a film about Mildred and Richard Loving, a Virginia couple who, in 1958, were dragged out of their bed, arrested, and sentenced to a year in prison. Their crime? They got married. However, Richard was white and Mildred black, and that was against the laws of the not-so-long-ago day when women and men of different races were, in some states, forbidden to do so.

The actual charge: “cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth.”

Their sentence was suspended on the condition they leave Virginia. They eventually took the case to the Supreme Court, where, in a unanimous decision, the justices struck down Virginia’s law. (We’ll let the point about the heavy hand of the state interfering with people’s private lives pass for the moment.) In his opinion, Chief Justice Warren specifically noted that laws like Virginia’s were obviously “designed to maintain White Supremacy.”

Despite the Court’s ruling, laws forbidding interracial marriage remained on the books for decades. Alabama was the last state to purge this racist concept from its state constitution . . . in 2000.

Irony is a term to describe an event that presents the opposite of what one might normally expect, and that is in full flower this year. The Loving’s case represented a triumph of love over hate, hate that was institutionalized in law. I happened to think that, in the 49 years since that decision was handed down, my country might have made more progress against hatred, and I say this as a man who grew up in the midst of it and who was not completely immune to it in his early years. See this post from March of last year if you want more details.

This election has proven me wrong. I certainly was not so naive as to think we’d banished racism, bigotry, misogyny, and other forms of hate, but I really did believe they were no longer the norm, and surely a national political campaign could not be driven by them, at least not obviously. But this election, more than any other I’ve seen, at least since 1968, is driven by hate, and by racism.

Donald Trump’s campaign began with a racist message, couched in anti-immigration language. All the familiar elements were there, including his claim that Mexico’s government was sending “rapists” and other criminals to the U.S. It’s a stock racist technique to emphasize rape, with the clear implication that brown or black men are going to force themselves on white women. He was still at it more recently, with the fear-mongering claim that Hillary Clinton was going to bring 600,000 Syrians into the Land of the Free.

In this, Trump is really only practicing a louder, coarser, and more obvious example of a core Republican strategy going back decades. As a young Republican in the late 60s, I vividly recall Nixon’s Southern Strategy (a direct appeal to white racists, in an attempt to blunt George Wallace’s appeal across the South). Then there was Reagan’s first campaign stop, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three young Civil Rights workers were murdered in 1964, and declaring his belief in “states’ rights.” And who can forget Bush the Elder’s Willie Horton ad? The Younger Bush’s administration made suppression of minority voters, in the name of stopping non-existent vote fraud, a priority, and a Republican-dominated Supreme Court gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Trump himself called for his supporters to watch polling places for fraud, by which he meant they should do whatever they could to intimidate minority voters. A federal just just slapped him down for that.

What was particularly horrifying to me was the gleeful sense of relief expressed by millions of Americans that their racism could now be voiced openly, encouraged by their candidate. “He says what we’ve all been thinking,” or words to that effect, marked many news stories on the subject of Trump’s appeal.

That hatred took another form, aimed at Hillary Clinton herself. I saw a recent poll that reported 51 percent of Trump voters surveyed were voting against Clinton, and the rhetoric, in the Trump campaign and among his supporters, has been far beyond mere criticism or disagreement with her policies. It’s been ugly, misogynist, and violent. There are threats on her life. So millions of Americans are willing to put a race-baiting, bigoted, lying sexual predator into the Oval Office to satisfy their hatred.

And they may well succeed.

I had this uncle who paid for a genealogical study of my family and found that we had a motto: finem respice, Latin for “consider the end.” By that, it means, think of the consequences of your actions.

The consequences, in this case, should be terrifying. There is already more than enough hate-spawned violence abroad in the land. Consider how that escalates if the president of the United States encourages it. If you are African-American, Hispanic, Muslim, or gay, Trump is working people who hate you and may commit violence against you into a froth. Now that it’s out in the open, after January 20th, it may be open season on you.

Later,