Since
Garance at the Prospect mentioned I was one of the bloggers to meet Warner "up close and personal" at YearlyKos, I thought I give my reaction which is both more positive and more negative than Matt Y's "
where's the beef" reaction.
Bloggers are becoming more horse race-oriented than the worst of the old campaign journalists so let me generally ignore the tactical evaluation. (Although given the media coverage of the Stratosphere party, I give a thumbs up to the big party bash; no question Warner got his money's worth; and better it went to union hotel workers to deliver chocolate fountains to weary bloggers than to ten or twenty seconds of a random ad buy.)
But to substance:
On the positive, Warner's speech to the convention was more than a list of talking points. It was a narrative about bringing Virginia together around expanding health care for the poor and delivering jobs to communities suffering from deindustrialization. He also made the case that energy-efficiency at home is a job creator, far better than buying overseas oil which creates few jobs at home-- and that's one of the smartest themes any candidate should be making.
But let me return to his argument about bringing jobs to rural Virginia. He painted a nice story about education and retraining leading to software jobs springing up in rural towns, especially if supported by strong investments in broadband locally.
All to the good as far as it goes. But the story hides one of the big lies of DLCish economic policy, which is that the key to improving wages is just more education and more training. While that's ONE good thing to do, the hard reality is that a large portion of new job creation in the future will not be high-tech jobs but traditional service jobs. Warner had essentially NOTHING in his speech about how to raise wages for those in traditional service or remaining manufacturing jobs, no mention of the minimum wage or other policies to help the workers who will make up the vast bulk of new jobs.
In the blogger followup session, I pointed out to Warner that the Las Vegas region is the fastest growing area in the country, its middle class growth founded on good unionized jobs in its core hotel-casino industry. Warner punted on that question and said that not everyone could move to Vegas, where he should have been advocating bringing the wage standards of Vegas for basic service jobs to other regions. For most Americans, it's the wage standards in these basic non-tech jobs that will matter for the future of the middle class, not a few high-profile software jobs recruited to a few towns.
As this Bureau of Labor Statistics projection outlines, very few projected new jobs will be in what people think of as "high-tech" jobs like software. Here is the key sentence:
Employment in professional, scientific, and technical services will grow by 28.4 percent and add 1.9 million new jobs by 2014.
This is the category for what most people think of as high-tech jobs, and it'll add just 1.9 million jobs in the next decade. Of course, many other jobs will become more technically-oriented, so education and training is still a good thing, but it's a mirage to argue that you can retrain a bunch of ex-autoworkers or ex-textile mill operators and replace them with software engineers.
In fact, by occupation, the largest total number of jobs that will be added in the next decade will be retail salepersons (i.e roughly 800,000 new Wal-Mart clerks et al). Registered nurses are also supposed to do well, so more training there will be helpful, but in the top ten occupations with numerical job growth, most of the jobs are basic service jobs such as customer service representatives, janitors, waiters and waitresses, food preparation including fast food, home health aides, and nursing aides.
Warner needs a policy that addresses the hopes and aspirations of the millions of people who will take these new jobs, which in most areas of the country pay very badly. But they are not inherently "bad jobs"-- janitors in New York City and a number of other unionized towns make a living wage for their families and in towns like Vegas, cooks and food prep workers make good solid union wages that allow them to buy homes for their families.
Warner threw a big party in Vegas where his largesse went to fuel the middle class lives of those Vegas service workers. Maybe he can learn a lesson from that and think about how strong wage standards can assure that all money funnelled into services can build a middle class life for working families across the nation. Words like "minimum wage", the "freedom to form unions," and "wage enforcement" will have to become a more regular part of his stump speech.
But I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. If he can combine his jobs and environment rap and expanded health care story with a real commitment to raise wages for the tens of millions of workers who will never get a high-tech job, he might end up with a winning stump speech-- and maybe even the Presidency. But he has a bit of a way to go right now.