Empathetic Indifference: Why the Democrats Lost

Jack Metzgar
Working-Class Perspectives
December 6, 2010
http://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/

In 2008 white working-class voters in Wisconsin and
Iowa gave Barack Obama 52% of their vote - and that was
pretty important because in both states, working-class
whites were a majority of all voters. In 2010 they
were even larger majorities, but they gave Democratic
candidates only 40% of their votes in Wisconsin and
32% in Iowa.

Though especially striking, these huge swings are
pretty typical of Midwestern states - where, except for
Illinois, whites without bachelor's degrees (the
reigning definition of the electoral "working class")
constitute a majority of all voters. In the Great
Lakes states over the past two decades, there has been
a slow but substantial drift of white voters, including
working-class whites, toward the Democratic Party.
That drift halted (or at least paused) big time this
year. Why?

First, as Democracy Corps has documented,
(see "Graphs," p.7):
(http://www.democracycorps.com/strategy/2010/11/what-next-for-president-obama-and-democrats/?section=Analysis
 nearly every demographic group swung against
Democrats in 2010, including declines of 3 and 4
percentage points among the core of the Party -
African-Americans, Latinos, and union households. The
swing was just larger, more dramatic, and potentially
more damaging among working-class whites in the
industrial Midwest. Given the ubiquity of the swing,
any explanation needs to focus on large overarching
causes that affect the entire electorate but have
special force in the Midwest where the working class of
all colors is such a large majority.

The consensus causal explanation among analysts and
pundits on this score is, of course, the state of the
economy. But there are several variations of this
explanation with important differences.

One variation is arithmetical mechanics: an official
unemployment rate of nearly 10% automatically leads to
whoever is in charge being thrown out by voters,
regardless of what they have or have not done. With
the inauguration of President Obama, the Democrats were
clearly in charge in January 2009. The official
unemployment rate then was "only" 7.7%, and it steadily
rose to 10% by the end of the year, where after a very
slight improvement it has remained. That economic
number and its trajectory are highly predictive of
electoral outcomes. Period - end of story.

There is wisdom in the simplicity of this mechanistic
explanation, and it should not be forgotten. I am
among those who think that Democratic economic policies
in 2009 averted a much worse economic situation than
would have occurred had the Republicans been in charge
- or if there had been complete, instead of partial,
gridlock. That's why I voted for Democrats, but I can
understand why the "wisdom of crowds" might see voting
as a kind of thumbs up - thumbs down affair, and not a
comparison. Indeed, as I voted for Democrats (a few of
whom, like my Representative Danny Davis, are actually
very good), it felt like I was saying "everything is
okay."

Another variation of the it's-the-economy explanation
holds that the Obama administration was simply
ineffective in explaining its various economic
policies. Endless punditry about "messaging" and
"narratives" ranges from the mildly insightful to the
disgustingly superficial and manipulative, but there is
undoubtedly truth to the general proposition. In
particular, the President bragging on his
accomplishments (which, as Rolling Stone has
comprehensively summarized, are many) as life got
palpably worse for workers and homeowners, not to
mention the poor and unemployed, was certainly
counterproductive when it was not outright maddening.

The third it's-the-economy analysis points to the
actual Obama macroeconomic policy, the "stimulus plan":
it was not big enough and too much money was spent on
the wrong things to get the economy growing vigorously
enough to bring down unemployment. This is tricky
territory, and I'm not competent to make the kinds of
combined economic and political judgments that
politicians have to make. But if the mechanistic
relationship between unemployment rates and electoral
outcomes is as important as decades of statistics
indicate, then a President and his party have to
actually move the numbers - or at least try.

They did try in 2009. Indeed, the Obama mistake was
not in the original stimulus plan, which we now know
averted a Great Recession but was not sufficient to
move the economy forward. Rather, the key mistake was
later, in the President's first full budget at the
beginning of this year. After promising "to focus like
a laser" on jobs and the economy when health care
reform was passed, the President presented a budget
that accepted 9% or 10% unemployment as the best he
could do. Eschewing a second stimulus plan, he
rejected an economically robust and politically shrewd
stimulus plan that was developed for him by the labor
movement and its allies.

That plan would have invested $400 billion of borrowed
money in job-creating activities, paid for over time by
a permanent Financial Transactions Tax designed to
reduce the kinds of speculative activity on Wall Street
that helped drive our economy into the ground. After
the $400 billion stimulus was paid for, that tax on
Wall Street would have produced more than $100 billion
a year in government revenues, which could have been
used to reduce the national debt.

It was not too late then to make a significant dent in
unemployment, and it is not too late now. The
President could pursue a similar plan outlined by some
of his most important allies. Even the Federal Reserve
Board is now pleading for a large deficit-financed job
creation program in the short term that will reduce
government deficits and debt in the long term, in part
by growing the economy faster and stronger.

It's true that Republicans will form a phalanx of
opposition to any such plan, and even with a full-
throated, whole-hearted effort by the President and his
party, the chances of passage are well south of 50/50.
But the alternative for Democrats is to do what they
did this year: to do next to nothing about unemployment
and to be seen again as doing nothing as the jobless
rate edges down to a projected 9.2% by the end of next
year and not much below that in 2012.

The white working class, in the Midwest and elsewhere,
swung decisively against Democrats in 2010 for pretty
much the same reasons as almost everybody else did: As
they went to vote, there were not enough jobs for one
of ten people who want to work and need to work, and
the governing politicians in charge, all Democrats,
didn't seem to give a shit. It's not just the fact of
such outrageously high and painful rates of
unemployment. It's the passive acceptance of them, the
serene, if empathetic, indifference.

Jack Metzgar, Chicago Center for Working-Class Studies

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