Looks like the Democrats are in the midst of a subcommittee restructuring. I took a look at the possibilities of joining an Outreach Group: Affirmative Action and Outreach, GLBT Outreach, Senior Outreach, Women Outreach, Disability Outreach, Democratic Latino Caucus, Youth Services and a few others. As I have written earlier, while all of these demographic groups are important, does anyone see what’s missing? Why is there one glaring demographic that we are not reaching out to? If you can’t see what’s missing, look at who is driving the next pickup truck you see. It’s not Scott Brown, but it’s the guy who voted for him and Charlie, perhaps because no one from our party reached out and asked him for his vote.
Please share widely!
What group in particular are you thinking of that could be the mandate of a particular subcommittee? If it’s blue collar we do have a Labor Outreach. Otherwise I’m not sure I buy the premise that we didn’t reach out to that demographic.
Inside and outside the profession. A big problem with the post-industrial/post-labor Democratic Party is hat we have replaced the broad political base of class solidarity with the narrower base of siloed and occasionally competing cultural groups. I am all for outreach to those groups, and I would shudder to think of the nastier implications of an outreach committee that catered to working class white males-but I definitely think a stronger sense of class solidarity is vital to the future of the party.
It doesn’t need it’s own bucket, silo or committee it should permeate throughout the entire party at all levels and for all groups. My grandpa used to say “I’m in the working mans party-the Democrats”. We can get back to that while still embracing folks that were unwelcome in my grandpas party or excluded from it. We should never shy away from fighting for social equality but it goes hand in hand with economic equality and both principles sustain one another. They really can’t be treated in the mutually exclusive manner they have been for so long.
I just have the question, the void, the empty space. Reaching out to “labor” has meant reaching out to labor unions in the past. That demographic used to be 30-40% of the electorate, now it’s about 10%.
Reaching out to white males has a nasty ring to it. I’m in a quandary.
Not “blue collar”. Not “labor”.
Working class people. The fifty percent of Massachusetts residents who are one paycheck away from poverty. The people being screwed by Wall Street and big banks.
NOTE WELL: It isn’t just white males. It’s legal Brazilian immigrant women who clean houses. It’s black and Hispanic women who work full-time at WalMart and Staples and still can’t feed their families.
It’s working class people.
For sure it is. It’s folks like my sister and brother in law in Marlboro, it’s folks like I was when I was unemployed, or like my fiancee when she was making only $10 /hr. If it wasn’t for each other-we’d have had a tough time getting by during those leaner years. As it is we gotta live with her parents now so we can afford her nursing program. It’s a lot of young people too.
The question I think John May was asking was a variation on the Tom Frank question-> what’s the matter with Woburn? what’s the matter with Milford? what’s the matter with Greenfield and Western MA? these are the republican leaning areas that are paradoxically poorer than their neighbors and struggling to get by. These are the folks that voted reflexively against gas tax indexing and the bottle bill since ‘we already get whacked enough’-but they aren’t right wing ideologues.
They voted for paid leave and they stood in line with Artie T and his workers. How do we get them back into the fold? How do we get these Brown-Baker maybe Romney 2002 voters-we are with us at the presidential level-back to the fold? How do we get them to vote for progressives and not just warmed over moderate Republicans-especially all the ones in our legislature passing themselves off as Democrats.
We already have the working poor, immigrants, and people of color. We can definitely do a much, much better job of getting those folks to the polls in non-presidential years and mobilizing them not just for election season but standing shoulder to shoulder with them when they strike for a living wage at McDonalds or have a strike to protest Wal-Mart’s black friday madness. I get that. I am not saying cast them aside. If anything it’s an existing foundation we can and must build out and expand dramatically to win.
But we also have to add those other folks too if we want a real progressive majority in our state and more broadly in our country. Texiera is wrong-latinos, blacks, and young people won’t be enough. We still need working class whites. And like I said in another post-it’s all the same fight but they don’t feel like they are on the same side yet-and we have to look in the mirror as well as call the GOP out for its hypocrisy.
The Democratic Party is no longer the working man’s party. It is the party of programs and entitlements. It is the party that creates SC posts for every approved minority – but as one commenter said, it feels ‘nasty’ to embrace white males, let alone working class white males. In Grandpa’s day, the battle lines were drawn more efficiently – there was the working man and the malefactor of great wealth, and everybody could identify with one or the other. Now, unionization is primarily among taxpayer-paid government workers and God knows you can’t piss THEM off, but they have no interest in viewing workers outside of automatic pension, holidays, time off, wage deferral, and cheap protected health care world as fellow strugglers. This is not a phenomenon of loss of manufacturings job so much as it is people in office jobs not seeing any point to a union. Many work for themselves as trade LLC’s, self-employed producers like realtors or computer repair techs, or private duty care workers. The law and permit system treats them like Malefactors – there is a reason I will never have more than 5 employees, as that triggers all kinds of additional burdens on a business.
These people rightly see themselves are the people actually paying for most of the programs targeted at your base. They don’t have the accounting help or legal stratagems that are readily available to the Malefactors. Again and again, progressives aim their gun between the eyes of the Malefactor, but the arm gets tired, the aim drops, and they shoot the self-employed working class in the gut instead.
Yes, like Social Security, Medicare.
Yes, and that gave us strong labor unions….it grandpa’s day.
These small biz heroes are familiar to me as employers of last resort.
Nearly all have an overblown sense of what they ‘contribute’ and are generally trying to make some pipe dream work with dodges and cheats.
This is what makes the tax officials suspicious of them. I believe there are stats on small biz tax dodging.
Here’s an overview paper from 2010
http://www.nber.org/papers/w16300
It is cited in an article from the admittedly awful WSJ organ called Marketwatch.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/small-businesses-the-engine-of-tax-fraud-1302903532794
You’d think that some of this could be streamlined on the tech side so the honest ones don’t get whacked for honest mistakes.
One reason I have spent years working for reviled temp agencies is because they have enough critical mass to be a workable go between in these small biz employment excursions.
The victim mentality is a bit overblown. Are there stats on these “actual payments for most of the programs”.
As someone on the other side of the trade, I usually just see petty chiselers who did a lousy job of biz planning, design and number crunching. And when the pipe dream doesn’t pan out they plead for special considerations while complaining about others special considerations in the same breath. It’s quite a feat.
One could even argue that small biz chiselers are merely early spawn phases of malefactors such that the aim is more accurate than it would seem, the outcome of the hit just isn’t that significant.
There is the demographic that includes “white males”. I like it. Painfully obvious and I missed it! That’s how the canvasser who’s cutting a turf in Grafton or Easton or Andover and so on can walk up to the guy raking leaves and say in reply to his “what’s in this for me?” stance, “If you’re a working man like the rest of us, you know that many of us are one paycheck away from poverty, despite our hard work. The people are being screwed by Wall Street and big banks and legislation that enables them while it hurts us! My candidate “Insert here” is in the fight to support working class people like you…” (NOT “Jobs and the Economy”)
…your aversion to the words “jobs and the economy” when it sounds lie that is exactly what you are talking about.
Remember that episode from the Twilight Zone? The title refers to the book carried by the aliens that invaded earth and we erroneously thought it was a book on how to cater to our needs while in fact, it was a cook book.
“Jobs and the Economy” is surrendering to the notion that the free market, capitalism, and job creators are our saviors as it deliberately omits any mention of social programs, community support, and so on. When the Pharaohs built the pyramids and when the southern American plantations grew a cotton empire, both were examples of plenty of jobs and a growing economy. “Jobs and the Economy”, if one reads between the lines, means free markets are the answer and social programs are to be mocked.
Yes, we all want jobs, but not just “jobs”. They want jobs and security and only a strong government can provide the security.
FDR said it years ago at the Democratic National Convention in 1932
What do the people of America want more than anything else? To my mind, they want two things: work, with all the moral and spiritual values that go with it; and with work, a reasonable measure of security–security for themselves and for their wives and children. Work and security–these are more than words. They are more than facts. They are the spiritual values, the true goal toward which our efforts of reconstruction should lead. These are the values that this program is intended to gain; these are the values we have failed to achieve by the leadership we now have.
Actually, the jobs under slavery were pretty steady, too.
I was tempted to simply downrate over the obvious immorality of slavery, but you are just wrong too. Slave jobs were not secure in the sense that you could be sold on your owner’s whim, separating you from your family in the process, and you certainly weren’t able to retire with a pension from being a slave.
I concur that this is a serious problem that needs our undivided attention. For anyone who is politically astute, we can be rest assured today that Democratic candidates running statewide (save Billy Galvin who just may be the last old-line Democrat to ever run statewide) will lose Worcester, Hampden, and Plymouth Counties as well as the Merrimack Valley and sizable swaths of Bristol and Barnstable Counties. The chips are stacking up folks and while we may not yet feel the fire, it’s beginning to burn and could actually create a sizable opposition party to our own within a decade’s time.
I have heard from numerous sources that there is a real push within the state GOP to make it the “blue collar” party. I think it was wholly evident in Scott Brown’s notorious faux blue collar persona including a barn jacket, Chevy truck, and all. In succession Gabriel Gomez and Charlie Baker have picked up on the same sweep of blue collar communities across the state from Methuan down to Quincy, out to Chicopee and dozens in-between. When you throw in traditional Republican enclaves in the monied North Shore and can run a socially liberal Republican as was witnessed this fall in Charlie Baker, you win back the Metrowest vote: the Sudburys and the Wellsleys of the Commonwealth. Add it all together and the Republicans have a winning coalition to expand upon.
What does all this say? That with a shrinking percentage of the blue collar moderate “lunch bucket” crowd we lose our advantage. In essence blue collar voters are becoming a sort of king maker in the Massachusetts electoral process. They vote on bread and butter issues and will vote for the candidate with the strongest message on economic development and fairness. It was quite noticeable in 2012 when Elizabeth Warren was able to defeat Brown in a decisive victory largely by weakening his advantage among blue collar voters, especially union voters among whom he actually held an advantage against Martha Coakley in 2010.
So what can be done? For starters we as Democrats need to stop demonizing the candidates of that shrinking wing of our party. Sure they may not be the stars of BMG but we must accept that there is a place for the Tom Kochs, Steve Lynches, Colleen Garrys, and Dick Moores of the Massachusetts Democratic Party. If we truly are the big-tent party then we will be welcoming and hospitable. Sure they may not necessarily pass the progressive litmus test with flying colors but we can’t win this without them. Litmus tests and exclusionary behavior ought to stay in the Tea Party where that decisiveness forever belongs.
Lynch, anti-ACA vote aide, has always been a solid economic progressive and has abandoned the vestiges of social conservatism. Colleen and many others vote against policies that help labor, help lower working class taxes, and find services and programs working folks rely on. Dina DiZoglio is a good example of a Dem in a Republican district who is as progressive as her district would allow. Not sure if Garry or Moore fit the bill the same way.
We can make economic arguments with simple sound bites that resonate with traditional folks-a feat Warren excels at and folks like Coakley or Kerry struggle with. Always make it an us or them election-identify the them and be clear about what you will do for the us. Warren and progressives that do this win. And the win over demographics that wouldn’t dream of voting for a latter liberal.
What if lunch bucket white guy just despises people who can’t seem to call him by his name? Little things count.
Scott Brown at least made a plausible pretense of it, which is probably preferable to weird encounters with zipperheads who seem socially autistic.
Yuppie progressive strategists are partly hobbled by this demographic market think. It’s lazy shorthand and lousy politics. And it isn’t a quality improvement over old school Tip O’Neill pavement pounding.
Can anyone imagine Tip turning Tony the plumber or Jimmy the barber into marketing abstractions. It makes progressives seem soulless and alien to the people they expect to put up with this nonsense.
If you want high school white guy on board, it probably wouldn’t hurt to ask him what he cares about as if it actually mattered. But engagement, like math, is hard and we all love our shortcuts until they get to dead ends.