Part One: The Planting of Seeds
It was October 2012, during the home stretch of President Barack Obama’s reelection bid versus Mitt Romney, when former General Electric CEO Jack Welch insisted on Neil Cavuto’s Fox News Channel show that the numbers in the new September jobs report were “cooked” by the Obama Administration. He doubled down on this claim to the Wall Street Journal, saying that his contention was “fact-based.” Later the same day Welch admitted on MSNBC that he had “no evidence” to back up his assertion, but that the numbers “just don’t add up.”
To Welch, Cavuto, the Republican establishment, and to virtually its entire political base, none of it added up. How was it possible that this Obama—this socialist, anti-capitalist, pro-government Democrat—could somehow be leading America out of the worst economic crisis in 80 years? After all, he said on the campaign trail, “…you didn’t build that…” when speaking to small business owners (in absentia)—a line to which the reply, “We Built It!” was a theme of the Republican National Convention that summer. The only problem was that President Obama was referring to “roads and bridges,” and that small business owners did not personally build them.
For Jack Welch to contend that the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the specifically and intentionally non-political career professionals who compile and analyze the country’s employment data, was in cahoots with the Obama Administration to tilt the election in the president’s favor, was a major controversy—and legitimately so. The September 2012 report showed the addition of 114,000 private sector jobs, and an unemployment rate that fell from 8.2 percent to 7.8 percent in one month, the lowest since Obama took office. The report also marked the return of almost half of the jobs lost since the recession started, 4.3 million of 8.8 million, a month before the election.
In the context of where the Republican Party would go after its loss in 2012, the Welch incident was a signal moment in the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories into the broader GOP electorate. A bitter and desperate right wing media establishment, led by Fox News, latched onto the Welch conspiracy in much the same way they had two years earlier when Donald J. Trump embraced birtherism as his pet project. The grand conspiracy theory that the first Black President of the United States was born in Kenya, and that his parents, alone or working with others, managed to create both a contemporaneous but false record of his birth in the state of Hawaii, and a printed birth announcement in the Honolulu newspaper, all in anticipation that Barack Obama would, forty-seven years later, run for the office of president, was, to right wing media, a legitimate news story worthy of investigation.
After months of high profile television appearances by Trump, along with numerous lawsuits filed by activists across the country, all of which were summarily dismissed, President Obama gave in and released a short-from birth certificate (the one just about all of us have), which, of course, was not enough for Trump and the other birthers. The State of Hawaii later released the full, original, long form birth certificate for the president, which soon after was the subject of the very public, point-at-him-and-laugh humiliation of Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner on the same night that Obama ordered the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. Not a bad night’s work, and perhaps the worst night of Trump’s life. Not only was he mocked and laughed at by a room filled with the most prominent people in the country, live on national television, but his signature mission, the loudmouthed questioning of the legitimacy of America’s first Black president, was shoved down his throat in the most hurtful way imaginable by the President himself.
The Right’s descent into an alternate reality, an effort to avoid good news for the country that America was recovering from some of its darkest days, was traveled hand in hand by right wing media, the conservative electorate and eventually the GOP establishment. Electoral victories in 2010 and 2014 only bolstered the influence of the wing nut wing of the Republican Party, and while still a minority, the Tea Party/Black Helicopter contingent would soon take control—the mob was breaching the gate and soon the inmates would be running the asylum.
Today, in the heat of the 2016 general election campaign, I defy anyone to find one Trump for President supporter who actually believes that the national unemployment rate is 4.9 percent, and that more than fifteen million private sector jobs have been created over a record 78 straight months. Both are statistics provided by the same BLS that was reporting 10 percent unemployment in 2009, and 7.8 percent in September 2012, a number that today would be campaign fodder for a party that considered it political venom four years ago. Trump himself claims that the “real” unemployment rate is “…probably 28, 29, as high as 35 [percent]. In fact, I even heard recently 42 percent,” which, of course, is completely ridiculous, and is 17 percent higher than its worst at the peak of the Great Depression. Anyone who graduated high school with greater than a C-minus average should see right through this ridiculous lie, right? I mean, this requires more like “not educated,” not just “poorly educated.” Right?
Well…not when it’s not convenient. When Trump introduced his vice presidential running mate, Governor Mike Pence of Indiana, he bragged on stage, “Indiana, their unemployment rate has fallen, when he was there, when he started, 8.4 percent when he was governor, when he took over, to less than five percent in May of 2016.” So we are to believe that the United States’ national unemployment rate is 28 to 42 percent, but that Indiana’s unemployment rate is a real five percent? Because, as we all know, the economic powerhouse of America is Indiana. Governor John Kasich of Ohio also boasted about 300,000+ jobs created in his state, during his failed primary campaign for president—but he didn’t bother going down the conspiracy theory route by claiming the “real” national rate was phony. Of course, Kasich was an adult, most of whose thought processes seemed to be based in reality—a sure fire losing proposition in the 2016 Republican primary campaign.
One way the Trump’s (Donald Jr. included) try to explain how the “real” unemployment rate is quadruple or more the stated rate, is to claim that those who have given up finding a job are “counted as employed,” or, I guess, “not unemployed.” Of course this is another ridiculous lie. The general rate we all hear is based on the BLS “U3 Survey,” which estimates the number of people who are employed, plus those who are available to work, and are actively looking for a job but do not have one, whether they are receiving unemployment benefits or not. Those who have given up looking for a job, and of course are not receiving unemployment benefits, are counted in the “U6 Survey,” from which the Labor Participation Rate comes, another cheap GOP tactic used to divert attention from the falling U3 rate, now 4.9 percent. This U6 Survey counts everyone over age 16 who is not institutionalized, to the age of death, to determine how many are not in the labor force, and among those the number who are able to work but have given up looking. That “U6 unemployment rate” is, as one would expect, the highest number, and is these days around 9.5%, still the lowest since 2008. The U3 rate tends to always be about half the U6 rate—it is now, as it was 40 years ago, and it was at the bottom of the recession, more or less. Those people who have given up looking for work, the ones about which the Trump’s blather, are counted in the U6 rate. They are the difference between the U3 and the U6 rate. They are nowhere counted as employed.
When unofficial king of all political liars, Sean Hannity, talks about “95 million out of the workforce,” he is counting your 84-year-old mother as not in the workforce, along with the woman down the street who inherited $10 million and does not work, along with Mitt Romney, as well as your sixteen year old kid who hasn’t started his or her first “real” job. None of them are in the workforce and this is who Hannity counts as burdens of the state created and supported by President B. Hussein Obama. Kind of like Romney’s famous “47 percent” included mostly retirees and disabled veterans, as those who do not pay federal income tax, and who he and his ilk count as “takers” in our society.
GOP party self affiliation went down five percent six years after the administration of President George W. Bush, millions fleeing the party for good after two botched and disastrous wars, one based on faulty intelligence, trillions added to the national debt, seven years without getting bin Laden, and, to top it off, total economic meltdown, millions losing their savings, homes and jobs—lest we not forget hundreds of failed banks and major corporations, and the near death experience of that little economic engine known as the U.S. auto industry. That’s all.
Add the ridiculous lies to a record of disaster, and many clear thinking voters, including yours truly, left the Republican Party for good. As President Obama scored one success after another, as we saw our own lives and those of people in our communities first, stabilize, then improve, even if slowly, we became more comfortable with our new political home. We began to attach greater meaning to what had been our standard, “I’m a Republican, but…” introduction when explaining our political beliefs, and to the fact that each of those “buts” represented some value that we held dear, even if our political party did not. Before long we had more buts in our faces than a stag party, and the time came to grow up, take a step back, and start with what “I believe” first, not what we had been taught to believe. This is like losing one’s religion—I will say more difficult for some—and requires the two character traits we all say really matter, but we seem to seldom expect from our leaders: honesty and humility—the honesty to objectively examine what you thought you knew—to be a rebel and question your personal orthodoxy based only on accurate history, facts, and the reality we live every day. Once you accept reality, humility will be required to admit you have been wrong all these years, but if your mission in life involves truth, your embarrassment will be replaced with a thirsting desire to get it right this time, and for as long as you care about politics.
For me it took the last game in a 104-year college football rivalry, along with getting shot in the head. But I was stubborn.