August 21, 2019--Biden's Women

I'm trying. Trying to get enthusiastic about supporting Joe Biden. But he doesn't make it easy.

It's not just that he's a gaff machine. Most can be written off as a version of charming. Biden being Biden. Like the other day when he mixed up Burlington Vermont and Burlington Iowa.  

Though even with that, benign as it is, and though the contest for the nomination is not "Jeopardy," it also leaves the lingering concern that these kinds of mixups are not just innocent slips of the tongue but are symptoms of, OK I'll say it, old age. He is 76 and at that not a young 76. 

More concerning is the kind of thing he said the other day at a gathering in Iowa of mainly minority voters when talking off the cuff about the academic potential of at-risk children. He said that "Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids." 

What is one to make of that? This is more than a slip of the tongue. 

But according to Monday's CNN/SSRS poll it didn't put a dent in black voters' support for him. His numbers in fact have risen since June, especially among white women, particularly older white women. They love Biden and appear to be wiling to stick with him almost no matter what.

I am not saying they are like the Trump people who would stand by him even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue. Actually, maybe even more would vote for him if he did. Biden's supporters appear to be quite locked in. It seems as if they will remain committed to him almost no matter what.

Some of this increasing support for Biden is the result of women coming to his defense as they see him attacked by the other leading candidates. Especially, counterintuitively, the female candidates. 

(See the results of the CNN poll which show Biden increasing his lead over his closest rivals--now up by 15 percent over Sanders and 14 percent over Warren, while Kamala Harris has the support of just 5 percent of potential Democratic voters.)

The response to Harris is the clearest example of women coming to Biden's rescue  She challenged, some said attacked, some say disrespectfully took on Biden, Barack Obama's vice President, during the first debate. Her poll numbers blipped up for a day or two as did her campaign contributions, but since that time they have trended downward. Recently they have been plummeting.

Perhaps because as they thought about it, potential Democratic voters perceived her to be more angry than passionately engaged with the issues. 

Some of this may be the result of gender bias--what behavior is considered to be appropriate for a woman when confronting a man--some of it may be Harris's hard-charging style, but some of it is Democrats who want to win in 2020 seeing in Biden the candidate most able to defeat Trump. Still the overarching concern of most Democratic voters no matter their demographics and ideology. And thus his people are quick to protect him.

In a political environment where the conventional wisdom does not apply, some of the familiar realities still pertain--especially about race and gender. We are by no means a post racial society nor are men and women running for public office regarded equally. 

It is ironic that much of this is being played out through Joe Biden's candidacy, considering his history when it comes to women and minorities is far from without blemish.

July 8, 2019--Make American Men Great Again

For more than two years, my sister-in-law, Guest Blogger Sharon, and I have been attempting to understand why so many women, white women, 53 percent of them, voted for Trump. It seems so against their best interests. 

Recently she wrote-- 

I still haven’t totally figured it out, including what role religion may have played. I think there are people whose world view or “values” may trump (sorry) self-interest. Just look at the number of women who voted for a misogynist. Or are so pro-life that they are willing to give up control of their own bodies.

Then I wrote--  

About the women who voted for Trump: like you I've been obsessed with trying to understand this since he was elected. Some of it is a version of Evangelical belief about the appropriate place for women in the social and family hierarchy. "In their place" below men. But I have come to conclude it's less about religion than about gender. 

Likely for most of Trump's white men the women's movement tripped off all sorts of scary bells and whistles. Having in many cases to deal with female bosses; having to deal with dramatic changes in sexual behavior where women have come to assume an almost equal role; needing wives to enter the work force not for career reasons but because the men couldn't earn enough to pay the bills and sustain them as stay-at-home wives and mothers, often with the women earning more than their husbands, as a result feeling dispossessed, these men are angry about their shrinking hegemony within the family and the larger society, and voted for Trump in the belief that he would restore things to their natural, their rightful gender dispensation.  

And then for the these women--they want their husbands back. The ones who could support them, dominate them, and make them feel protected and secure. They too feel that something profound has been abrogated, overturned. Thus, that is what making America great again means to them. It really means how to make men a regressive version of great again. 

To progressive women this represents a retreat from all that has been fought for and accomplished during the past 50-60 years; to conservative women this would represent a restoration of the natural order.

The Dems need to figure out how to relate to this in a non-condescending manner for at least two reasons--they'll lose again if they don't and because it's the right way to engage Trump supporters--with understanding and sensitivity. Doing so, though, doesn't mean we need to roll over and come to agree about everything. Or very much. But we do need to show respect for how they are experiencing life in a changed America, and try to find some empathetic common ground.

Toward the end of Hillary Clinton's campaign, when it finally dawned on her and some of her advisors that they were losing white working-class voters--women as well as men--some of her people who had kept Bill Clinton at arms length from participating in campaign strategizing, realizing he was in fact their best strategist, finally asked him what he thought was going on with these voters, mainly the men. He said, "They're dying of a broken heart."

He was right. And since it was too late to reach out to them in appropriate ways, Hillary Clinton lost their votes and ultimately the election.

Fair warning. 

March 11, 2014--White Men

Democrats finally are paying attention to the fact that in the 2012 election Barack Obama received just 35 percent of the white male vote, down from 41 percent four years earlier.

He won the election because he received more than half of women's votes (55 percent), 93 percent of the African-American vote,  71 percent of the Hispanic vote, 75 percent of the Asian vote, and 60 percent of voters between 18 and 29. That was his winning coalition.

But in the meantime, though Democrats kept the White House, largely because the overwhelming percentage of white male votes went to Republicans, the GOP maintained its majority in the House of Representatives and are threatening to wrest control of the Senate later this year.

This should not be new news. No Democrat running for president has received a majority of white men's votes since 1964 when Lyndon Johnson trounced Barry Goldwater, carrying 44 states.

What's the problem?

These men voted for Democrats for decades--from at least Franklin Roosevelt's time to LBJ's. But then they began to drift toward the right. Most notably, Ronald Reagan was elected not just because Jimmy Carter and four years later Walter Mondale were weak candidates but because he figured out how to appeal to what came to be known as Reagan Democrats--disaffiliated white men.

Many of these white men felt abandoned by the Democrats because the party began to be perceived as too devoted to civil and women's rights. These men who felt they had worked hard to achieve middle-class status were appalled by their perception that New Deal and subsequent Great Society programs, including affirmative action, were unfair to working people. And, of course, there was a healthy dose of racism and misogyny in the mix.

On the other side of the political spectrum, liberals and progressives began to caricature these men with equal passion and overstatement. If liberals were not tree-hugging N___ -lovers, conservative white males were not all redneck, trailer-trash six-pack guzzlers. In fact, characterizing these Reagan Democrats as such only drove more of them further right as they felt mocked and ignored.

Fellow progressives, let's be honest--we do tend to show not-so-thinly-veiled contempt for these white men. We do not want to engage as equals the less-educated and the unwashed. In our hearts we know too many of us feel this way and those who we largely mischaracterize are not unaware of what we think about them. From this kind of contempt, one cannot expect to widen one's political coalition.

The Democrats' plan seems to be to let demographic changes solve their problem. Hispanics are among the fastest growing segment of the population and as soon as there are enough of them in, say, Texas, just carrying Texas, New York, and California will give Democrat presidential candidates a leg up on an Electoral College majority.

But--and this is a big but--just as we might expect to see a series of Democrats elected to the presidency, we will simultaneously see increasing Republican majorities in Congress.

Waiting for demographics to overwhelm white men, then, will not get the job done. So what to do?

First, acknowledge that the 35 percent of white men's votes Obama received in 2012 (as unpopular as he was and as African-Ameircan as he is) is not insignificant. Nor was the 41 percent in 2008. The challenge for Democrats, then, is how to at least retain that 35 percent and inch back to Obama's 2008 41 percent.

To begin to do this we have to stop making fun of, showing contempt for these frustrated and unhappy men. In addition, we should try to figure out why they feel so disaffiliated. Polls tell us that they think the Democrats are the Mommy Party, more concerned about giving everyone food stamps and welfare than standing up to the unions, communists, and terrorists.

We shouldn't go along with the call to keep the "military option" on the table when confronting Russia in Ukraine; but we should listen respectfully to that argument and not mock it.

When they chastise liberals for pandering to gays, we should calmly state why gays should be given the same rights as the rest of us, and not make fun of their alleged homophobia. We should back off from accusing them of "waging war on women" (war is not the most appropriate or fairest metaphor) and talk with them about their hopes for their daughters.

And in the policy realm, Democrats should look to embrace approaches that would address the concerns and needs of these men. There should be tax breaks as much for them as for the wealthiest. We should make it easier and less costly for their children and grandchildren to go to college. We should improve veterans benefits and emphasize health care that focuses on men's issues, not just reproductive issues.

Above all, we should emphasize approaches to helping low-income people become self-supporting. We should agree with these men that it is not a good thing for people to need government assistance. It should be the last resort. A guaranteed annual income, for example, which many conservatives support, would obviate the need for most of our current safety net programs and offer dignity to those unable to fully support themselves.

For the progressive in me, to come up with a list of viable policy suggestions is not easy. Better minds than mine should be able to come up with an agenda, which isn't pandering, that could increase Democrats' appeal to these alienated white men. Fairness requires this as does smart politics.