Blogs: Isaiah J. Poole

Chasing the Rainbow: Can We Capture It?

Isaiah J. Poole — Fri, 16 May 2008 11:02:19 -0400

I flashed back to the Rev. Jesse Jackson's 1988 presidential campaign, which aimed to build a "rainbow coalition" of working-class people based on progressive populist economic policies, earlier this week in my post on Firedog Lake.

It is easy to get discouraged by the racial polarization evident in the election results in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. There is, as my colleague David Sirota has been writing, a serious racial chasm in this country—and, frankly, in the Democratic Party.

But, to borrow a line from Scripture, "we are hard-pressed on every side, but not crushed."

I believe that it possible to begin to bridge the chasm—or at least narrow it significantly—as those who have been hurt by Bush administration policies come to understand that their pain is broadly shared and that the solutions are just as broadly beneficial.

I don't expect to win over all of the white voters who have told exit pollsters that the race of a candidate is important to them and that therefore they will not vote for an African American, regardless of who he is or what he says. But the spirit of what Jackson envisioned—a polyglot assemblage of people with common dreams convinced to set aside their differences and embrace their hopes—can take shape in the midst of the devastation of the Bush era.

It will take a presidential candidate who is willing to speak directly to their hopes and their anxieties in ways that are both practical and unapologetically progressive. Spelling out exactly what that means is the challenge of the "Making Sense 2008" project the Campaign for America's Future launched this week, which you will be seeing and hearing more about in the coming days.

In the meantime, I'd like to ask you: What would it take to build a "rainbow coalition" that unites people across race and class lines around a progressive agenda for change? The conversation started at Firedog Lake; I'd encourage you to continue it in the comment thread below.

Do Conservatives Really Want to Shed the "Block-and-Blame" Label?

Isaiah J. Poole — Thu, 15 May 2008 11:41:02 -0400

It is, as our co-director Robert Borosage pointed out this week, ludicrous on its face. House Republicans, coming out of their weekly caucus on Wednesday, started touting their latest slogan, "the change you deserve," and they are being virtually laughed out of the room.

In the meantime, Republicans are engaging in a degree of hand-wringing that hasn't been seen in the party since the post-Watergate days. National Republican Campaign Chairman Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., was quoted in Politico:

“A large segment of the American public doesn’t have confidence in the Republican Party to deal with the issues in front of us. What we have to do is look in the mirror a bit and ask how we lost our way.”

Well, Mr. Cole, maybe conservatives like you might learn how to say "yes" to what the American people want rather than continue your obstructionist, block-and-blame strategy.

To take just one example, you and House Minority Leader John Boehner could have worked more cooperatively with Democrats last week on a mortgage relief bill. House Banking Committee chairman Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., has been getting mainstream media kudos for bending over backwards to listen to the Bush administration and find common ground. Yet, when the final legislative package went to the House floor last week, it was met with a veto threat from President Bush and stubborn rejection from a majority of House Republicans.

Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein's take on what happened fits the block-and-blame narrative:

Why the House Republican leadership decided to oppose the bill remains a mystery. The most charitable explanation was that it ran afoul of its free-market ideology. The more likely explanation is that it understood that the economy had become the most salient political issue in the coming election, and it was determined to deny the Democrats who control Congress the chance to show they had done something about it.

Whatever the reason, Republicans leaders were apparently successful in pressing the White House to stop negotiating with Frank and oppose the legislation. Suddenly, Treasury officials who had signed off on the portions of the bill dealing with Fannie (Mae) and Freddie (Mac, the two major mortgage financing institutions) began raising new objections. And the White House announced that President Bush would veto the bill, calling it a bailout for speculators and lenders and complaining, alternatively, that it would not help many homeowners and that it would cost far more than the estimated $2.5 billion over five years.

At the time of this writing, a decent mortgage relief compromise might yet get past the conservative naysayers in the Congress and past the biggest naysayer of all, George W. Bush. But conservatives still show few signs of realizing that they are paying the price for a strategy of obstruction that, after Democrats took control of the Congress in 2006, they deliberately and systematically followed.

Even the memo House Republican leaders sent to their members on Tuesday is stuck in block-and-blame-ism, accusing the Democrats of "promises made, promises broken" when, in fact, dozens of bills passed by the House Democratic majority have been snagged in the Senate by an obstinate Republican minority.

The Republicans are right about one thing in that memo: "This has to change. It must change." But that change will have to start with conservatives recognizing that the American public is not interested in more of their government-off-your-back-and-into-my-pocket ideology. Americans want an economy that offers them a fair chance to prosper, and since conservatives have had their chance to bring that about and have failed, they should get out of the way.

Living Standards Under Stress

Isaiah J. Poole — Wed, 14 May 2008 11:50:49 -0400

It does not take much to understand why a hard-core Republican district in Mississippi would elect a Democrat to the House of Representatives by a nine-point margin. Mississippi is a state under particularly serious economic stress, a point brought home in a report released this week by the Campaign for America's Future.

"The Stress Test" shows in graphic detail the impact that seven years of conservative economic policies have had on working families. It explains why this week's Washington Post-ABC News poll indicates that "nearly seven out of 10 Americans are worried about maintaining their standard of living."

The most recent, and perhaps most dramatic, threat to standards of living has been in the form of higher gasoline prices, which have risen 33 cents a gallon just in the past month, according to The Post. But the erosion in living stands has been a long time coming and it comes from multiple sources, according to the Stress Test report.

Consider this: In Mississippi, since 2000 the average weekly wage has done up, in inflation-adjusted terms, $33 since 2000. But there are plenty of indications that Mississippi families have nonetheless fallen behind, even if you leave out the whopping 128 percent increase in gasoline prices during that period. The percentage of people without health insurance increased 63 percent since 2000, and the number of jobs with health coverage declined 12 percent. Seventy-four percent more people—it's now almost one in 10—spend at least a quarter of their income for health care than was the case in 2000.

In Mississippi, the number of people who are below the poverty line is up 8 percent, bankruptcies are up 27 percent and home foreclosures are up 92 percent.

On a national level, "The Stress Test" reports:

The states experiencing the most economic difficulties are Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Maine and Tennessee. A cross‐section of middle America, these states are represented by both political parties and exhibit both industrial and rural characteristics. Michigan’s number one ranking in stress reveals America’s shrinking industrial base. It has high unemployment as well as the biggest decline per capita in both manufacturing jobs and construction jobs. North Carolina’s high ranking also stems from crumbling industry, which led to its having the fourth highest decrease in goods‐producing jobs and third highest decrease in manufacturing since 2000. North Carolinians are also plagued by health care woes. Thirteen percent fewer people in North Carolina got health care through their employers in 2006 than in 2000. Nine percent of the residents of North Carolina pay more than 25 percent of their income on health care. In Ohio, more than one in ten construction jobs has been lost since 2000. The cost of a year of state college is now up to 20 percent of a median Ohio family’s income.

It is no wonder conservative lawmakers this week are trying to sell "change," as if it were someone else besides President George W. Bush in the White House and as if conservatives weren't running the Congress like a military precision marching band until voters said "Enough!" in 2006. The Stress Test shows that real change will not come from more of the same, but from a radically different set of progressive economic policies. We need to focus on supporting the aspirations of working-class families, not the avarice of corporations. There is no better proof of that than the conditions on the ground in conservative strongholds like Mississippi—and in how voters are responding behind the voting-booth curtain.

Conservatism Collapses in the Emergency Room

Isaiah J. Poole — Thu, 08 May 2008 12:13:48 -0400

A column I've just posted on Firedog Lake takes Sen. John McCain and the Bush administration to task for failing to address one of the most critical failings of our health care system: our overstressed urban hospitals.

It was one of the elephants in the room when McCain rolled out his health care plan last week, which emphasized a wacky free-market fundamentalism as the solution to our health insurance crisis. This week, the House Government Affairs and Oversight Committee exposed the elephant during a two-day series of hearings on what might happen in seven key cities if there were a disaster comparable to the 1994 train bombing in Madrid, Spain.

The results of the survey show that none of the hospitals surveyed in the seven cities had sufficient emergency care capacity to respond to an attack generating the number of casualties that occurred in Madrid. The Level I trauma centers surveyed had no room in their emergency rooms to treat a sudden influx of victims. They had virtually no free intensive care unit beds within their hospital complex. And they did not have enough regular inpatient beds to handle the less severely injured victims. The shortage of capacity was particularly acute in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

What this means is that hospital emergency rooms often aren't equipped to properly handle the day-to-day needs of their communities, much less the burdens of a natural disaster or a terrorist attack. And while the hearing did not explore this in detail, this problem is compounded in communities where a large percentage of the patients are low-income and uninsured.

The committee released the report to highlight the damage that could be caused by Bush administration changes in Medicaid reimbursements, a significant share of hospital income. These hospitals are already pinched by reimbursement rates from both government and private insurers that do not fully compensate them for the cost of care, as well as by the millions of uninsured and underinsured patients that use the hospital facilities as a primary care facility because they do not have a doctor.

This is a complicated problem, but it is one that has been made worse, not better, under the conservative regime of the past seven years. We need progressive health care experts to add to the debate the best ideas for fixing our health care infrastructure as well as guaranteeing access to that system to everyone.

Let's Bank On Rebuilding America

Isaiah J. Poole — Tue, 06 May 2008 11:48:40 -0400

Instead of a silly argument over a "gas tax holiday," we desperately need a serious discussion about the nation's infrastructure. And there is a good legislative proposal that could be the basis for that discussion.

There are bills in the House (HR 3401) and the Senate (S 1926) that would create a national infrastructure bank. It could be one way to bring some common sense to the task of rebuilding America's roads, bridges, sewers and public buildings. The creation of this bank should be part of the effort progressives are making in Congress to enact a second stimulus bill this month.

Such a bank would allow the federal government to finance these projects in the same way that states do: by issuing long-term, tax-exempt bonds or by making loan guarantees.

Both Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have said they support the idea of an infrastructure bank, although it rarely comes up in their campaign speeches. And that's a shame, because they both need to spend their time reinforcing an emerging national mandate for repairing and improving our crumbling foundations.

Just last month, the blog Infrastructure Watch notes, the Government Accountability Office estimated that the nation's total water infrastructure needs would cost between $485 billion to $1.2 trillion. However, funding for the largest federal drinking water and wastewater infrastructure programs have been flat or declining.

Also, the Congressional Budget Office told Congress last year that the Highway Trust Fund, which is made up largely of the revenue from the gasoline tax, will run out of money in 2009. Spending is outpacing money flowing into the fund. (High gasoline prices, in fact, worsens that problem. When high prices force cutbacks in driving, less money flows into the fund; the federal gasoline tax is a per-gallon tax; it does not increase proportionately to the cost of a gallon of gasoline.) One key reason for the exhaustion of the fund is that prices for materials such as asphalt and concrete are exceeding the general rate of inflation.

In March, the president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, David G. Mongan, reminded the House Banking Committee that in 2005 the organization gave a grade of "D" to the state of the nation's infrastructure and said that an investment of $1.6 trillion by 2010 would be needed to bring the fix these public resources. At the time, that bad grade got a fair amount of attention. Since then:

Nothing approaching that level of investment has been made. Indeed, little has changed in the three years since we handed out that dismal grade, and establishing a longterm plan to finance the development and maintenance of our infrastructure remains a pressing national priority.

This nation continues to under-invest in infrastructure at the national level. The total of all federal spending for infrastructure as a share of all federal spending has steadily declined over the last 30 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

One of the more shameful examples of what Robert Kuttner adroitly calls "the squandering of America" is the failure of America to take care of its basic public assets, especially after the Bush administration inherited a government with a budget surplus that gave it the leeway to tackle that challenge intelligently. (Colleague Bill Scher has linked to some NBC News reports on how we're literally falling apart and is asking why the media, including NBC, isn't doing more to press this into the national debate.) Under the guise of controlling spending, the administration has shifted an increasing share of the national burden to state and local governments—where the same conservatives who say the federal government shouldn't tax to pay for these needs make the same argument at the state and local level—or encouraged turning public assets into private profit centers.

Now that the country is moving through a recession, there is an even more critical need to target government resources on projects that will produce jobs in the short run and leave the nation in the long run with the clean water, transportation, schools and other public facilities that a nation needs to be healthy and economically vibrant. As Congress considers a second economic stimulus package for short-term relief this month, it should authorize the creation of that infrastructure bank. Then let's have a serious debate about how to fund it and how to use it when the next president takes office.

The Time for Inaction Tour

Isaiah J. Poole — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:55:28 -0400

The conservative war against the war on poverty continues today as Arizona Sen. John McCain goes to the Ninth Ward in New Orleans. From what we've seen so far, McCain is coming to the still-devastated city with nothing that will actually address the compounded conservative failures of not protecting the city from the flood and failing afterward to rebuild.

He calls his tour of communities where the failures of conservatism have had their most graphic impact the "It's Time for Action Tour." But the only real action on this tour is on behalf of wealthy people and corporations, whose tax rates are more worthy of government attention than the plight of working people who can't pay their bills. For the latter, it's the same old, same old: Just as thousands of New Orleans residents were left to fend for themselves in the flood waters of Hurricane Katrina, you're going to be left on your own in today's rising waters of looming economic catastrophe.

McCain's speeches recall the "benign neglect" approach toward race and urban decay in the 1970s, where platitudes replaced the active engagement of the federal government in making sure that poor people of all races had a clear route up the economic ladder. As an unholy alliance of conservatives and week-kneed Democrats did then, McCain presents false choices between a robust government role to foster opportunity and personal initiative. Note what McCain said Wednesday in Inez, Kentucky:

I have no doubt President Johnson was serious and had the very best of intentions when he declared the war on poverty in America. But the army he enlisted was mostly drawn from the ranks of government bureaucracies. Government has a role to play in helping people who through no fault of their own are having a hard time. But government can't create good and lasting jobs outside of government. It can't pay lost wages. It can't dig coal from the earth. It can't buy you a house or send all your kids to college. It can't do your work for you. And you've never asked it to.

No, we've never asked government to "do our work for us." But it is wrong to suggest that government policy can't make a difference in what jobs are available, what consequences society suffers from digging coal from the earth, the business practices that affect our ability to buy and keep our homes, or whether college is affordable.

If government used its resources to move the country away from fossil-fuel dependency, as Democrats in Congress have been pushing to do, literally millions of green-collar jobs would be created in both the private and public sector. And government could jump-start this effort with just the money it is currently losing as a result of tax breaks to oil companies.

With a fraction of the money it is spending on the war in Iraq, the government could embark on a national program to rebuild its aging infrastructure of roads, bridges and sewers, as well as schools and other essential public facilities. Instead, McCain is pushing for a gas-tax holiday that will place such an effort further out of reach, while not addressing the fundamental economic problems, such as the fallen dollar, that are behind the rise in gas prices.

Perhaps most importantly, given the scope of the fundamental damage done to the economy over the past seven years, government has to do its job as referee and guardian of the public interest. It is not too much to ask government to protect our food from contamination or our mortgage agreements from deception. That's not government doing our work for us. It's government enabling us to do our work in a safe and just environment.

There are hundreds of policy choices the person who sits in the Oval Office can make with regard to how government should, or should not, address poverty and opportunity, and they all boil down to this: Will a government that is at its root "of the people, by the people and for the people" work on the people's behalf to foster economic opportunity, or will it work on behalf of the few?

For the people of Inez, Ky., and people throughout the country below or barely above the poverty line, the conservative answer, delivered so kindly and gently by McCain, is to show "a decent concern for your hard work" and then walk away. And, to be blunt about it, that's all that conservatives can do as long as they insist on spending $341 million a day on the war in Iraq while aiming to make President Bush's disastrous 2003 tax cuts permanent, ignoring the fact that the tax cuts did not boost the fortunes of middle-class families during the anemic economic recovery prior to 2007 and have had no appreciable effect on preventing the current recession. The math simply doesn't add up, just as it hasn't under President Bush.

McCain arrives at a New Orleans that is still reeling in part because little has been done to rebuild the stock of low-income housing that was lost during the hurricane. That was one of the chief crimes of ex-Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonse Jackson, one of the conservative apostles who in practice embraced the old benign neglect theory that the best urban policy is none at all. As a consequence, the availability of affordable housing is a crisis not only in New Orleans but in urban areas nationwide. Meanwhile, what the Bush administration did push—home ownership in a deregulated, Wild West financial market—has brought the economy to the brink of collapse.

(UPDATE: Jonathan Stein in Mother Jones looks at McCain's own response to Hurricane Katrina and says the record "suggests that he was part of the problem, not the solution." The article concludes:" McCain may talk sympathetically about New Orleans' recovery this week, but the record shows that when it mattered most, McCain failed to act. His passion for fiscal conservatism blinded him to a city and a region in need, and his Time for Action is simply too late.")

McCain is getting credit for going where his conservative friends would not dare show their faces. But he faces a stark choice. The conservative ideology he embraces includes a disdain for government, and ultimately a disdain for the people who clearly want government to be empowered to work on their behalf instead of merely on behalf of the wealthy. Unless he makes a clean break with that ideology, he can't claim to have a "decent concern" for the struggles of poor and middle-class Americans.

Click here for more on the continuing conservative failure behind Hurricane Katrina.

Let's Get Real Economic Stimulus

Isaiah J. Poole — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 10:19:35 -0400

It's now more clear than ever that the so-called economic stimulus package Congress passed earlier this year is inadequate. It is now time to demand that Congress get to work on finishing the job by passing a second economic stimulus package in the coming weeks—and do it on its own merits, without falling into the trap of linking its passage to more funding for the war in Iraq.

Families who are underwater already because of declining home values, rising energy prices and ballooning costs for other basic needs are not in a position to stimulate the economy with $600 rebate checks. That case is made vividly by a recently released report by the Center for Law and Social Policy. And business tax cuts on top of the tax cuts already lavished on corporate America will continue to be meaningless to American workers in the absence of a strategy that encourages investment in American jobs, not to mention investment in education, infrastructure and human needs.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus has taken the lead on moving a $118.9 billion stimulus package, offering to work with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to get it passed.

The proposed package represents the best thinking of a broad range of progressive policymakers and would fill in critical gaps left unaddressed in the earlier stimulus bill, including increased spending for unemployment insurance and food stamps; Medicaid payments to states; home foreclosure relief; and capital spending on schools, public housing, roads and sewer lines. (The Coalition for Human Needs has prepared a fact sheet with details of the plan and reasons why the elements are necessary.)

For the long term, the Progressive Caucus proposes a "Rebuild and Reinvest in America" program that would address the backlog in repairing and upgrading our public assets, from schools to transportation.

On Tuesday afternoon, the Emergency Coalition for America's Priorities met with a broad range of activist organizations to discuss strategies for moving the stimulus agenda forward. They were given a letter of support for a stimulus package and were told to begin a lobbying effort leading up to the week of May 5, when the House is expected to take up a a $102.5 billion emergency supplemental bill for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Some of the facts in the support letter being circulated:

1.3 million workers who have been unemployed for six months or linger were actively seeking work in March.
Food stamp recipients are spending nearly all of their allotments each month, which average $1 per meal, and rising food costs will mean food stamp allotments will fall far short of of the minimum families need to stave off hunger.
States are facing shortfalls of at least $39 billion, forcing cutbacks that could worsen the impact of a recession in areas where the cutbacks hit hardest.
Youth unemployment has risen 19 percent since 2000, a strong case for adding a summer youth employment component to a stimulus package.

President Bush, and the Republican who wants to succeed him in the White House, Arizona Sen. John McCain, have argued that Congress, have said that Congress should not move on a second stimulus package; they want Congress instead to make permanent the 2003 tax cuts for the wealthy that have widened the gap between the rich and the working class. So there is great temptation on Capitol Hill to link the stimulus package to something President Bush does want desperately: that supplemental war spending bill.

The misspending on the failed war in Iraq is significantly responsible for our domestic economic problems. Continuing that war should not be the price for beginning to repair the economic damage at home. The political challenge of the coming weeks is to get Congress to say yes to a meaningful short-term and long-term strategy for getting our economy back on track, without at the same time having to say yes to a war that long ago should have ended.

(Updated April 23, 2008, 11:45 a.m.)

Cancerous Conservatism Debilitates Workers

Isaiah J. Poole — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:25:40 -0400

Perhaps the ultimate workplace expression of conservative "you're-on-your-own" ideology is FedEx Ground, where all of the workers who deliver packages are not FedEx employees but are independent contractors.

FedEx sells that as "the ability to grow your own business." But for Jean Capobianco, a FedEx contractor who was the subject of a profile in Sunday's New Work Times, it meant that FedEx could fire her for, in effect, having cancer.

FedEx is among the most aggressive users of independent contracting as a way to get out from under the provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act, the bane of conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation, which derisively calls it a burdensome "Depression-era labor law," and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which touts independent contractors as a way to "avoid some of the legal and financial drawbacks of being an employer."

Drawbacks such as paying Social Security and payroll taxes, compliance with wage and hour rules, providing health and other benefits and allowing workers to choose union affiliation should they want to do so.

FedEx, as The Times reports, exercises almost total control over worker schedules, what they wear—even, Capobianco was quoted as saying, how workers wear their hair. Federal law says that workers can only be considered independent contractors if they have a degree of actual independence in setting the terms of their employment. But the Labor Department has been notably acquiescent in what labor activists, and legislators in a number of states, say is rampant abuse of the rules governing classification of independent contractors. In the absence of federal action, states have had to fill the void with court suits and legislation.

There is a bill in the Senate (S 2044, sponsored by Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.) that would require the Labor Department to more aggressively police abuses of independent contractor classifications so that employees will in fact have all of the rights of employees. The legislation has not moved very far in the Senate. There were roughly 10 million workers classified as independent contractors in 2005, according to a Government Accountability Office report. Their rights deserve the attention both on Capitol Hill and on the campaign trail.

♦ ♦ ♦

Another conservative outrage against workers—a Supreme Court ruling that makes it practically impossible for workers to file claims against employers for equal pay violations—is expected to get some favorable attention in the Senate this week.

The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (HR 2831) would undo the damage done by the court's conservative majority, which ruled that Ledbetter, an employee with Goodyear Tire and Rubber, could not recover damages for being paid less than men doing the same job because she did not discover the pay disparity quickly enough. (Because individual workers' pay is usually confidential, pay disparities could be undetected by workers for years, as it was in Ledbetter's case.)

The House has already passed this bill, and the Senate is expected to act on it Wednesday.

How serious is this issue? Women make 77 cents for every dollar a man makes. In other words, the average woman had to work from January 2007 until today to match what the average man had made by December 31.

Push for Workers' Rights

Isaiah J. Poole — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 16:45:17 -0400

Bitter? Of Course. Here's Why

Isaiah J. Poole — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 22:03:11 -0400

Honest discussion about the roots of working-class angst and how to address it has gotten seriously burned in the firestorm of controversy fanned around comments by Sen. Barack Obama that working-class people are "bitter" about the economy and government.

However poorly phrased his original comments were, they were based on a fundamental truth: that conservatism, having failed for more than three decades in its promise to bring broad prosperity to all Americans, has exploited the issues of God, guns and gays—and the lie that government is their enemy—to keep their con going.

For awhile it worked, as millions of voters were convinced to vote against their interests by conservatives armed with polarizing rhetoric. But there is no disputing the anger as these same working-class voters are finding that they've been duped.

The percentage of Americans polled by Gallup who say that they are worse off than they were five years ago—31 percent—is the highest recorded by the polling firm since it started asking the question in the mid-1960s. And that belief is based in reality: Median household income in 2006, $48,201, was lower in inflation-adjusted dollars than it was in 1999, the Census Bureau reports. The latest Democracy Corps memo includes a poll finding that 74 percent of Americans believe the economy is seriously off track.

That same memo also suggests that voters have caught on that conservatives who claimed they were taking government "off the backs" of the working class have put in into the pocket of corporations. "The focus of people’s anger are the corporate special interests that dominate government, producing a demand that politicians make it a priority to take back government for middle class Americans," the memo says.

But there's been a lot more interest among the punditocracy in branding Obama "elitist" for trying to synthesize this working-class anger than in talking about causes and solutions. As former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich writes in his blog:

Are Americans who have been left behind frustrated? Of course. And their frustrations, their anger and, yes, sometimes their bitterness, have been used since then -- by demagogues, by nationalists and xenophobes, by radical conservatives, by political nuts and fanatical fruitcakes – to blame immigrants and foreign traders, to blame blacks and the poor, to blame "liberal elites," to blame anyone and anything.

Rather than counter all this, the American media have wallowed in it. Some, like Fox News and talk radio, have given the haters and blamers their very own megaphones. The rest have merely "reported on" it. Instead of focusing on how to get Americans good jobs again; instead of admitting too many of our schools are failing and our kids are falling behind their contemporaries in Europe, Japan, and even China; instead of showing why we need a more progressive tax system to finance better schools and access to health care, and green technologies that might create new manufacturing jobs, our national discussion has been mired in the old politics.

Andy Ostroy of The Ostroy report writes:

Both Clinton and the McCainiacs know exactly what Obama was referring to when saying the nation's poor and middle classes were bitter. And why shouldn't they be? Starting with Ronald Reagan in the 80's, their values were co-opted and their loyalties misused and abused, and they were routinely directed towards hot-button issues like abortion, gay marriage and gun control. These Reagan Democrats, by the time George Bush and Karl Rove got through with them, felt duped, dirty and betrayed. And now they're still without proper health care, jobs, quality education for their kids, and are mired in a housing crisis. You're damned right they're bitter, and they ought to be. They were mercilessly used and abused. And that's what Obama was talking about.

Dave Lindoff at Democratic Underground writes of his experience in rural Republican communities in upstate New York that have been left impoverished by conservative government policies and the North American Free Trade Agreement, which led to the disappearance of thousands of factory jobs.

It’s Republicans who have whispered the poison in their ears that their high taxes are because “the Blacks” are getting all that welfare money and are getting all the jobs through “quotas.” It's the Republicans who have warned them about "hoards" of Mexicans coming across the border to steal their jobs. It’s the Republicans who have been warning them that Democrats are going to take their hunting rifles and shotguns away. It’s the Republicans and their Christian fundamentalist front men who have been saying that the Democrats have been causing the nation’s decline by supporting licentiousness and a “gay” agenda. And it's Republicans and Democrats who have been hyping the bogus issue of national defense to keep people from focusing on the deliberate dismantling of the U.S. economy that is underway. (Over years of Republican and Democratic administrations, the tax contribution of U.S. corporations to the national budget has fallen from 50% in 1940 to just 14% today. Between 1996 and 2000, 61% of all corporations and 39% or large corporations paid no taxes at all, and that situation has only gotten worse in the Bush years.)

Anything but the real issue, which is how to provide funds so that the children in places like Spencer and Hancock (towns in upstate New York) can get a decent education without bankrupting the local taxpayers, how those communities can get jobs again, so that their children won’t have to move out, how to ensure that everyone in town can have health insurance and access to medical care.

It is true that "bitterness" does not tell the whole story of these voters. Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz, in a study of white working-class voters for Brookings, says that these voters actually have "a bifurcated view of their economic situation":

On the one hand, they tend to believe that things have changed for the worse—that the economy is doing poorly, that the security that families once enjoyed is disappearing, that leaders just don't get it. On the other hand, these very same members of white working class believe that they are holding up their end of the economic bargain, that they are working hard and doing right by their families, that their story is one of optimism and hope, not pessimism and despair. Even today, with most white working class voters embracing a negative economic story overall, many still believe a positive economic story applies to themselves.

Their conclusion: A successful appeal to these voters would "connect economic security to economic opportunity." It would frame the progressive principles that brought the nation the New Deal and the Great Society and link them to the desires of individuals and families to move forward toward the American Dream. And, as the Democracy Corps has been saying, it is time "to change who government works for"—all of the people, not just the wealthy few.

Campaign for America's Future co-director Robert Borosage outlined the challenge in his post on working-class voters:

Progressives have to prove that government can work. That it can make health care and college affordable. That it can help generate good jobs here at home. That it can curb the Wall Street casino and insure that increased profits and productivity are widely shared. We have to take reinventing government seriously, not as a slogan or a gimmick, but as a fundamental project of reform.

Republican Sen. John McCain was scheduled to give an address Monday in which he was expected to pile on to the so-called "elitism" of telling the truth of the working-class mood. But if McCain stays within the framework of the conservatism he espouses—a conservatism that truly wants government, as the title of Grover Norquist's latest book suggests, to "leave us alone," abandoned in the midst of record economic inequality, instability and injustice—he will be at a loss to offer more than stale, attack-dog rhetoric. With the bankruptcy of conservative ideology as plain as the foreclosure signs popping up on millions of homes around the country and the lengthening lines at unemployment offices, voters have lost their taste for that bitter pill.