This is my first diary so please excuse me if I don't do this correctly. I was born in Denver and later relocated to New Mexico to finish high school. Growing up I didn't realize how liberal my mother (a lawyer no less) and her family were but as time has gone by I have become more and more thankful for that upbringing. After high school I moved to the heart of Texas to attend Texas A&M University. To say I experienced "culture shock" when I got here is an understatement. I went from knowing next to no racists to being surrounded by them. I went from being in a religiously tolerant state to being in a religiously hypocritical state. I went from having a political opinion to being afraid to open my mouth for fear of being ganged up on for being some damned "liberal."
Living in Texas has helped me grow as a person in many respects. I have now completed two degrees and working on my third (a PhD in genetics). I no longer hold my tongue about politics or the hypocrisy I see. I have seen the country travel down a dangerous road and I've actually seen people wake up to it. Even in this highly conservative city in the heart of Bush country I can see a glimmer of hope. I can't sum up who I am in a few short paragraphs. I have experienced many ups and downs along the way but I still strive for the American Dream.
I'm pretty sure that most of us on here understand that the economy does better under Democratic Presidents than it does under Republican Presidents. We've seen various graphs and charts and to us it's a no brainer. But what about the rest of the country? What has the Democratic Party failed to do to get the message out to the masses that the economy really does do better when we're in control? Sure we can say that Republicans vote based on "God, gays and guns" and that there's racism and xenophobia involved in their decision making. Why else would any semi-rational person continue to vote against their economic self interest?
I personally blame the media for a lot of this in terms of their coverage of Democratic candidates compared to Republicans. Remembering the doomed 2000 elections I remember that no one would touch Bush but they went after Gore like sharks to chum. Had the media done their job Bush would have been revealed as the lazy, subpar, uneducated (well, he may be educated but he lacks intelligence) dolt that he is. And we can see it in their current coverage of McCain today. Anyway we all know this so I'll leave it at that. But more than the media I blame the Democratic Party for their failure to message...anything! The one thing the right wing can do is to get their message out regardless of how distorted/false/irrational it is.
I truly feel that if we can message this the right way we can "obliterate" (as Hillary would say) the Republican Party...well maybe not (it's worth dreaming about though) but at least severely injure it.
Larry Bartels, a political professor at Princeton, wrote the book "Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age." Yesterday he published an article in New York Times addressing the results of his historical perspective on income inequality and political representation.
Bartels writes that:
The past three decades have seen a momentous shift: The rich became vastly richer while working-class wages stagnated. Economists say 80 percent of net income gains since 1980 went to people in the top 1 percent of the income distribution, boosting their share of total income to levels unseen since before the Great Depression.
Despite the historic magnitude of this shift, inequality has thus far had little traction as a political issue. Many Americans seem to accept the conservative view that escalating inequality reflects "free market" forces immune to amelioration through public policy. As Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson put it, perhaps a bit defensively, the growing income gap "is simply an economic reality, and it is neither fair nor useful to blame any political party." Paulson’s assertion, however, is strongly contradicted by the historical record. While technology, demographic trends and globalization are clearly important, purely economic accounts ignore what may be the most important influence on changing U.S. income distribution — the contrasting policy choices of Republican and Democratic presidents.
The Census Bureau has tracked the economic fortunes of affluent, middle-class and poor American families for six decades. According to my analysis, these tabulations reveal a wide partisan disparity in income growth. The real incomes of middle-class families grew more than twice as fast under Democratic presidents as they did under Republican presidents. Even more remarkable, the real incomes of working-poor families (at the 20th percentile of the income distribution) grew six times as fast when Democrats held the White House. Only the incomes of affluent families were relatively impervious to partisan politics, growing robustly under Democrats and Republicans alike.
The cumulative effect of these partisan differences is enormous. If the pattern of income growth under postwar Republican presidents had matched the pattern under Democrats, incomes would be more equal now than they were in 1950 — a far cry from the contemporary reality of what some observers are calling a New Gilded Age.
I added the bold to underscore the stunning numbers he points out. Middle class income grew twice as fast and the working poor's income grew 6 times as fast!! I mean why aren't Democrats using information like this?! Although not included in the NY Times article, there are several graphs from
The Washington Monthly that might help those who like visual aids.
The first graph shows the average growth rate of the different economic sectors over the past six decades. The second and third graphs show how election years affect the growth rate of these different sectors. Gee, I wonder why it always seems to get better right before an election. Maybe it's because Americans seem to have the attention span of a goldfish and only think about how they're doing today and not realizing how the past 7 years have treated them.
As for my previously posed question about why people vote against their economic self interest, Bartels addressed it in his research concluding that
If middle-class and poor people do so much better under Democratic presidents than under Republican presidents, why do so many of them vote for Republicans? One popular answer, advanced by Thomas Frank and others, is that they are alienated by Democratic liberalism on cultural issues like abortion, gay marriage and gender roles. This does not appear to be the case. In recent presidential elections, affluent voters, who tend to be liberal on cultural matters, are about twice as likely as middle-class and poor voters to make their decisions on the basis of their cultural concerns.
A better explanation for Republican electoral successes may be that while most voters, rich and poor alike do vote with their economic interests in mind, they construe those interests in a curiously myopic way. Their choices at the polls are strongly influenced by election-year income growth but only weakly related to economic performance earlier in the president’s term. And while Republicans have presided over dismal income growth for middle-class and poor families in most years, they have, remarkably enough, produced robust growth in election years.
I think it's time to remarket ourselves and finally give the American people the information that can ease the economic burdens that have been placed on them. We need to message this!