Edwards' Framing of his Signature Poverty and Minimum Wage Issues Won't Resonate with Middle Class America
I like John Edwards quite a lot and I was very discouraged that neither he nor Howard Dean was the Democratic nominee for President in 2004. John Edwards has a compelling personal history about working to make it through law school and then using his legal education as a trial lawyer against corporations. Unfortunately, the signature issues that Edwards has chosen and his framing of these issues, while laudable as matters of policy, would gaurantee electoral defeat for Democrats in 2008.
Edwards often tells his story of growing up in North Carolina as the son of a textile mill worker and a postal service employee, and has said he believes his modest upbringing resonates with working class voters -- one of the Democratic Party's core constituencies.
Born in Seneca, S.C., Edwards moved with his family to Robbins, N.C., as a boy and attended public school there. His parents belonged to labor unions, and Edwards was the first in his family to earn a college degree. After graduating from North Carolina State University in 1974, Edwards went on to earn a law degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
After practicing law in Tennessee for a few years, Edwards and his wife Elizabeth returned to North Carolina where he began to practice trial law at a plaintiff's firm. From the beginning Edwards had enormous success as a trial lawyer, earning large sums for his clients in negligence and malpractice claims. A fellow attorney told the Boston Globe that Edwards "then and now he had almost a Clintonesque ability to understand a complex subject and break it down to very simple terms."
After prevailing in several high-profile cases, Edwards' courtroom career culminated in 1997 when he won North Carolina's largest personal injury verdict ever for a young girl who had been permanently disabled by a swimming pool drain. [ http://www.pbs.org/... ]
Yesterday, John Edwards reintroduced himself to many new people here at DailyKos by submitting a short diary and spending an hour addressing questions and issues. In his brief diary, John Edwards said,
Hello. John Edwards here. I have an hour or so and I would like to use it by listening to you. Tell me what is going on out there....
I also hope that we can talk about Uganda -- I recently traveled there and am hoping some of you might be interested in talking about the humanitarian crises there and what needs to be done to help. I'd also love to talk to all of you about the issues I am focused on right now -- like poverty and efforts to raise the minimum wage. [ http://www.epi.org/... ]
According to the Economic Policy Institute,
An estimated 14.9 million workers (11% of the workforce) would receive an increase in their hourly wage rate if the minimum wage were raised from $5.15 to $7.25 by 2008. Of these workers, 6.6 million workers (5% of the workforce) currently earn less than $7.25 and would be directly affected by an increase. The additional 8.3 million workers (6% of the workforce) earning slightly above the minimum would also be likely to benefit from an increase due to "spillover effects". [ http://www.epi.org/... ]
Increasing the minimum wage is vitally important for 14.9 million workers, but it will do nothing for many other workers who earn more than the minimum but still are not able to afford health care, pay they mortgages and send their children to college. The primary focus on raising the minimum wage sends a message to voters that John Edwards is primarily concerned about someone other than them. Meanwhile voters often are antagonistic to government efforts to help the poor.
During the "Reagan Revolution", Reagan successfully feuled anger against people on welfare, accusing them of being lazy, dishonest and not worthy of any help they might receive from the Government.
Over a period of about five years, Reagan told the story of the "Chicago welfare queen" who had 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards, and collected benefits for "four nonexisting deceased husbands," bilking the government out of "over $150,000." The real welfare recipient to whom Reagan referred was actually convicted for using two different aliases to collect $8,000. Reagan continued to use his version of the story even after the press pointed out the actual facts of the case to him. [ http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/... ]
After centuries of indoctrination, many Americans associate poverty with blackness and blackness with laziness. [
http://www.aaregistry.com/... ] Reagan didn't create this meme, but Reagan used it as part of a strategy to convince even poor, working-class white voters to vote for Republicans, to end welfare instead of supporting Democrats who might maintain or expand welfare programs.
Reagan also deftly took advantage of the public perception that poor people are black ("Chicago welfare queen"), even though most poor people in America are white. The perception that helping the poor means helping Black people is one of the reasons that helping the poor is not more popular in America.
Social psychologists developed the notion of scripts to refer to "a coherent sequence of events expected by the individual, involving him either as a participant or as an observer." The utility of scripts lies in their ability to distill information, thus aiding in quicker comprehension. Scripts set up predictable roles and actions that, in turn, offer clear indicators of what is most likely to follow from them.
The narrative (or storytelling) script for the welfare queen has two central features. First, it tells us that the majority of welfare recipients are women. Of course, the data show otherwise. The largest single group "on welfare" is children about one in every four kids under the age of 18 receives welfare benefits. Nonetheless, given this script, most of the public connects welfare to gender. For instance, the "feminization of poverty" is a common explanation of American poverty rates.
This script then leads people to the next step in this association, what could be called a "gender narrative"poor women choose to be on welfare because they fail to adhere to a set of core American values. From this perspective, single motherhood, divorce, desertion and a failure to hold the family unit together become the causes of their impoverished condition. In short, welfare dependency is a function of the moral failings of poor women. Their unwillingness to adhere to the principles of hard work, family values and sexual control thus deem them as undeserving.
The second key image that emerges from the welfare queen script is that most women on welfare are African- American. While African-American women do represent more than one-third of the women on welfare, in census data released in 1998 they accounted for only a bit more than 10 percent of the total number of welfare recipients.
This narrative script skillfully locating the "intersection" of race and gender was given its most public voice by then-candidate Reagan on the 1976 campaign trail. During that election Reagan often recited the story of a woman from Chicago's South Side who was arrested for welfare fraud. "She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veteran's benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She's got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names." David Zucchino, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, spent a year with two welfare mothers in Philadelphia and wrote "The Myth of the Welfare Queen." According to Zucchino, "[T]he image of the big-spending, lavish-living, Cadillac-driving welfare queen was by then thoroughly embedded in American folklore."
The implicit racial coding is readily apparent. The woman Reagan was talking about was African-American. Veiled references to African-American women, and African-Americans in general, were equally transparent. In other words, while poor women of all races get blamed for their impoverished condition, African-American women commit the most egregious violations of American values. This story line taps into stereotypes about both women (uncontrolled sexuality) and African-Americans (laziness). [ http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/... ]
Bill Clinton promised to "end welfare as we know it" because he understood that much of America has a low opinion of poor people and, furthermore, associates poverty with laziness and black people.
ONE OF THE loudest--and most bipartisan--rounds of applause during Bill Clinton's 1993 State of the Union address came when he reiterated his promise to "end welfare as we know it." During the campaign, Clinton repeatedly said that welfare benefits should be time-limited, and that, after two years of job training and education, welfare recipients who can work should be required to do so. "We have to end welfare as a way of life," he told Congress and the nation, "and make it a path to independence and dignity."
Clinton's rhetoric taps into a deeply held feeling among the public and politicians that long-term welfare dependency is a serious and growing social problem. [ http://findarticles.com/... ]
Although Republicans had worked hard and successfuly to feul a public perception of Democrats as the "party of welfare", Clinton was able to neutralize this meme by promising to "end welfare" such as it had existed up to that time - the welfare against which many Americans had become so angry and resentful.
Starting from the premise of ending welfare, Clinton was able to convince America to support at least some of his programs that would help those who were leaving welfare, such as increased funding for daycare, job training programs and the earned-income tax credit. These programs helped not only minimum wage workers but working class workers who earned considerably more than the minimum wage. But the stated political goal of these anti-poverty programs - the goals that enabled them to receive public support and not be branded as "liberal"- was the revolutionary idea (coming from a Democrat) of "ending welfare as we know it."
A work requirement might also reduce the attractiveness of welfare for young people with poor earnings prospects. If young people know that the welfare agency is serious about mandating work, they will be less likely to view AFDC dependency as a possible life option. Over the long run, this could change behavior substantially--as the implications of the new regime sink into the consciousness of disadvantaged teens. [ http://findarticles.com/... ]
If the programs had been publicly perceived as spending money to help people on welfare or to help the poor (which many people see as synonymous), rather than something to get them off the dole, it is doubtful that these programs would have garnered the broadbased support that they needed in an increasingly conservative political environment, in the wake of the conservative and popular Reagan revolution.
Can even the poor be counted on to vote for an anti-poverty platform?
In the Ipsos-Reid surveys, 38% of voters in "strong Bush" counties said they had incomes below $30,000 while 7% said that their incomes exceeded $100,000. In "strong Gore" counties, by contrast, only 29% of voters pegged their household income below $30,000, while 14% said that it was above $100,000. citations omitted
One of the more glaring differences between the two groups is income. The average per capita income in blue states was $27,899 in 1998 versus $23,722 for the "red states", per the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Of the top ten metropolitan areas with the highest per capita income, eight were from blue states; the other two were from the highly contested state of Florida. Similarly, eight of the ten metro areas with the lowest income levels were from red states. [ http://www.stat.columbia.edu/... ]
Although the meaning of these statistics can be argued endlessly, these numbers seem to indicate that many people who stand to benefit most from programs to help the poor are voting Republican instead. Meanwhile, many wealthier people are voting Democratic and every effort must be made to keep their allegiance while reaching out to others. Poor people often don't vote for candidates who expressly want to help poor people.
Unfortunately, not much has changed in America's attitudes toward poverty and the poor (which many people think really means "black people") since the days when Clinton was running for President. Americans - even many of the poor ones - still isn't eager to spend public monies alleviating poverty, partly because America has ambivalent or antagonistic attitudes toward the poor themselves. Even many poor and working class people buy into the "script" that says that the poor and welfare recipients are "lazy" and "underserving" of governmental help. [ http://findarticles.com/... ]
As much as I like John Edwards, I believe his introduction to his diary of yesterday illustrates why his chosen message and positioning of himself as a candidate will not lead to a Presidential victory for Democrats in 2008. Few people want to identify as being poor. When it comes to increasing the minimum wage,
The benefits of the increase disproportionately help those working households at the bottom of the income scale. [ http://www.epi.org/... ]
This is not a bad thing, but those who earn over $7.50 per hour will not be directly helped. So, although the minimum wage desperately needs to be increased, the emphasis on increasing the minimum wage may actually serve to alienate other workers who are earning just a little bit more, because it makes them feel that "John Edwards doesn't want to help people like me." This is not an argument against increasing the minimum wage; it is an argument against making that the centerpeice of an American presidential campaign in the current environment.
Having said all of this, laying out the hard facts of post-liberalism, I expect that a lot of readers will interpret this discussion to mean that I am against helping the poor or that I believe black people are unworthy of help. This couldn't be further from the truth. I am black and have benefitted from many programs that help the non-rich like myself to succeed, such as student loans, Pell Grants and even unemployment insurance on occasion. I personally know many people who were only able to complete college because welfare was available to enable them to support themselves and their children while completing their coursework, and now they are well-established, well-respected middle-class professionals.
But most of America doesn't see this issue as I and DK participants do. Much of America believes that the poor are breaking the Government's back by receiving benefits they don't need and don't deserve. It's insane, but the election of Ronald Reagan and the destruction of many safety-net programs with public support confirmed what I'm saying. This "wedge issue" will make it impossible for a Democrat to succeed who is perceived as "poor-centric".
Anti-poor, anti-black attitudes are a heavy cudgeon that Republicans have historically used very successfully to convince even poor white people to vote against their economic interests. This is why, politically, helping the poor has become a losing electoral proposition in America, an uncompelling premise for a presidential candidacy, regardless of its obvious merits as social policy.
Instead, a presidential candidacy has got to focus thematically on the middle class, the people who work everyday and are trying to make ends meet.
As Elizabeth Warren said at TPM Cafe recently,
Why care about middle class economic issues? Why not focus energy directly on the poor?
- Programs for the poor are poor programs. To get the momentum to pass social safety-net proposals--and more importantly, to hang on to them in hard times--such programs need to help a broad swath of society. Look at the difference in constituent support for Medicaid for poor families and Medicare for all seniors.
- The poor need a vibrant middle class to create the opportunities for upward mobility--jobs, housing, schools. If the middle flourishes, the chances increase that there will be room for the working poor and very poor to move up. [ http://www.tpmcafe.com/... ]
Even if the poor were a majority of Americans, it would not be possible to gain their support by urging programs for the poor.
most of those living below the poverty line did not consider themselves to be poor. Fifty-nine percent of those respondents called themselves "low income," 13 percent said they were "middle income" and 24 percent said they were poor. [ http://www.findarticles.com/... ]
People simply don't like to identify themselves as members of group that society holds in disregard. This may help to explain why gays in Congress identify publicly as Republicans (in-group) rather than as gays (out-group). Appeals that require self-identification as member of an outgroup and campaigns that advocate for offering help to an out-group are and up-hill battle and often fail. [
http://www.findarticles.com/... ]
It is an embarassment that America is so rich and accept that so many people living in poverty. John Edwards is to be congratulated for his concern for the poor, for "the least of these". I he can reformulate this concern and present it in a way that makes it more broad-based and susceptible to public support. Unfortunately, John Edwards is creating a brand for himself that may be impossible to erase from the public's mind in time for the general election campaign of 2008. Because he has campaigned extensively around the country over the last two years talking principally about ending poverty, the damage to the Edwards brand may already have been done in the minds of middle America. He may already be seen as someone who "wants to help those people, instead of helping me". The meme may be, for middle and upper America, that John Edwards "wants to help those people at my expense".
Finally, many readers will surely point out that I, "francislholland", am notorious at DailyKos for my die-hard support of Hillary Clinton, just as surely as day is associated with daylight and night with darkness. This is true. I support Hillary Clinton because I believe that the positions she takes, as much as the anger us at DailyKos (or precisely because they do), are the ones that will lead Americans to vote Democratic in 2008. In contrast, and regardless of who wins the nomination in 2008, I am absolutely certain that, although an anti-povery platform could garner support in the primaries, it can not and will not take the Democrats to victory in the 2008 general election. I still am favorably impressed with the personal story of John Edwards, but I believe his signature issues would spell defeat for the Party in 2008.