There is a thread in DKOS about coal and jobs. In it someone referenced an e-mail the Mahoning County Democratic Chairman sent to the Clinton campaign.
It was prophetic:
More than two decades after its enactment, NAFTA remains a red flag for area voters who rightly or wrongly blame trade for the devastating job losses that took place at Packard Electric, GM, GE, numerous steel companies, as well as the firms that supplied those major employers,” Betras, a practicing attorney, tried to explain to the Clinton high command. “Thousands of workers in Ohio … continue to qualify for Trade Readjustment Act assistance because their jobs are being shipped overseas..
Youngstown is the county seat of Mahoning County, which is home to about 232,000 people. The population was more 300,000 in the 1970s, but then the steel mills closed and the area has never really recovered. Obama won the county by 28 points in 2012, a larger margin than he had won it by in 2008. Clinton wound up carrying Mahoning by just three points. That is largely thanks to a sizable African American population. She lost neighboring counties that had not gone Republican since 1972. Even amidst his 1984 landslide, Ronald Reagan lost Mahoning by 18 points.
Everyone thinks that this is a white rural problem. But Mahoning is not rural, as MaComb in Michigan is not.
When you see shifts this large you know something very big is going on.
One part of the article struck me:
We weren’t offering them anything for their souls. When people are thirsty, they’ll drink dirty water. When people are hungry, they’ll eat bad food to get sustenance…
The messages can’t be about `job retraining.’ These folks have heard it a million times and, frankly, they think it’s complete and total bulls**t,” he continued. “Talk about policies that will incentivize companies to repatriate manufacturing jobs. Talk about infrastructure … The workers we’re talking about don’t want to run computers; they want to run back hoes, dig ditches (and) sling concrete block. … Somewhere along the line we forgot that not everyone wants to be white collar.”
There is a good amount of irony in Betras’s e-mail. Clinton had a $30 Billion plan to compensate the coal minors. There were policies she was for that were exactly that. On the last night in Iowa I heard her talk about a small manufacturing plant that had opened outside of Des Moines.
The article quotes a “senior aide” as defending the Clinton campaign:
“But no one took Youngstown for granted. No one didn’t think it was important. … It’s more of the fact that we were unable to tap into economic anxiety (nationally) than that we were not paying attention.
We thought we were going to be able to peel off more suburban Republicans who were going to be so influenced by Trump’s divisiveness. And then we thought the working class would come home,” an adviser explained, “when they heard that Clinton supported the auto bailout and Trump opposed it, when we hammered him for using Chinese steel in his construction projects and when we highlighted how workers in the building trades had been stiffed after working on Trump’s projects. … We weren’t able to accomplish either one.”
I have made the point elsewhere that these policies were never in her advertising, and there is some polling to suggest this failure to connect was decisive. In any event I never really believed the policies where much more than the best intentions of people who really didn’t understand the urgency of the problem.
It is more than possible, probable even, that there was really there was very little Clinton could do about this. Clinton was trapped: she could not move very far away from Obama (who was popular) and as a result was left defending the status quo. But Obama’s popularity was based in part because he was not part of the Status quo. More fundamentally, and I have heard this from pretty senior people, that part of the status quo was gridlock, which in turn made people skeptical that she would achieve of any of what she proposed.
In point of fact in New Hampshire one of her last ads was about her ability to work with Republicans –
In any event I want to draw attention to a review of the Post’s article on the Betras e-mail in Education Week. It noted:
Both candidates in this election promised to spend a ton of tax money on new infrastructure that will provide exactly the kind of jobs that David Betras was talking about: running backhoes, digging ditches, slinging concrete block. Building new airports, roads and bridges will also require a lot of steel girders, pipe and culverts. Glass walls will be needed and steel guard rails. And when all the old bridges are replaced and the new airports built and the work is done, it will be all over. And we will be right back where we are now; the infrastructure program will only delay the inevitable for a small part of our workforce.
But these folks, according to Betras, don’t want to want to run computers. They don’t want to be retrained. They don’t want to give up their way of life. They don’t want to leave the land their family has lived on for generations. To the extent that Betras was talking about the white working class, the data bears him out. Forty-five percent think that life would be better if they had a four-year degree; but 51 percent think that life would be about the same.
This I think is very smart. If you run the numbers on the 1 Trillion dollar stimulus package that Trump promised, it would create 1 million jobs a year. Of course these jobs would only be incremental increases in the first year: in the next nine the money would just support the jobs in the first year.
So that would help. But that isn’t a solution.
The truth is I don’t know what is.
More from the article:
So what, now, is political leadership here in the United States? We can easily say what it is not. It is not promising to get the old jobs back. That won’t happen. It is explaining why no one can bring the old jobs back–that is, by figuratively bulldozing the old shipyards–and then laying out what the people who used to do them will have to do to earn a good living in an increasingly automated, global economy. That is what no political leader has yet done. Only then will it be both necessary and possible to put together the kind of massive education and retraining program the country really needs.
I think there is a fair amount of truth in this. But who will ever believe the politician who says this? The history of the last 40 years is that we DON”T do this. In fact I would argue the scale of problem dwarfs the proposed solutions by so much as to render the political programs offered to date basically worthless.
I was taken by something Shaun White said:
Recently, I’ve asked the crowds where I am speaking two key questions about the Democratic Party. The response that I get is always the same – mass laughter or audible frustration.
The first question is, “If I asked you, in just a few sentences, to sum up what specific policies the Democratic Party stands for, what would you say?”People have no genuine idea. They know some things the party stands against, but it’s genuinely hard to be sure of what they stand for.
The other question is, “What exactly is the strategy of the Democratic Party to take back the government from conservatives across the country?”
That one always gets the most laughs. Nobody has any idea. Not once has somebody stood up and said, “Hey, I know the strategy.” Hell, I don’t know it. I don’t think one exists. Whatever the strategy was this past election, it didn’t work either. And again, I don’t just mean in the presidential election. Democrats lost all over the place in national, state, and local elections.
If there IS an answer, it is a solution born out of policy. A solution that describes how in gods name to stem the catastrophic collapse of communities all across the Midwest of this country.
Such a policy, when articulated, will I hope also be a political answer as well.
It is literally true that this policy is something every Party to the left of center in the industrailized world is look for.
When you hear one that makes sense let me know. Because I was a big Bernie supporter, but in the end he didn’t have a solution either. What he offered was to slow the pace of change, and to make sure all had access to the things life requires.
But that isn’t really a solution either. Make no mistake: it would be vastly superior to the status quo. But restoring jobs that give a sense of independence and self worth?
