So today, the almighty (and perpetually drunk) Terry McAuliffe announced that Senator Clinton raised $10mn through 60,000 online donations after winning the PA primary by a 10-point margin. [Time]
My. Ass.
Seriously. Americans can't afford to fill their gas tanks, but you want me to believe that the Clinton campaign managed to pry about $166 from each wallet in blue collar America? I'm calling bullshit on this one. But that's not the point. Even if the Clinton campaign didn't just withhold $10mn at the end of the quarter and save it for a time when they needed a little money-driven "momentum," the question remains as to why blue collar America is so attached to Senator Clinton.
Blue collar jobs are incredibly difficult, strenuous, and over time, are often debilitating. It's a life that is incredibly admirable. But these people aren't sheet metal workers because it was their life's passion. They aren't workers in cement plants because they understand and value the importance of smooth texture and a good blend when pouring foundations. They're auto workers because it pays the bills. They're miners because they want to send their children to college. They're service workers because they want their children to be the directors and the CEO's they never had the opportunity to be.
Somewhere in this post I lost track of the snark and ended up in campaign speech land. But really. I've been trying to compose the next paragraph of this post for the last 20 minutes and have written and erased it 6 times. I don't fucking have an answer.
I don't understand blue collar America.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
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7 comments:
I think you're probably right to some extent in suspecting Clinton of trying to depict momentum in rearranging how she reported her fund-raising.
However, I think that you're making two critical mistakes.
First, I don't think for one moment that those donations came from blue collar workers and families. Clinton may win those votes, but that is hardly where she gets her money. I think that of the 50,000 new donors she announced, she probably got a couple hundred 1000+ donations that made up most of it. Donations from people who had been holding out until their state mattered, or something of the sort. Who knows?
That said, the more important second mistake that I think you're making is that you are assuming that blue collar America is wading neck deep in the politics, the speeches, the polls, etc, just like we are. That simply isn't the case. I think that for many Americans, voting and donating to Clinton is a safe bet; she's someone who has proven herself- the Clinton years were great for the economy, and Obama is a huge risk. Where the economy sits right now, I don't think that the blue collar worker who is barely scraping by can afford a "risk".
All and all, though, I wish I could understand more fully where that money came from.
I don't like the way either of you just lump together 'blue collar workers' as a monolithically uninformed or noble group. Those sorts of assumptions are exactly whats wrong with politics in the first place.
If you're going to talk about a demographic, you're going to have to A) lump them all together, and B) discuss the trends they exhibit. That's not categorizing any particular demographic as anything, but rather studying their behavior in an attempt to understand it. As far as blue collar workers being "monolithically uninformed" or "noble": never did I accuse blue collar workers of being uninformed. As far as noble goes, I don't like to step on toes. I give much respect to a man who spends 40 hours a week mixing cement to pay the bills.
Meredith,
I will acknowledge that it's far from fair to lump anyone into a monolithic block. However, in an election where we've been talking about things like the, "black vote" and the "white woman's vote" and that sort of thing, I think that a slightly more specific block like the "blue collar vote" is a fair thing to be discussing, sort of.
I think that this sort of discussion does inevitably end in unfair generalizations, if we incorrectly identify correlation as causation.
Now, as to the implication that I'm accusing all blue collar workers as being uninformed, I didn't intend to do that, and if I did, I like to say that I didn't mean to.
What I meant to say is that to someone who probably does not have the same kind of obsessive relationship with politics that I assume we all have here, Clinton is a safe vote where Obama is not.
That isn't, by the way, an implication that someone who does have an obsessive relationship with politics will favor Obama.
Hi, just found this blog by way of Merry's sister. I'm living in Youngstown, OH, one of the blue collar places that's been talked about so much during all this. We're just across the border from PA, too, so we were talked about a lot again, in relationship to blue collar PA, lately. It may be surprising to some, but blue collar people (here at least, I can't really speak for how it may be in any other blue collar region than this one) are obsessed with politics, and are often well-informed about why they have the positions they've chosen or constructed in relationship to politics. As I said, this may be particular to Youngstown, because of our history of political and economic strife here, so politics are an everyday sort of conversation here in the obsessive sort of way Jeremy has mentioned in these comments. Clinton took Ohio, and she won this region, but barely. It's a very divided state, both between Republicans and Democrats, but also within those two parties it's divided. I'm an Obama supporter myself, but what I often see in the Clinton supporters is a mix of reason. Some have the "safe bet" mentality, but others are perhaps racist more than misogynist when they weigh their options, or for some it's not about race or gender but fear of the rumors the Clinton and McCain teams have been spreading about Obama's religious background, and in some cases, in many cases actually, I hear a lot of women here who are voting for Clinton out of an identification with her simply as a woman. Others state they prefer her narrative of solutions over Obama's narrative of hope and inspiration. You must remember, blue collar people, especially in the Rustbelt, have lost hope and inspiration over the past few decades as the economic supports of our communities have been wiped out by the outsourcing of the industries we once called "ours". So hope doesn't go very far with many blue collar people, whose problems have been ignored by our politics in the last thirty years or so. It's unfortunate, but there is a logic to that, and those narratives are created by politicians for a reason: they really are listened to by people; people are looking for a new story to be a part of. But when hope has already been lost by a large swathe of blue collar America, it's a hard sell. Hope didn't get us anywhere over the years (and we did have it). Unfortunately, Clinton's solutions don't really seem like solutions, and I'd much rather have a leader who brings people together imaginatively and rebuilds the public sphere in the way Obama can do, but this isn't the overall feeling. People come at all this from different angles, even blue collar people. So you don't understand blue collar people because you're not realizing they're just people like you are, various in opinions and various in the reasons for their views. And they're often as informed and misinformed as anyone else I've conversed with in the white collar realm, the middle and upper classes, the academic world, etc. It's a group that, though it sounds specific, isn't as specific as you might think.
And I think that money she's claiming didn't come from these people. Believe me. They're stretching what dollars they've managed to keep hold of.
Awesome blog, btw!
Chris:
Thanks so much for your comment! I think that's a fascinating point--that Hope (tm) doesn't sell to people who had already given up on hope a decade ago or more. I definitely think that's something that more Obama supporters, and probably the Obama campaign itself, really needs to learn. Thanks for informing me!
And, thanks very very very much for reading.
As much as I usually hate getting raked over the coals for stuff, this has actually worked out positively.
Very interesting.
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