[Dialogue] FW: Hillary and the struggling middle class

Sat Oct 20 20:11:29 EDT 2007

Janice, thanks for putting this piece on the
listserve. Nowhere else have I read anything about
this speech of Hillary.  It is eye opening.
Charles Hahn
--- Janice Ulangca <aulangca at stny.rr.com> wrote:

> Thanks much, Jim.  Very interesting.  
> Janice Ulangca
>   ----- Original Message ----- 
>   From: Jim Rippey 
>   To: 'Colleague Dialogue' 
>   Cc: Barbara 
>   Sent: Friday, October 19, 2007 10:56 PM
>   Subject: [Dialogue] FW: Hillary and the struggling
> middle class
> 
> 
>    
> 
>   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, 
=== message truncated ===>
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