SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2010
Learn to bridge the class divide
by Joan C.Williams A
t a forum Monday on jobs and the economy, a 30-year-old re- cent law school graduate who said he had been inspired by President Obama posed a
straightforward question. It seemed to stump the president. “Is the American dream dead for me?”
he asked. Obama’s reply was strangely bloodless.
He talked about people who were “tread- ing water,” but then he got bogged down in details about student loans. He didn’t seem to connect with the frustration and pain he was hearing. With even the president’s fans talking to him this way, it’s no surprise that the Dem- ocrats are in trouble as the midterm elec- tions approach. The party seems incapa- ble of getting its message across to a key group of voters: those who feel that the American dream is out of their reach. Where the Democrats are failing to con-
nect, the tea party is succeeding. That ris- ing conservative movement has been ex- traordinarily good at tapping into the fury of American families who are neither rich nor poor, whose median income is $64,000 and who make up more than half of the nation’s households. For two generations, the Democrats
have failed to relate to white working-class voters. Black working-class voters never abandoned the party, but the percentage
of working-class whites who identified as Democrats fell from 60 percent in the mid-1970s to 40 percent in the mid-1990s. George W. Bush won his two presidential elections with landslides among white working-class men, while Obama lost among white working-class voters by 18 percentage points in 2008, roughly the same margin by which Al Gore lost them in 2000. Democrats need to understand why Re- publicans have been so successful at court- ing working-class whites — and why Dem- ocrats have been consistently unable to do so. Let’s start with the tea party’s battle cry to “restore America.” Restore what, exactly? For two genera-
tions after World War II, a blue-collar man could support his family; buy a house, car and washing machine; and send his kids to good public schools. The typical blue- collar household in 1973 was more than twice as well off as the equivalent house- hold 25 years earlier. With the economy booming, the Democrats focused on uni- versal social programs and provided So- cial Security, unemployment insurance, VA and FHA mortgages, educational ben- efits for veterans, good public schools and universities, and Medicare. Then the economy shifted. The wages of high-school-educated men fell by nearly a fourth in the 1980s and 1990s. Family in- come fell less, but only because families sent wives into the labor force. While this was happening, the Democrats’ social jus-
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tice concerns moved away from universal economic entitlements and toward race, gender, the environment and gay rights. When Democrats did address economic hardship, they focused on the poor through programs such as welfare, hous- ing subsidies, Head Start and Medicaid. These programs mean that “the have-a- littles fight the have-nots” — a description that a Brooklyn lawyer in the 1970s gave Jonathan Rieder in his book “Canarsie.” A working-class housewife added: “The tax- es go to the poor, not to us. . . . The middle- income people are carrying the cost of lib- eral social programs on their backs.” That captures the enduring divide between working class voters and the Democratic Party. In a country where it is so difficult to
pass any social program, it may seem sen- sible to focus on the neediest. But politi- cally, that has proved shortsighted — a program for the poor alone is a poor pro- gram. Everyone likes universal initiatives; that’s why trimming Social Security is the third rail of American politics. But means- tested programs, aimed at the poorest, fuel class conflict. Republicans have forged the idea that “the taxes go to the poor, not to us” into a full-blown attack on government. The tea party’s “tea,” of course, stands for “taxed enough already.” Remember the famous “Get your gov- ernment hands off my Medicare” signs, toted unironically at rallies against health- care reform? Americans may hate “gov- ernment,” but they like government pro- grams that help them. Designing pro- grams to give subsidies to the poor, but nothing to working-class families who are also struggling, is a recipe for conflict. The Democrats fell into this trap yet again in the health-care debate, when they kept celebrating how many Americans would gain health insurance. Meanwhile, the Re-
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publicans maneuvered them into admit- ting that they would trim the fat from Medicare. The Democrats’ message played right into the well-worn theme that they were going to take from the have-a-littles and lavish attention on the have-nots. While Republicans have made working- class resentments a powerful weapon for achieving the policy goals of the business elite, Democrats have inadvertently fueled those resentments. For more than a gener- ation, a substantial class and cultural gap has tripped up progressive politicians. Salad greens have been a big problem for Democrats. Michael Dukakis got into trouble over Belgian endive; Obama over arugula. Both Howard Dean and Obama have tried, and failed, to speak about working-class voters’ values without sounding condescending. During his cam- paign, for instance, Obama once noted that working-class families were dis- tressed by their economic free fall — and then he stumbled straight into the culture gap as he talked about voters’ attitudes toward guns and religion. Democratic leaders can’t seem to speak to working-class concerns in a way that doesn’t alienate the very people they’re trying to reach. Having ceded this cultural ground, they need to win it back. Workers value directness as an expres- sion of personal integrity. Obama’s silver tongue highlights his elite education, while Sarah Palin’s inarticulateness con- firms her working-class bona fides. Re- member when she wrote notes on her hand? She was just waiting for the elite to make fun of her — a trap the president’s press secretary obligingly fell into. Republicans destroyed the New Deal coalition by appealing explicitly to white working-class culture in many instances, from Richard Nixon’s talk about urban crime to George W. Bush’s talk about fami-
ly values. Democrats need to find ways to express their genuine and deep respect for working-class morality, something they can do without abandoning key commit- ments on issues such as same-sex mar- riage and the environment. Democrats must show that they under- stand the pain and angst of the working class. They need to remind people that health-care reform wasn’t about the poor- est of the poor — they were already cov- ered. Rather, the effort was aimed at work- ing families who couldn’t afford care. Watching Obama campaign in 2008,
you’d never have guessed that a central challenge of his presidency would be fig- uring out how to connect with people. At that town hall Monday, a woman named Velma Hart told the president she was ex- hausted. “I voted for a man who said he was going to change things in a meaning- ful way for the middle class,” she said. “I’m one of those people, and I’m waiting, sir.” She’s still waiting for a good response.
Hart later told reporters that she’d hoped for something “magical, very powerful” from Obama and that she was disappoint- ed in his answer. The president can’t wave a magic wand and restore retirement savings or reduce unemployment. But he can make Hart, and millions like her, see that they have his attention and have engaged his imagina- tion. That’s all she wanted, really, as she explained in cable news interviews after the town hall: to know that he’s thinking about people like her and wants to talk. President Obama and his team should be able to do that.
williams@uchastings.edu
Joan C. Williams, a professor at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law, is the author of “Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter.”
CAUGHT IN THE
MIDDLE
Wall Street hates him. The working class is losing faith. So what’s a president to do?
ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES
Stop worrying about the CEOs
by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson
Group chief executive Stephen Schwarz- man said this summer, for instance, that President Obama’s proposal to tax the earnings of private equity and hedge fund managers at the same rate as other workers’ income was “like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.” Far more omi- nous for the White House, business has been putting its money where its mouth is: In sector after sector, corporate cam- paign contributions ahead of Novem- ber’s elections are going to Republicans. Conventional explanations for this mounting opposition focus on policies and personalities, insisting that the president has embraced runaway gov- ernment or unnecessarily ruffled busi- ness’s feathers. Perhaps in response to this received wisdom, Obama is report- edly trying to appease the business com- munity by considering a corporate chief executive to replace Larry Summers as his top economic aide. But this has it exactly backward. The business-Obama divorce isn’t about per- sonalities, and it’s not because the presi- dent and his economic team have pur- sued anti-business policies. Instead, it re- flects a deeper disconnect between corporate leaders and the rest of Amer- ica, rooted not just in the economic privi- leges executives enjoy but also in the par- ticular ways business connects to Wash- ington. This disconnect has blinded corporate leaders to the extent to which most Americans feel that the govern-
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orporate America’s stance toward the Obama administra- tion has recently deteriorated into vitriolic attacks and out- right opposition. Blackstone
ment, far from crushing corporate Amer- ica, has been looking out only for those at the top. Had Obama realized sooner that he would never win over corporate Amer- ica, he might have pursued rhetoric and policies that would have alienated fewer voters. But the cost would have been alienating Democratic moderates in Congress, thereby jeopardizing his re- form agenda. After November’s inevi- table Republican gains, however, those moderates will have a less decisive role, and Obama might feel freer to adopt a more populist approach. Obama wasn’t always big business’s nemesis. During and after his campaign, many corporate leaders backed him. In March 2009, at a friendly meeting be- tween the president and 60 top chief ex- ecutives, Verizon’s Ivan Seidenberg, the chairman of the Business Roundtable, said, “There’s a misperception I think in some people’s minds that the relation- ship between business and the Obama administration is like, well, oil and vin- egar. . . . From our standpoint, that couldn’t be farther from the truth.” “Oil and vinegar” would be an under-
statement today. Corporate leaders assail Obama’s rhetoric (he has “vilified” them, they say) and his policies (he is spending and regulating too much, and he wants to let the upper-income Bush tax cuts ex- pire). In June, the Business Roundtable, which represents executives at leading U.S. companies, accused the administra- tion of fostering an “increasingly hostile environment for investment and job creation.” These views are clearly overwrought.
Yes, Obama has spoken of Wall Street “fat cats,” but if anything, his rhetoric has been deliberately non-antagonistic, as
when he reassured financial executives in April that Main Street and Wall Street will rise or fall “together as one nation.” Compare this with FDR’s famous scold- ing of “organized money”: “They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.” Nor can the policy inclinations of Oba- ma and his advisers easily explain the scale of corporate apoplexy. The presi- dent filled his economic team with estab- lishment pragmatists such as Summers and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. More liberal economic thinkers such as Jared Bernstein and Elizabeth Warren were either put in the vice president’s of- fice (in Bernstein’s case) or left out of the initial lineup altogether (in the case of Warren). Time and again, Obama has ei- ther ruled out the proposals that busi- ness most opposed or has allowed them to languish— from labor law reform to a “public option” for health insurance to breaking up banks to serious caps on or claw-backs of bonuses. And it’s not as if the past year has been terrible for top executives. After the big- gest economic crisis since the Great De- pression, the government poured huge direct and indirect subsidies into the fi- nancial sector, and Wall Street roared back. Even if Wall Street profits this year wind up being lower than those last year, as some are forecasting, they will still be much higher than anyone would have dared imagine in late 2008. Ordinary Americans certainly don’t think Obama has been too hard on busi- ness; they see a government that has backed Wall Street and corporate titans but abandoned the middle class. In a Pew-National Journal poll two months ago, 53 percent of Americans said the government’s economic policies had helped banks and financial institutions “a great deal.” Forty-four percent thought they had helped large corporations a great deal. Just 2 percent thought they had helped the middle class a great deal. Why, then, doesn’t business agree?
T
he first reason for the disconnect is simply that the economic status quo is a lot less ugly for those at the
top than for other Americans: Since the late 1970s, while middle-class incomes have grown only modestly, the incomes of the very richest Americans have sky- rocketed. On Wall Street and off, exec- utives have continued to pocket huge sums, even at moments when their com- panies and shareholders have suffered. But this is only a partial explanation.
Corporate leaders do see problems on the horizon: rising health-care costs, the risk of more turmoil on Wall Street, an unsustainable energy sector. For most businesses, each of these is just one of many concerns. For a handful of corpora- tions, however, one of these issues is their business. Insurance companies care the most about health care, banks care the most about financial regulation, and so on. Leading the business commu- nity into its increasingly vigorous oppo- sition have been the firms whose bottom lines are most directly challenged by Obama’s reform agenda. Finally, business’s growing antago- nism toward the Obama administration has been aided and abetted by the Re- publican Party, which has stuck to its tax- cutting, deregulatory guns, even in the face of economic and electoral losses. Obama has offered American capitalists a serving of spinach: Make some big and painful changes to come back fitter than ever. The GOP, by contrast, continues to offer candy: a return to the economic pri- orities of the past few decades, when Washington’s role was to remove rules that businesses found bothersome and to make tax cuts aimed at the top — even though this binge helped set America up for a crash in the 2000s. The irony is that a dispirited electorate
that thinks Obama has been too favor- able to executives has shifted toward the GOP — the same GOP that executives are now backing.
Given these reasons for business’s op- position to Obama, winning over the ex- ecutives may always have been a hope- less cause. But could the president have instead won over the public by launch- ing the very thing his detractors in the business community already accuse him of: a populist campaign to reform the
economy? To many on the left, the answer is yes.
Journalist Robert Kuttner, in his new book “A Presidency in Peril,” blames both the weak economy and Obama’s declin- ing popularity on an economic team that was too solicitous of Wall Street. Demo- cratic pollster Stan Greenberg, mean- while, has found that Obama’s fight against extending tax cuts to the very rich resonates powerfully with crucial voting blocs.
Still, the barriers to a more populist route weren’t limited to Obama’s tem- perament and his Cabinet. They extend- ed to his Congress, in particular the con- servative Democrats in the Senate and the “Blue Dogs” in the House (who, amazingly, just blocked a vote to elimi- nate high-end tax cuts, a move that would have positioned Democrats on the side of middle-class Americans while re- ducing future deficits by $1 trillion). Es- pecially in the Senate, where the threat of a filibuster now compels 60 votes for virtually any piece of legislation, these business-friendly Democrats have had an outsize voice. A more populist route would have alienated them, jeopardizing Obama’s entire agenda. After November, however, Democratic
moderates will probably no longer be at the center of the action. With even more Republican votes needed to overcome a filibuster, and with the GOP shifting ever further to the right, Congress is likely to descend into gridlock. At that point, tough talk will no longer
threaten important legislative opportu- nities. The president will be free to speak frankly about middle-class concerns and draw sharper ideological distinctions. By swinging its support to the GOP, busi- ness could bring on a more strident Oba- ma — in rhetoric, and maybe even in sub- stance.
Jacob S. Hacker is a professor of political science at Yale University, and Paul Pierson is a professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley. They are the authors of “Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class.”
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