In the immediate aftermath of Vice President Kamala Harris’ defeat, the Washington Post op-ed page blamed the Democratic Party for its embrace of progressivism. This ignores entirely the decision to move the party to the center to accommodate Rep. Lynn Cheney and her small army of disaffected Republicans who had been exiled out of their own party.
Of course, what actually moves a nation like ours is the confluence of circumstances of the American people who make their choice for president in the privacy of the voting booth and based on their economic reality.
There are hard questions that have to be answered by the nation’s labor leaders about the obvious disconnect between them and huge parts of their rank and file.
Maybe forcing your retired members onto a predatory Medicare Advantage plan that’s been documented to short change both taxpayers and program participants undermines your theme of unity and equity?
When you have your presidential campaign strategy designed by David Plouffe, who converted his Obama win credentials into being a highly paid tool of Uber, you know you are going to get a top down corporate playbook totally disconnected from the 44 percent of Americans that can’t afford to cover a $1,000 emergency expense.
These professional millionaire plus Democrats can only speak to the middle class because it’s their only social frame of reference. If they were to recognize the size of the struggling low-wage cohort they would have to question the way they make their living serving the banks and multinationals against the public interest.
The current form of winner take all late stage vulture capitalism has led to unprecedented wealth concentration and income disparity. The post-pandemic increase in wages in no way can compensate for the lost opportunity cost of a generation of flat or real wage loss that was replaced by predatory consumer credit and student loans.
Having former President Obama lecture Black male voters about anything is going to backfire. Yes, he won the White House, but how many Americans of every color lost their homes as a consequence of Wall Street’s mortgage backed security crime wave that hit Black neighborhoods hardest while the former President just looked on sympathetically.
That kind of moral injury has generational consequences. It’s just like the lingering anti-labor legacy left by President Clinton’s embrace of all things free trade that gave us NAFTA, that promoted the use of the U.S. tax code to reward corporations to ship jobs overseas.
You remember the day the sheriff puts you out from your family’s home. You never forget the last day at the plant where you made the best wage in you life.
When Biden’s boosters were confronted with the polling from Gallup that most Americans felt negative weeks out from the election about the economy, their response was to point to aggregate data. Yet, no one lives in the aggregate.
The Democratic Party refused to listen to Rev. Dr. William Barber about ignoring the plight of the working poor—and they lost big time.
Beltway Democrats were quick to declare the pandemic over, despite the well documented economic dislocation that lingered. The federal minimum wage still sits at the same $7.25 it was in 2009 during President Obama’s tenure. With Biden in the White House, Sen. Joe Manchin and a handful of fellow corporatist Democrats joined with Republicans to defeat raising that scandalously-low minimum wage.
After the pandemic, Washington let the Expanded Child Tax Credit expire, cruelly sending millions of children back into poverty. The White House cut tens of millions of Americans loose from Medicaid in the great “unwinding” when they let states cut back on the rolls of the poor they were covering during the pandemic even as they doubled down on shipments of munitions and weapons to global hotspots.
Former President Trump’s performative faux populism, paid for an oligarch like Elon Musk, spoke to enough of this cohort that the Democrats rust belt strategy collapsed with some union households going red and millions opting to stay home.
And there was that pandemic check from the U.S. Treasury with former President Trump’s name on it. Meanwhile, Biden wins funding for hundreds of billions in infrastructure and there’s not so much as a poster at the site of these projects explaining what it is and who advocated for its funding.
For years, Rev. Dr. William Barber has been imploring both political parties to pay attention and engage the 87 million low-wealth and low-wage voters, fully a third of the electorate.
“For far too long extremists have blamed poor people and low-wage people for their plight, while moderates too often have ignored poor people, appealing instead to the so-called middle class, while the poor and low-wage people have become nearly half of this country,” Barber told reporters earlier this year. “Poor and low-wage people have the power to determine and decide the 2024 elections, and elections beyond. In the 2016 election, there were 34 million poor and low wealth people eligible to vote but didn’t. These voters made up more than a quarter of the electorate.”
Barber continued, “Poverty is now the fourth-leading crisis of death in America, a moral crisis in America taking the lives of 800 people a day—and this is before and after COVID. These are the issues that must be at the center of the narrative of a democracy in our country. If we are serious about saving the democracy, it can’t be some philosophical term. Saving the democracy must be a Third Reconstruction where people are paid a living wage—where people have health care—where public education is fully funded, and where voting rights are protected and expanded.”
Beltway Democrats were not listening. They think poor people are of little consequence.
Bob Hennelly is an award-winning print and broadcast journalist focusing on labor, public health, national security, the economy, public finance and the environment. He is the New York City Hall reporter for Work-Bites and his weekly Monday morning radio program on WBAI closely tracks the latest local, regional and national labor movement news.
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