Thomas Edsall’s brilliant piece this morning provides one of the best syntheses of the cynical and cruel bets that the Bircherized GOP is making this election – that White Middle & working class voters are very ripe for the ultimate coup of giving up the Social Safety net and willfully committing economic suicide. By choosing Paul Ryan, the GOP are signaling that they have the best agent and loudest megaphone to amplify White working class economic insecurity into weaponized racial resentment to yield political gold.
As Edsall shows, GOP already counting on winning the election with energized White voters only, now cynically signal to use Paul Ryan (the very architect of dismantling the social safety net) to score high marks with White blue collar workers. They are counting on converting Ryan from the flesh and blood congressman with an actual dismal legislative trail, into an airbrushed cipher to accomplish this feat; a retroactive Rorschach Test.
We liberals see Ryan posing the ultimate conundrum for blue collar White workers: fall in love with their executioner or preserve their own economic interests.
But GOP are betting that they have the Corporate & SuperPac backed mirage machinery ready to steer the outcome, facts be damned.
What are those facts anyway?…
Who stands to lose the most if the pillars of the social safety net are dismantled could not be clearer than Edsall’s summation here:
The overarching strategy of the Romney campaign is to turn out as many white voters as possible in a contest that may well come down to turnout on Election Day.
The Ryan budget, however, tackles a broad array of domestic social spending, and in slicing Medicare and Medicaid, Ryan’s plan imposes harsh costs on a very large proportion of white voters. An overwhelming majority of Medicare recipients, 78 percent, are white. Just 9 percent are black, 8 percent Hispanic, 2 percent Asian-American and 3 percent “other.” A solid plurality, 43 percent, of Medicaid recipients is white, 22 percent are black, 28 percent Hispanic and the rest are “other.”
A February 2012 study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities of all federal entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance Program, unemployment insurance, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (welfare), the school lunch program, Earned Income Tax Credit, and the refundable Child Tax Credit – finds that non-Hispanic whites, who make up 64 percent of the nation’s population, received 69 percent of the total benefits. Hispanics, who make up 16 percent of the population, received 12 percent of the payments, and blacks, who account for 12 percent of the population, received 14 percent of the benefits.
The Obama campaign and its allies are preparing to show that the Ryan plan will severely cut social insurance programs that not only provide help to poor people, but also to many in the middle class, including millions and millions of whites. The Romney campaign and its supporters, in turn, will try to make the case that these programs go disproportionately to the undeserving (and heavily minority) poor, who should not be subsidized by taxpayer dollars.
That gap between reality and fiction is the hallowed ground upon which this election rests as far as domestic turf is concerned. Each side of the political divide thinks it has the best method of winning that turf war.
The historical record of successfully winning elections on various iterations of “The Southern Strategy” probably justifies Republicans’ belief that this time will be no different if they morph White Voters’ economic anxieties into the ready narrative of undeserving lazy minorities taking things from them. And who better to co-lead in re-sowing that poison than the dude who is a cross between junior Reagan/Brawny Guy/Just For Men model/faux nerd? Finally, after a long search they believe they have found their own leg tingling Obama. So they are juiced up.
Democrats are similarly juiced up. They believe Ryan provides not only the human billboard upon which to hang the degeneracy of the GOP, but he also serves liberals’ quest for an emotion-triggering piñata. Yes, yes, his Budget Plan will be the turf for FACTUAL attacks on Republican vision for America. But there’s more.
Edsall mentioned the novel choreography to the Democrats’ efforts to define Romney thus far. As Robert Draper already reported recently in his NYT piece, Democrats found out through polling that FACTS about Romney and especially the Ryan Budget were not going get them any traction with voters. According to Draper, Bill Burton’s PrioritiesUSA Action found out a while ago that voters simply refused to believe that any politician would create let alone enact such a cruel policy document as the Ryan Budget. They flat out rejected the premise.
So PrioritiesUSA Action Bain ads were meant to accomplish what Burton called:
“building a ‘thought structure’ among voters of a guy who makes decisions based on profits, and not on the concerns of middle class families.”
Now, we know from
polling, and even John McCain that the
Bain ads were taking their toll, and thus we Libs can conclude with EVIDENCE that the desired "Thought Structure" was getting nicely built. Romney's mad dash to change the subject with the veep choice, reveals the panicked freakout in his camp. Ryan is the narrative bandaid to not only stanch the bleeding from Democrats' appeal to the "thought Structure" of White Working Class voters, but more importantly to RE-DIRECT said voters' minds.
So the coming weeks will tell us which side is winning that fight over America's working class, and particularly White working class. Obviously, such naked demographic appeals seem crass and even offensive.
But here's the thing: it isn't Democrats who are insulting the intelligence of White blue collar voters. Democrats are fighting to preserve the economic security of ALL Americans especially in the Middle and working classes. The various ethnic minorities & other coalition members who belong to the Democratic party are in it because of their rational VESTED ECONOMIC & SOCIAL interests. And so they cannot be taken for granted. They will up and leave when the democratic Party ceases to advocate those interests.
As frustrating as many people find Democrats (and yes yes, there is a stench of corporate coddling), they are STILL the one party that shed its past racist baggage and transformed itself into a coalition of diverse Americans united to advance the civil rights, economic security, and a social safety net for the benefit of the American people.
The Republican party has gone from Abe Lincoln to "John Birch" Koch Party that caters ONLY to the wealthy and corporations. Americans who belong to the 99% who can be hoodwinked by the false flag agenda of the GOP paymasters are the ones we are fighting to win, if not yet to our side, at least to scrutinize carefully the Ryan-packaged CRAP that the GOP are trying to sell them.
The two political parties are not the SAME. So let's do our part to WIN to save this country from a regressive band of corporate bandits, masquerading as patriots
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