Winning the Working Class Vote

Democratic primaries in Kentucky and West Virginia have pundits punditing that Barack Obama can’t win the working class vote. But that’s when his opponent is Hillary Clinton. What if he’s taking on John McCain?

The Charleston Gazette tells about a “preposterous statement” McCain made when he traveled to one of the poorest areas of east Kentucky in April. Standing where Lyndon Johnson announced the War on Poverty in 1964, McCain declared poverty programs “do not work.” That surprised the people of Martin County where between 1969 and 1979 the poverty rate dropped from 56% to less than 25%.

The Gazette also noted that on the day McCain was in Kentucky, he said he opposed a Senate bill to give equal pay to women.

It’s clear that if elected McCain will continue the economic policies of George W. Bush, with more tax breaks for the wealthy and the back of his hand to everyone else. His tax cutting proposals for corporations would cost about $400 billion a year. To make up for the lost revenue, he plans to reduce the growth of Medicare.

This is McSame, staying the course.

When Bush took office in 2001, budget surpluses of $5.6 trillion were projected over the coming decade. Stan Collender, author of The Guide to the Federal Budget, writes that Bush pledged “to eliminate the national debt by the end of the decade because that’s what Bill Clinton did as his term was ending. The new Bush administration had to look at least as fiscally conservative as the Democratic White House it was succeeding.”

What we got instead was a misguided, unnecessary, never-ending war in Iraq sucking money out of every other government need. After Bush leaves office the debt held by the public will be close to $6 trillion, an 80% increase over what it was when he first became president.

Collender notes that the biggest problem will be that the federal government will be committed to paying about $200 billion a year in interest on the debt!

That’s money that would have been available to help fund Medicare, repair our crumbling infrastructure and create jobs that working people so desperately need.

So much for McCain winning the working class vote in November.

Can't Anybody Here Play this Game?

Our hearts go out to the distraught Republican leadership after losing three in a row special elections that were held in GOP strongholds. How the mighty have fallen. It wasn’t too long ago that Karl Rove was crowing about a permanent Republican majority. In the ashes of recent losses, their elderly statesmen compare the party label to dog food that people won’t buy.

Just how bad is the GOP image? Party pollster Fran Luntz tells the Weekly Standard: “It used to be that Republicans won on economic and values and foreign policy issues. Democrats won on quality of life. Now Democrats are winning on everything.”

The Democratic primaries are generating millions of new voters while a stream of defectors cause more anguish for the GOP. Not since 1932 has the party been in such trouble.

What to do? In a fit of desperation, party leaders put their battered heads together and came up with a new slogan, fittingly copied from a drug maker’s anti-depressant pill. That probably won’t do the trick.

I feel so badly for these poor folks that I have a suggestion that might help. Why don’t they play on voters’ compassion? When I see the mighty reduced to rubble this way, I think of how Casey Stengel went from the all-winning New York Yankees to manager of the deplorable New York Mets. As terrible as the expansion Mets were, fans packed the old Polo Grounds to see them play. Thanks to the way Casey presented his team to the media, the Mets won the hearts of New York and were heralded everywhere as “lovable losers”.

Pay attention, John Boehner, here’s how Casey did it:

First, you’ve got a Presidential nominee who is the oldest in our history and while Democrats will be too polite to draw voter attention to it voters are sure to notice. Shortly after Casey Stengel led the New York Yankees to five straight World Series titles, he was fired because he was believed to be too old to manage. When he came out of retirement to manage the Mets, he made light of his age: “It’s a great honor to be joining the Knickerbockers”, a New York baseball team that last played around the time of the Civil War.

After losing Denny Hastert’s seat and should-be “locks” in Louisiana and Mississippi, GOP brass put the blame on “bad” candidates. That’s not how Casey would have explained it. Here is his positive spin: “I’ve been in this game a hundred years, but I see new ways to lose I never knew existed before.” As for “bad” candidates, Casey told reporters about two of his rookies: “See that fellow over there? He’s 20 years old. In 10 years he has a chance to be a star. Now, that fellow over there, he’s 20 too. In 10 years he has a chance to be 30.”

Ready for the Fall

The greatest myth perpetrated this election cycle is that the nasty, bitter Democratic presidential campaign will leave the party divided this fall. Sure, supporters of the losing candidate will be angry and disappointed and may sulk a bit, but any notion they will go for Sen. John McCain in November is Republican fantasyland.

When the Democrats leave Denver in August, their presidential nominee will have a double-digit lead and the “battle” over lapel pins and Bosnian snipers won’t even be a blip on the voter radar honed in on Iraq, the economy and eight years of Republicans Gone Wild.

No matter how many times McCain says “my friends,” he will have few of them among general election voters when they give unbridled attention to his position on issues they care about.

Soaring gas prices, stagnant wages and the housing collapse have our economy in tatters, and McCain concedes this isn’t his strong suit even though “I’ve got Greenspan’s book.” Our failing economy is one of the casualties of the Iraq War that McCain continues to strongly support. At long last, the media are beginning to ask some hard questions about the cost of the war.

Ron Brownstein of National Journal poses this question for McCain: “If the war really is crucial to America’s security, shouldn’t today’s taxpayers finance it?” As has been pointed out numerous times, Iraq is the first major war that this country has fought by transferring the entire cost to future generations through government debt. President
Bush never proposed raising taxes to pay for the war. Worse, in 2003 he substantially cut taxes, unprecedented in war time.

Expect more of the same from a McCain administration. McCain has already endorsed tax cuts that would cost more than $300 billion a year, including reduction of the corporate income tax from 34% to 25%. And, of course, he wants to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, another $110 billion.

A constant worry to families across America is our deteriorating health care system where rising costs leave nearly 50 million with no insurance coverage and millions more underinsured. The current system cherry-picks the healthy and tells those with chronic diseases to get lost. When a journalist asked if the Senator’s skin cancer might make him sympathetic to the idea of requiring that insurance companies offer policies to those with such conditions, McCain responded: ‘That would be mandating what the free enterprise system does.” (He is referring of course to a system that does indeed allow insurance companies to choose the healthiest people and refuse coverage to those who are sick.)

McCain told the Boston Globe he would give people with preexisting conditions “an extra tax credit” to help pay for insurance funded by savings in the Medicaid program. The Columbia Journalism Review made this observation: Where does McCain think the Medicaid savings will come from? Does he mean cutting benefits to poor people who depend on Medicaid for health care? Or from middle-class families who rely on Medicaid to pay for nursing home care?

Real issues like these keep people awake at night, and only the Democrats offer real solutions. I think I’m really going to enjoy the fall campaign.