Sam Smith
JOHN EDWARDS has departed the race leaving a surprising number of liberals without a target for covert class prejudices that have so broadly replaced ethnic and gender discrimination among the better educated. Now the righteous are safe to make what is in their mind a decent and diverse choice: between a black and a woman, one a graduate of Harvard Law School, the other of its Yale equivalent.
It's sort of like the beginning of the Clinton administration which was going to look like America. In fact, 77% of Clinton's initial cabinet were millionaires, beating out both Reagan and Bush in this category. In DC, the Clinton choices barely raised an eyebrow. Clinton's cabinet may not have looked like America, but it certainly looked like establishment Washington. It required no corruption or conspiracy for the city's journalists to ignore it; everything was just too normal.
The 28% of the American adult population with college degrees defines the country's values, its policies, its laws, what is stylish and how you get to the top, including the White House. And what it has defined has exacted no small price from the remaining 72%. For example, just in the past eight years, the following have gotten significantly worse:
Median income
Number of manufacturing jobs
Number of new private jobs
Percent of workers with company based health insurance
Poverty
Consumer credit debt
Number of housing foreclosures
Cost of heating oil & gas
Number without health insurance
Wages in manufacturing
Income gap between rich and poor
Wealth of the bottom 40% of Americans
Number of older families with pensions
Number of workers covered by defined benefit pensions
Hunger
Use of soup kitchens
Personal bankruptcies
Median rent
Yet when John Edwards tried to build a campaign around these issues he was subjected not only to the opposition of the establishment and its media but a notable tone of ridicule whose subtext was: why would anyone want to bother with such things? Especially a guy as rich as Edwards?
And when he pulled out of the race, Edwards was treated to more of the same, especially from such faux hip websites as Gawker, Radar and Fark:
Radar: The pretty-boy presidential candidate scored just 14 percent of the vote in yesterday's Florida primaries. . .
Fark: John Edwards announces he will drop out of race today to spend more time with his hair.
Gawker: John Edwards will end his 49th run for president Wednesday after failing to capitalize on his angry hobo-under-the-bridge message.
These sites, like much of elite America, are led by spoiled offspring of generations who had to struggle with just the sort of issues Edwards was trying to raise, but from which they now consider themselves immune by their education, status and cleverness.
It didn't used to be like this. I have sometimes tried to explain to people, usually unsuccessfully, that we've always had born-again Christians; we just used to call them New Deal Democrats. And those construction workers, easy foil of the New Yorker cartoonists, were once part of a Democratic electorate before they were lured away by the likes of Ronald Reagan.
For many years, as the Democratic establishment has become wealthier, the traditional Democratic base has been steadily pushed away as too dumb, too prejudiced, or otherwise too unworthy of the party. It wasn't that abortion, gays and family values were intrinsically so important. But if your campaign contributors won't let you talk or do anything about pensions, healthcare, outsourcing or usurious interest rates, the door opened wide for the rightwing hypocrites.
Class has always been the forbidden fruit of American political debate. A civil rights activist, Julius Hobson, with whom I worked once put it this way:
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