[Dialogue] FW: Hillary and the struggling middle class

[Jim Rippey]

I am not particularly a fan of Hillary's but some of the information in this
column of Judith Warner's is fascinating.  The Wall Street Journal
information she quotes is particularly interesting. It confirms my growing
suspicion that most of the happy talk about our "healthy economy" is a
product of well-to-do people talking to each other and ignoring what's going
on in a great many people's lives.  For instance, translate the Journal's
statistics this way:

Take 100 people and distribute the nation's total income among them.  If the
national total income is 1000, then the one richest person would get $212 of
it. The next highest 49 people would, on the average, divide up $660.  That
figures out to $11.34 each.  The bottom 50 people, on the average, would
divide up $128.  And that figures out to $2.56 per person.

Put another way, the one person at the top would get almost 19 times as much
as the average income of the next 49 people.  And he or she would be getting
almost 83 times as much as the average of the bottom 50 people.

On that basis, it makes sense for Judith Warner to write:  "More and more
people are being priced out of a middle class existence."  Warner thinks
that an increasing number of those people realize what's happening to them.
Therefore, Hillary's message appeals to them.  That would explain "Clinton's
surprising levels of popularity among lower- and middle-class women."


 

Read Warner's article and see what you think.     Jim Rippey in (FINALLY)
sunny Bellevue, NE.

PS:  Thanks to those persons who suggested I not back off from Dialogue.

------------------------- 

The Clinton Surprise, by Judith Warner, in her Domestic Disturbances column
on the  NY Times blog, Oct. 18, '07  

(You can see the original article and a picture of Warner by Googling
"Domestic Disturbances.)

The shocks just keep on coming:  Hillary Clinton leads the Democratic field
with 51 percent of the vote.  She beats Barack Obama by 24 percentage points
among black Democrats.  She is projected now to beat Giuliani - or at the
very least to be in a statistical dead heat with him in the general
election.

This wasn't supposed to happen. According to the received wisdom of those
in-the-know here in Washington, Hillary was supposed to be divisive,
unelectable, "radioactive."

It was the fault of Bill and Monica, and the fact that you never knew when
there was going to be another Bill and Monica. It was the fault of Hillary -
for not taking the hard line on Bill and Monica the way a woman of her
stature and standing was supposed to do. And it was the fault of voters -
those people out there who would never, ever elect another Clinton. 

Why? Because . everyone said so.

("I think the one thing we know about Hillary, the one thing we absolutely
know, bottom line, [is] she can`t win, right?" is how MSNBC host Tucker
Carlson once put it to New Republic editor-at-large Peter Beinart. "She is
unelectable.")

The "we" world of Tucker Carlson knew what they knew about Hillary Clinton -
right up until about this week, I think - because they spend an awful lot of
time talking to, socializing with and interviewing one another. 

What they don't do all that much is venture outside of a certain set of zip
codes to get a feel for the way most people are actually living. They don't
sign up for adjustable rate mortgages, visit emergency rooms to get their
primary health care, leave their children in unlicensed day care or lose
their jobs because they have to drive their mothers home from the hospital
after hip replacement surgery. 

Hillary Clinton's supporters, it turns out, do.  Alongside the newest set of
poll results showing Clinton's surprising levels of popularity among lower-
and middle-class women, white moderate women, even black voters, was another
story this week, based on a new set of data from the I.R.S. 

It showed that America's most wealthy earn an even greater share of the
nation's income than they did in 2000, at the peak of the tech boom. The
wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, the Wall Street Journal reported, earned
21.2 percent of all income in 2005 (the latest date for which these data are
available), up from the high of 20.8 percent they'd reached in the bull
market of 2000. The bottom 50 percent of people earned 12.8 percent of all
income, compared with 13 percent in 2000. And the median tax filer's income
fell 2 percent when adjusted for inflation (to about $31,000) between 2000
and 2005. 

More and more people are being priced out of a middle class existence.
Because of housing prices, because of health care costs, because of tax
policy, because of the cost of child care, The Good Life - a life of
relative comfort and financial security - is now, in many parts of the
country, an upper-middle-class luxury. 

Given all this, you would think that Clinton's big policy announcement this
week on improving life for working families would have been big news.

After all, it contained a number of huge new middle class entitlements: paid
family leave and sick leave, most notably. There were a number of
tried-and-true triggers for outrage from the right wing and the business
community like government standards and quality controls for child care.
There could have been debate stoked among the many childless workers who now
feel parents are getting too much "special treatment" in the workplace
(Clinton supports legislation to protect parents and pregnant women from job
discrimination). At the very least, someone could have accused Clinton of
trying to bring back welfare. (She supports subsidies for low-income parents
who wish to stay home to raise their children.) Or someone could have
questioned how realistic it really is to pay for all that - to the tune of
$1.75 billion per year - simply by cracking down on the "abusive" use of tax
shelters, as Clinton proposes to do. 

But there was none of this. Clinton's family policy speech in New Hampshire
all but sank like a stone. If it was covered at all, it was often packaged
as part of a feature on her attempts to curry favor with female voters.
("Clinton shows femininity," read a Boston Globe headline.) It was as though
the opinion-makers and agenda-setters, waiting with bated breath for Bill to
slip up, just one more time, couldn't see or hear the message to
middle-class voters.

("I do see you and I do hear you," Clinton said in a speech on "rebuilding
the middle class" earlier this month. "You're not invisible to me.")

In contemplating the disconnect, as I often have done, between Hillary and
her upper-middle-class peers, I find myself thinking of psychologist Abraham
Maslow's hierarchy of needs. 

In Maslow's theory of human motivation, needs were mapped out in a pyramid
form. The broad array of physiological needs was at the bottom, followed by
the almost equally wide range of safety needs: things like bodily and
financial security, secure physical health and work, and property ownership.
Transcendent needs, like truth, justice, wisdom and self-actualization, were
in the tiniest triangle up at the top. As their "lower-level" needs were
met, Maslow theorized, people moved up the pyramid; they did not - unless
the material circumstances of their lives changed dramatically - move back.

The American middle class, it seems to me, is looking to politicians now to
satisfy a pretty basic - and urgent - level of need. Yet people in the upper
middle class - with their excellent health benefits, schools, salaries,
retirement plans, nannies and private afterschool programs - have journeyed
so far from that level of need that, it often seems to me, they literally
cannot hear what resonates with the middle class. That creates a problematic
blind spot for those who write, edit or produce what comes to be known about
our politicians and their policies.

Having used that Maslow pyramid analogy, I want to make clear that I do not
mean to impute to upper middle class people a "higher" (in the sense of
"better") form of political reasoning. I am merely trying to say that the
wealth gap has brought an experience gap that is in turn producing a gap in
perception - one that, I predict, will yield a wealth of surprises in this
election period.

Hopefully, they'll be good ones.

 

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