Here’s the thing about the election of 2016. When you peel away all the wild bigoted rhetoric of Trump, the alt-Right, the conspiracy theories and fake news, the emails, Benghazi fever what you have left is the fact that Democrats really didn’t answer the most burning question affecting those in the industrial rust belt of America was — what about our jobs?
They didn’t tell us how and when they were going to bring the jobs back. To many of the people in the rust belt what he said didn’t matter, all that mattered was his promise to restore America’s luster and to bring back jobs from overseas. Everything else was just talk, just noise.
This IMO is how we lost and Donald Trump won. He had a smooth slick easily understood answer to this — bogus though his answer may have been — but Democrats didn’t. That has to change.
On the first episode of his Facebook series “The Messy Truth” Van Jones went to Gettysburg to talk to Trump voters and let them explain in their words why they voted the way they did and have a dialogue with them. The family shown in Ep1 had previously voted for Obama twice, but this year voted against Hillary Clinton largely because of job.
“She hurt us, she really hurt us.” they opined.
As noted by Rawstory many people just didn’t listen to or care what crazy thing Trump said, or who he said it about, they simply didn’t care. They were more worried about Hillary and her connections to NAFTA.
Her principles are communist ideals, that’s my opinion, leaving these crimes she’s committed like lying, deleting things she was under investigation.
Jones pointed out that Trump admitted to sexual assault which is also a crime, but they didn’t care.
I didn’t see anything of him admitting to sexual assault, I heard him talk about women in a degrading way.
Jones again, argued that touching anyone in a sexual way without consent is an assault. But still they wouldn’t budge.
People don’t care that he speaks egotistical, they don’t care that he doesn’t speak eloquently, they need change and they need it yesterday. I go back to a time when we were their age [points at kids] you didn’t have to have a college education with a high school degree you could work in a factory, you can work in a local plant and work in manufacturing and work their 35-40 years. These jobs has left us with the last 25 to 30 years because so much Federal regulation has strangled business.
Another member of the family emphasized this.
I can tell you personally I’ve had two careers killed from after being passed now I have a second career which on the bubble. In the cigar industry it can cost anywhere from a half a million to a $Million per blend to be approved by the FDA.
When asked by Jones why he felt that Trump with his track record of cheating small business and using the bankruptcy laws to short change them how they could trust him on jobs they simply stated he was the “Lesser of two evils.” But Jones went on to challenge that.
“Here’s the stereotype about Trump voters, that all the economic scary stuff and regulation and the big government stuff is really just a cover and what’s really going on is you don’t like the immigrants...” Family snorts and laughs. “...you don’t like the Muslims, you don’t like black people and you like the fact that Donald Trump is saying stuff that is offending all these different groups” said Jones.
Kimberly responded back with “You just look on that wall, they’re all immigrants. Immigrants is what makes this country, none of us would be here without immigrants. We need to do it responsibly and we’re not doing it responsibly.”
“In terms of doing it responsibly shouldn’t we talk about it responsibly? He says, y’know, ‘Mexico is sending rapists and all this and ‘some of the I suppose are good people’. So he’s certain about the rapists…” said Jones.
“So he’s a horrible speaker” Kimberly responded.
Jones continued, “If you real concerns are economic, regulation and trying to get these jobs back and undo these trade deals I’ll fight the last dog barks to get that fixed, but there’s this whole other part to the Trump thing, that’s all these antagonisms that continue to land on certain groups.”
“The word ‘racist’ is thrown around so much it’s losing it’s meaning, and that is so sad. You’re a racist if you dress up in a Halloween costume as an Indian. Are we that sissified now and our feeling are that fragile...and that’s what we’ve come down to” Kimberly countered.
“Look we got all these groups hollering. Trump runs his mouth, the Mexicans say ‘that hurts me.’”
“People have got to toughen up” Kimberly interjected.
“No, you don’t have the right to tell someone else how to deal with the pain that they’re going through,” Jones responded. “If you say, ‘You should have a thicker skin,’ if you say, ‘You have got to get over yourself,’ I’m gonna hear that as, ‘This person does not respect me, does not understand me, does not know what I’ve gone through.’”
Later Jones asked “How do we get to the point where you disagree with somebody, they have to be your enemy?”
To that Kimberly said “This past week on social media one of my best friends was like ‘How can you be a mother who professes to so love her children support Trump who is blah, blah, and she called me two-face and she cut into me big time. I lost a friend I really liked and cared about.” Chokes up. “How did my mothering come into play with who I supported for President? LIke how dare you put me out there to be this evil individual. I broke my heart, it just broke my heart.”
Yeah, that should break your heart. And that happens to be exactly how people felt when they were Mexican and Trump called them evil “rapists”, or when he attacked Judge Curiel, or when he said “thousands of Muslim celebrated 9-11”, or when he attacked the integrity of the Khan family, or when he went after the cast of Hamilton, or when he went after he Union boss for daring to correct his lies. That would be all the people Kimberly had just told to “toughen up.”
It’s true that America’s manufacturing base has indeed suffered, and there are multiple reasons from globalization to automation.
The U.S. economy added 2.7 million jobs in 2015, capping the best two-year stretch of employment growth since the late 1990s, pushing the unemployment rate down to 5 percent.
But to listen to the doomsayers, it’s just a matter of time before the rapid advance of technology makes most of today’s workers obsolete with ever-smarter machines replacing teachers, drivers, travel agents, interpreters and a slew of other occupations.
Almost half of those currently employed in the United States are at risk of being put out of work by automation in the next decade or two, according to a 2013 University of Oxford study, which identified transportation, logistics and administrative occupations as the most vulnerable.
Unfortunately there aren’t any easy answers. Unfortunately just “getting tough with Mexico and China” probably isn’t going to do it. Meanwhile cutting regulations, or simply not enforcing them, has the downside of putting people’s environment, health and safety at risk as we’ve seen with products like Vioxx, restaurants like Chipotle, in the Flint, MI water supply, on the Yellowstone River, the Delaware River and the Kalamazoo River.
It was Democrats and Barack Obama who went out of his and crawled way out on a limb to save the U.S. Auto Industry and didn’t get a single Republican vote. It was Barack Obama who presented the American Jobs Act, and the Infrastructure Bank Bill only to have both completely blocked by Republicans. It’s been Barack Obama’s focus on the green technology and investment that has brought back or created over 800,000 manufacturing jobs to American since 2010 without any support from Republicans what so ever.
The president’s press secretary comes up with 805,000 by counting job growth since February 2010, which was the low point for manufacturing jobs in the U.S. following the Great Recession from December 2007 to June 2009. The administration frequently uses February 2010 as a start date when calculating manufacturing jobs, as it did on Aug. 8 to announce Manufacturing Day. …
Manufacturing employment was 12,258,000 in October 2016, according to the most recent estimates from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s down 303,000 from the number employed in January 2009, the same month that Obama was sworn in as president.
Yeah it’s true that it was higher in 2009, but that was during a time when America was losing thousands of jobs per day. It took some time to halt the slide and it’s taken some time to slowly bring things back, and no they aren’t they’re all the way, but they are headed in the right direction.
These Trump voters decided they couldn’t wait any longer. They decided that rather than implement long term fixes using new technologies in new markets, they rather bring back the horse and buggy in the midst of the digital-cyber age. Those old jobs are gone, new ones are coming.
As a result they essentially sold the rest of us out, ignoring our valid and serious concerns about Trump’s history of bias, lack of qualifications, questionable personal integrity and emotional instability in return for a promise of rolling back the clock to a time that is never ever going to return, not the way it was.
I understand why they did it, we all need to understand this — and we need to come up with a better answer than just “keep waiting for the change, it’ll come eventually.”
Time is up. The wait is over.
Now we all have to start dealing with the aftermath.
Thursday, Dec 8, 2016 · 10:17:31 PM +00:00 · Frank Vyan Walton
During the first few minutes of Van’s Town Hall this issue was further addressed.
I want to make it clear that don't think there isn’t a lack of racial awareness or sensitivity on the part of this family or the others featured in the full town hall. There is, and I’ve already written even if someone didn’t vote for Trump for any reasons related to race, the end result will still have IMO a horrible racial impact. It may not have been the primary or even a secondary reason for some of them, it’s just going to be the result. They own that. On the overall spectrum of racism from 0 to 100, these guys are fairly low on that scale. The real question to me, which I will address in my next Sunday FP dairy is if Donald Trump truly isn’t a racist as some of these people contend, then he’s either a horrible liar and/or a racial panderer and manipulator of people prone to bigotry — or both -- and that’s frankly a far worse scenario.
Secondly I’m not trying to say Clinton and Democrats didn’t have any answer over jobs at all, the problem is that there is no good answer for these people. With that in mind Clinton’s answer was far more honest and potentially far more effective than anything Trump said on the subject. It’s just that she was wonky — and correct — but he did a far better sales job to the people he needed to get to, the people all polls indicated Clinton didn’t need to bother with. Obviously she did need to make a pitch to them, and other Democrats still do need to focus on them and sell them on our ideas more effectively.
Another irony is that Van Jones was Obama’s Green Job “Czar” and was specifically focused on solving the problem their complaining about until the was smeared by Glenn Beck over some overheated comments he made in college [he had called Republicans “Assholes”’ and questioned the Bush Administration’s lack of action prior to 9/11 despite clear warnings and signs] and decided he should resign rather than let that issue negatively impact the entire Obama administration.
That’s all it took to get bounced from the Obama White House, now 20 times that level of controversy isn’t enough to make a lot of people, in the media and certainly not in the GOP, hyperventilate or even blink.
