http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JE23Dj05.html
By Julian Delasantellis
May 23, 2008
"What do women want?" Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud asked, as
if the population being inquired about was an enigma shrouded in a
conundrum, when an answer was there just by asking one. These days,
American politics is obsessed by a similar question, "What does the
white, less-educated, lower income, middle class want?"
In 1975, a friend of mine going to college in Boston, Massachusetts,
tried to find out. At the time, the notoriously gentrified Boston was
presenting a new and unexpected image of itself to the world thanks
to resistance, frequently violent, to a federal judge's order to
racially desegregate the city's schools.
Instead of sophisticated, cultured Brahmins sipping tea on Beacon
Hill, reading poems by Longfellow and discussing the progress of
their sons at Harvard, TV news broadcasts featured almost nightly
graphic footage of the protests, in reality near riots, that followed
the judge's order. The mechanics of the desegregation process was
that white kids would be taken by bus from their segregated white
neighborhoods to schools in segregated black neighborhoods, and vice
versa. The events taught the world that much of Boston was demarcated
into sharp sectarian divisions as mordacious as any strife-torn city
in Northern Ireland.
The loci of the white resistance was found in South Boston, an almost
exclusively white, Irish Catholic, and very poor, neighborhood - but
one where residents were proud of their (albeit underperforming)
schools. If you ever see documentary footage of yellow school buses
rolling into a white neighborhood, phalanxes of jackbooted State
Police officers separating them from hordes of protesters screaming
obscenities and throwing rocks, you're most likely looking at events
in South Boston.
My friend was earning his college tuition by working as a deliveryman
for two brothers, Holocaust survivors, whose business provided
supplies to nursing and convalescent homes. One of his stops was a
retirement home in South Boston.
Behind the front desk at this establishment was a blond, cute,
curvaceous young receptionist, with deep blue eyes and a flashing
smile. My friend, who had to sign in at her desk to gain admittance,
was always too tongue-tied to strike up a conversation until one
night he noticed that playing on the girl's AM radio was the song
Black and White, by the rock group Three Dog Night.
The song, meant as a paean to school desegregation, had these lyrics:
The ink is black, the page is white
Together we learn to read and write
A child is black, a child is white
The whole world looks upon the sight
A beautiful sight.
And now a child can understand
That this is the law of all the land
All the land.
The world is black, the world is white
It turns by day, and then by night
A child is black, a child is white
Together they grow to see the light
To see the light.
My friend crossed the Rubicon; he went for the gusto. "So," he smiled
at the girl. "I guess this song isn't that popular around here these days."
The girl flashed her pretty eyes, answered back.
"Eat [expletive for excrement]," she suggested to my friend. "You
[extremely derogatory obscenity referring to African-Americans,
generally referred to as the 'n word'] loving [derogatory insult to
persons of the Jewish faith rhyming with bike] [present participle of
the obscene verb referring to one who has conjugal relations with a
maternal parent] [obscenity for the exit terminus of the human
alimentary canal]."
Well, Barack Obama isn't having a lot of luck connecting with this
population, either.
American politics, particularly American presidential politics,
wasn't always as complicated as it is now. For about 75 years
following Republican William McKinley's 1896 election victory over
populist firebrand Democrat William Jennings Bryan, American politics
settled into a fairly comfortable and predictable pattern - business
and the economic elite voting for the Republicans, more middle and
lower income, "popular" interests going for the Democrats.
It was McKinley's political guru, Mark Hanna, the Karl Rove of his
day, who engineered this significant political "realignment". He was
the one who made the now obvious political tautology that if you
represented the interests of the economic elite, the elite would
reciprocate with loads of campaign contributions, and, as California
political boss Jesse Unruh once said, "money is the mother's milk of
politics".
Once the Republicans got by their anti-corporate, trust-busting
president Theodore Roosevelt from 1900 to 1908, this pattern held
until very recently. Americans were happy and content with the
prosperity delivered to them by the free market in the Roaring
Twenties, so in that decade they elected as president three
Republicans in a row - Warren Harding in 1920, Calvin Coolidge in
1924, and Herbert Hoover in 1928.
However, following the stock market crash of 1929 and the subsequent
Great Depression, the seeming salvation of the country from both the
economic calamity and the threats of the fascist Axis ushered in one
of the longest periods of one-party dominance of the presidency in
American history. The Democrats won seven of the nine presidential
elections between 1932 and 1964. The only victories the Republicans
could manage during this period were in 1952 and 1956, when they had
as their standard bearer the non-ideological, essentially centrist
American hero-conqueror of Europe, Dwight D Eisenhower.
The 1964 presidential election, held less than a year after the
assassination of president John F Kennedy, was particularly brutal
for the Republicans. Running Arizona conservative Senator Barry
Goldwater against now president Lyndon Johnson, the Republicans were
thoroughly thumped; Johnson won 61% of the popular vote. The only
states that Goldwater won were his home state of Arizona, and, it was
thought interesting at the time, the previously hard-core Democratic
Deep South states of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi
and Louisiana.
In the immediate aftermath of the 1964 election, the prospects of
conservatism in general, and the Republican Party specifically,
seemed bleak. Their defeat was so thorough and substantial that it
was thought that it would be many years before they would once more
be a force in the political system. A new "liberal consensus" would
rule the day, leading to a beneficent dominion of government-employed
technocrats using the latest advances in quantitative social science
to solve society's problems.
As for the conservatives, it was now thought that their ideology was
past its time and that, in the 1954 words of Columbia University
sociologist historian Richard Hofstadler that essentially accused the
entire conservative movement of sociopathy, "Their political
reactions express rather a profound if largely unconscious hatred of
our society and its ways - a hatred which one would hesitate to
impute to them if one did not have suggestive clinical evidence."
High-water mark
But rather than being the first crest of a crashing liberal wave,
1964 would, in reality, be liberalism's high-water mark - a mark that
the movement would not even come close to in the following 40 plus years.
The counter-attack was launched from the redoubt of those five Deep
South states carried by Goldwater in 1964. Most political observers
attributed this phenomenon to Johnson's advocacy of political and
civil rights for African-Americans; Johnson himself admitted that his
signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the attendant rebellion
against the Democratic Party that would soon arise among white
Southerners, meant that the South would be lost to the Democrats for
the next 20 years. Currently, that prediction is off by 24 years, and
still counting.
The America that chose a new president in 1968 was a far different
place than in 1964. The anti-Vietnam war and civil rights protests of
the intervening four years had generated the worst civil unrest in
the country since the Civil War, and, as the cities of the North
burned in the aftermath of the assassination of the Reverend Dr
Martin Luther King, it was seen that racism was not just a disease of
the backward, non-progressive South.
For the conservatives in the Republican Party, America's electoral
doormat for over the past three decades, this was the way out of the
darkness. Advised by 28-year-old television wunderkind Roger Ailes
(more lately the creator and still head of Fox News), candidate
Richard Nixon hit on a strategy to finally reach down and peel off
some of the middle- and working-class whites that had been at the
core of the Democratic party consensus since Franklin Roosevelt.
As chronicled by journalist Joe McGinnis in his groundbreaking 1969
book, The Selling of The President 1968, Ailes steered Nixon towards
the relatively new political tool of the television advertisement to
bypass the considered-to-be hostile printed press, to re-introduce to
the American public a "new Nixon", supposedly more trustworthy and
honest than the shifty eyes and questionable morals of the old Nixon
of the 1950s.
In a series of one-minute (far longer than the 15- or 20-second spots
now aimed at today's short attention span younger voters), television
advertisements, Nixon appealed to an American middle class that had
seemingly grown frightened and apprehensive about the rapid pace of
social change cascading about before their eyes.
One spot had still photos of the riotous 1968 Chicago Democratic
Convention that had nominated his opponent, vice president Hubert
Humphrey, interspersed with a frightening collage of burning
buildings, presumably from the civil rights and antiwar riots, and
the war in Vietnam. Another spot, "Youth" , mixed stills of
degenerate, ill-kempt hippies (who by then were being painted by
social critics as nothing but spoiled upper middle-class cowards and
crybabies) in what the spot called the "fringes", with scenes of
good, wholesome American youth, doing good, wholesome American youth
activities such as studying science (none of that degenerate social
science stuff with these good kids!) working, playing baseball,
standing under American flags - all clean cut, short haired, and
dressed as if they were happy to wear what their parents had just
purchased for them at Sears.
One of the most ominous shots, "The First Civil Right", crystallized
what would be the Republican's main campaign plank for the next 40
years. With ominous, jarring music, and while showing dark pictures
of bloodied protesters facing off against determined riot cops, Nixon
told America that, if elected, social change would stop.
"It is time for an honest look at the problem of order in the United
States. Dissent is a necessary ingredient of change, but in a system
of government that provides for peaceful change, there is no cause
that justifies resort to violence. Let us recognize that the first
right of every American is to be free from domestic violence. So I
pledge to you, we shall have order in the United States."
Running against Humphrey on the left, and anti-civil rights activist
George Wallace on the right, Nixon won the election by the relatively
small margin of 500,000 votes, but that margin hid some remarkable
partisan turnarounds from 1964.
Nixon won Ohio by 91,000 votes, Goldwater had lost it by over a
million. Nixon won New Jersey by 60,000 votes; Goldwater had lost it
by over 900,000. Johnson had won Florida by 40,000 votes; Nixon won
the Sunshine State by 210,000. Perhaps most telling of how elections
would be decided here on in, Nixon won Virginia, lost by Goldwater by
almost 80,000 votes, by 150,000 votes.
The Deep South states won by Goldwater (except South Carolina) in
1964, along with Arkansas, voted for Wallace, and his vice
presidential nominee US Air Force General Curtis LeMay, who attracted
support from those sick of both the antiwar protests and the war
itself through his 1965 suggestion of, should communist aggression in
Vietnam not stop, "we're going to bomb them back into the Stone Age".
Here is seen the birth of the slayer of the progressive movement in
the United States-the "values voter".
Why Nixon?
Democrats and liberals were perplexed by the victory of their
long-hated nemesis, the once aggressive red-baiter Nixon. Why had the
working class, represented by the industrial states Nixon won back
from them in 1964, turned against them and against their own economic
interests? Didn't these voters know that it was the Democrats,
through such initiatives as support for unions, the minimum wage,
public education, Social Security and the new medical insurance
program for the elderly Medicare, that were their only true friends?
What secret had Nixon, Ailes, and the high-priced pollsters they had
recruited from commercial marketing firms, discovered?
In 1978, Universal Studios released director Michael Cimino's
groundbreaking film, The Deer Hunter, to significant public acclaim -
it was awarded Best Picture, along with four other Oscars for that year.
In brief, the movie tells the story of a small, gritty Western
Pennsylvania steel town, the kind that reliably voted Democrat up
until 1968, populated by super-patriotic Russian immigrants, that
sends its sons off to the Vietnam War. One comes back a paraplegic,
another, "Nick", played by Oscar-winner Christopher Walken, due to
the psychic scars suffered in the war, never comes home at all.
After Nick's funeral, town members gather at a bar to watch scenes of
the frenzied American withdrawal from South Vietnam in the spring of
1975. They are silenced; it seems that they have finally realized
that Nick's, and their town's, sacrifices were all in vain. Suddenly,
"Linda" (Meryl Streep), Nick's widow, begins to quietly sing God
Bless America. The others around the table softly followed suit as
the movie ends.
Liberals loved the movie for its graphic depiction of the brutality
of the Vietnam War, but many were puzzled by the ending. Why the
patriotism, just what were the townspeople celebrating? After all,
they had just given one of their boys, Nick, to the government, which
had squandered his life away. The town was far from prosperous; life,
along with the backbreaking work in the steel mills, was tough and
arduous. Working there, and living in the town in general, aged all
those within it well beyond their years.
Wouldn't the townspeople be better off canvassing and voting for
their local Democratic party liberal candidate for Congress, with his
platform of, among other things, improved enforcement of health and
safety regulations for the plant, easier access to public education
so their kids might have a better future than their parents, most
importantly, no more wasteful wars like Vietnam that their sons would
be sent away to die in?
Instead of God Bless America , why weren't the townspeople singing
Happy Days are Here Again, Franklin D Roosevelt's 1932 campaign theme
song, played faithfully at most Democratic party rallies since?
But what the Democrats and the liberals couldn't get, the Republicans
and the conservatives picked up instantly. With perception and
marketing skills honed by their long years as corporate advertising
executives, they saw that the townspeople in the little towns of The
Deer Hunter, and in thousands of others that had been sheared away
from the Roosevelt coalition, were singing to America because that
was all they had, and, like a frantic suitor, they were desperate to
prove their loyalty to it.
Their lives didn't revolve around fancy houses, exotic trips to
far-off lands, or bulging stock portfolios. What they could say that
they had, what they guarded with jealousy, was their perception as
first in line as America's lover. They could prove it, too; like the
Old Testament story of God asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, look
how many of their sons they had willingly sacrificed at their Master's call.
It was the genius of the Republican polling and image spinmeisters
that turned this ill-formed and relatively inchoate patriotism into
powerful "wedge" issues they could use against the Democrats. From
about this period on, whenever the Democrats advanced a reform issue
that might improve the lives of average Americans, such as health
care, income support for the poor, an increased minimum wages, and
many others, the Republicans told this population that, if the
Democrats really loved America as much as they said they did, why
would they be trying so hard to change it?
Perhaps the key point of this strategy, the factor that truly led to
its success with the white working class, was that, indeed, it only
worked with middle- and lower-income whites, not African Americans.
That population continued to vote as reliably Democrat as any other
component of the Roosevelt coalition of the 1930s - yet which
African-Americans were not part of as racial oppression and
intimidation had essentially kept African-Americans out of the ballot
booth until the late 1960s.
But the reliable patronage of the Democrats by African Americans was
a key part of the appeal of the Republicans to middle- and
lower-class whites. The "blacks" (in private conversations, they were
called much worse) may be benefiting from all these welfare, racial
preference in hiring, and income-support programs, but we white
people don't need them; "We'll pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps."
The Democrats could never really understand this; in essence, lower-
and middle-class white voters were punishing them for advocacy of
programs to help them.
Along with hostility by traditionally minded lower- and middle-class
whites to the agents of social upheaval and dislocation of the 1960s,
the spoiled, rich college kid "hippies", a name was soon developed
for this class of voter who cast ballots against their own economic
interests, who voted to give upper income capitalists and business
owners benefits they themselves could never use - they were the
"values voters".
The exploitation of the grudges and prejudices of the "values voter"
completely annihilated the old Roosevelt coalition, and it led to the
last 40 years being a period as dominated by Republicans as the
middle of the 20th century was by the Democrats. The Republican Party
has won seven of the 10 presidential elections since 1964, and every
time, this appeal to "values" over economic interest has been a key
part of their campaign strategy.
During this time, the rise of fundamentalist Protestantism acted as
another incentive for lower middle-class whites to turn away from the
Democrats. Contrasting diametrically with the left wing "liberation
theology" of the 1960s, these congregations were both super patriotic
and ultra traditional; of what use was the Democrats' appeal to a
better life in this world, when just by sitting in the pews and
tithing (that is, donating to the church) eternal bliss in the
afterlife was assured?
In 2004, in the midst of the unpopular Iraq War, and in an economy
then still growing very slowly (the dramatic effects of the housing
bubble blowoff would only be seen in the following two years), and
after nominating a genuine war hero in the person of Senator John
Kerry, the Democratic Party still got rejected and drubbed by these
white, "values voters".
The transition from the pattern set by McKinley and Hanna was
complete. George W Bush's Republicans, the party clearly working to
serve the interests of big business and big money, had now become the
party that was winning elections solely with the votes of
lower-income whites; in that election the Republicans won 18 of the
19 lowest income states in the nation. The average income of the 19
states won by the Democrats was US$49,770; for the Republicans, $41,598.
The American left-wing intelligentsia searched desperately for
answers. One came from social historian Thomas Frank, in his book,
What's the Matter with Kansas - How the Conservatives Won the Heart
of America.
In a New York Times 2004 essay, Frank explained the trick:
For more than three decades, the Republican Party has relied on the
''culture war'' to rescue their chances every four years, from
Richard Nixon's campaign against the liberal news media to George H W
Bush's campaign against the liberal flag-burners. In this culture
war, the real divide is between ''regular people'' and an endlessly
scheming ''liberal elite.'' This strategy allows them to depict
themselves as friends of the common people even as they gut workplace
safety rules and lay plans to turn Social Security over to Wall
Street. Most important, it has allowed Republicans to speak the
language of populism ... Our age-old folkways, in other words, are
today under siege from a cabal of know-it-all elites. The common
people are being trampled by the intellectuals. This is precisely the
same formula that was used, to great effect, in the nasty spat over
evolution that Kansans endured in 1999, in which the elitists said to
be forcing their views on the unassuming world were biology
professors and those scheming paleontologists.
It is interesting that in Kansas it was the fight against the
teaching of evolution that drove the common people to the
Republicans. In 1925, in the famous Tennessee "Scopes Monkey Trial",
high-school teacher John Scopes was put on trial for teaching
evolution. The prosecutor in the trial was the famed populist William
Jennings Bryan, defeated by McKinley in the 1896 presidential
elections. The shift of populism from an ideology that had found a
home in the American Left, to one claimed by the Right, is the
essence of the motivation of the values voter, the foot soldier in
the trenches of America's now-raging "Culture War".
George W's revolution
Early 2005 was as dark a time for the Democratic Party and the left
in America as the time following the Goldwater defeat was for
conservatives 40 years earlier. With his election victory George W
Bush made clear his intention to continue and intensify the
free-market, big business revolution; the first step in that cause
would be the privatization of Franklin Roosevelt's most durable gem
from the New Deal - the Social Security program of old-age income support.
But like a sorcerer's apprentice who can start his magic but does not
know how to stop it, the right wing's appeal to the values voter had
a very curious side effect. In winning the poor, they lost the rich.
This became obvious in the Democrats' retaking of Congress in 2006.
If you find a very pricey, tony address in America these days,
there's a good chance it's represented by a Democrat.
In the 10 wealthiest states in America, Democrats outnumber
Republicans in the House of Representatives' delegations of these
states by 69 to 39, as opposed to a 30-22 advantage by the
Republicans in the 10 poorest states.
Manhattan zip code 10012, which reported an average income of just
under $2.4 million on its 294 tax returns, is represented by
Democrats Jerrold Nadler and Nydia Velazquez. Even Beverly Hills,
California, with its famous 90210 postal code, is represented by
Henry Waxman and Howard Berman, both Democrats.
The Democrat support by the rich and upper middle class is the mirror
image of the Republican support by the white poor. While the poor
seek to cling to tradition in the face of a changing and uncertain
future, those better off reject it; they are open to all the
limitless possibilities that their imagination can think of and their
abundant wallets can finance.
They want to be able to buy a book and choose from something other
than the wide selection of bibles at a Christian book store, go to
the theatre to see something other than Passion Play, hear a concert
other than a Messiah, go out to dinner and dine on something other
than franks n' beans in the church basement. They want to know that
they'll face no social, or even legal, sanction, sleeping in instead
of going to church on Sunday mornings. Perhaps most of all, if a
loved one faces the end of life, they want the decisions for his care
to be made by the family, not by a posse of Bible-thumping preachers
riding shotgun with the National Republican Party, as happened in
2005 with the Terry Schiavo case in Florida.
In this year's American presidential primaries, it is Senator Barack
Obama that is garnering most of the support from this new class. It
was this group that was the core of his remarkable string of
victories from the Iowa caucus to just after the Super Tuesday
primaries on February 4, and polls show that, in a matchup with
Republican nominee John McCain, he would overwhelmingly carry the
votes of college-educated, high-income professionals. In this week's
Oregon presidential primary, Obama beat Hillary Clinton among those
earning $100,000-$150,000 by 67 to 32. In Kentucky, a state with one
of the highest proportions of non-college graduates in the country,
Clinton got the "values voters" and reversed these numbers.
Just as Obama was about to decisively clinch the Democratic Party
nomination for president, a very unexpected phenomenon showed itself.
Clinton began to display a remarkable strength among the lower-income
values voters. It was particularly symbolic that the core of her
support seemed to be centered in a roughly 200-kilometer arc around
Western Pennsylvania, the very are that symbolized white lower income
angst in The Deer Hunter.
In rapid succession, Clinton won Democratic primaries in
Pennsylvania, Indiana, landslide wins in both West Virginia and
Kentucky. A core weakness of her campaign has been her inability to
postulate a clear, convincing rationale for her quest for the
presidency (other than the obvious and unspoken one that her entire
campaign is nothing more than a desperate attempt to validate an
identity as something other than the betrayed wife of a philandering
husband). Her recent support is providing her one. To quote the song
by John Lennon, Hillary is the self-appointed, new, "working class hero".
As Obama has not, as of this writing, been able finally to garner
enough pledged delegates to guarantee the nomination, Clinton is
presenting the Democratic Party with a very challenging argument.
In essence, she is saying that her support in these states proves
that she can go back, and, in effect, round up the stragglers; she
can regain the support of the lower-income white voters the party
lost in 1968, and has had great difficulty in luring back ever since.
As such, she is arguing that the party should - actually, it must -
ignore the results of the 47 states that have completed their nominee
selection process, one that has put Obama on the cusp of victory, and
choose - more accurately, anoint - her as the Democratic Party's nominee.
In presidential elections, American states are now divided into three
distinct categories. "Red" states are the ones, like Texas, South
Carolina and most of the Great Plains, that will almost certainly
vote Republican. "Blue" states, like New York, Massachusetts and
California, can be relied on to deliver their votes for the
Democrats. In between are the states where the race will actually be
decided, the so called "purple" states.
On the surface of it, Clinton has shown impressive strength in some
purple states, beating Obama in, besides the above, New Jersey,
Arkansas and New Mexico. If, as the nominee, she could deliver these
states, as well as the entire Western Pennsylvania arc, a Democratic
landslide could be in the offing.
But if she becomes the nominee, can she do that? Clinton supporters
argue that, in the states where she has won, exit polls have shown
that her supporters will vote for McCain if Obama is the nominee;
what they don't say is that those same exit polls also show that a
lot of Hillary's own voters plan to vote for McCain even if she is on
the ticket. Also, this argument ignores Obama's wins in his own
purple states: Nevada, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Wisconsin,
Minnesota, Maine, Virginia - all with white, working classes of their
own that Obama did win.
Also left unspoken in the Clinton argument is the question of what
will happen to the African-American vote if this population comes to
believe that the first African-American to fairly earn a major
party's nomination was denied his prize by the insidious machinations
of hidden party insiders.
If Clinton is "given" a nomination she did not earn, would not the
party be risking the millions of votes of its most loyal constituency
to try to catch the questionable fancy of a group it lost a long time
ago? The same argument can be made with the party's new upper-income
and young supporters. They came to the Democrats disillusioned with
the politics of the past; will they stick around to support a
candidate from the last century, fighting over and over again that
era's interminable culture wars?
I think again of my friend's pass at the pretty white girl from South
Boston. Such vehement, vitriolic hatred, and now, Senator Clinton
thinks she can overcome it through just the power of the pantsuit?
It's not like the Democrats haven't been trying. The party's platform
is almost unrecognizable from a quarter of a century ago; gone is
advocacy of gun control, abolition of capital punishment, welfare
payments to the poor, a non-interventionist foreign policy, and many
other liberal traditions. Still, the values voters intended to be
attracted by these policy shifts return to the party's fold all too
reluctantly, if at all.
At its core, perhaps it is just pure racism and ignorance that keeps
the "values voter" from voting his or her economic self-interest.
But, as evolution proves, any group that refuses to look after its
interests is doomed to extinction. In not getting the education to
compete in a globalized workforce, by desperately trying to cling on
to manual employment that can be done at one-fifth of the wage in
China or India, the white working class is becoming ever smaller with
each election cycle.
Far more important is the nation's burgeoning Hispanic population.
Obama has problems with them as well, but fortunately for the
Democrats, the hard-right, talk-radio base of the Republican Party,
in recently demonizing the Hispanic population to an extent not seen
since Nazi Julius Streicher did in his Der Sturmer newspaper with
Germany's Jews, has probably assured that Hispanics will continue to
vote Democrat, at least for this election.
On April 6, Obama generated controversy, and trouble for his
campaign, with these remarks to a gathering of wealthy campaign
contributors outside San Francisco. In them, he proved that he
certainly understood the values voter, even if he couldn't yet win their vote.
You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot
of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25
years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton
administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive
administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna
regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they
get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who
aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment
as a way to explain their frustrations.
"The truth shall set you free," US president James Garfield said,
"but, first, it will make you miserable." Obama spoke this truth, and
when these supposed private remarks were released, it did make him
miserable - the remarks were exploited by Clinton.
Clinton would have been outraged by what the girl in South Boston
said to my friend in 1975. These days, it sometimes seems that she's
bucking for that girl's job as well as the presidency .
--
Julian Delasantellis is a management consultant, private investor and
educator in international business in the US state of Washington. He
can be reached at juliandelasantellis@yahoo.com.
.
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