Biden, for hope and change

     "Left and Right at the grassroots need assurance that the country is moving on a path toward significant change."

                 Herb Rothschild

The division within the Democratic party cannot be papered over with rhetoric. 

There is an income distribution problem in America. The rich are getting richer, the working poor cannot afford a place live, and the middle class is hollowing out. 

That means there is a political problem. A functioning democracy cannot exist if a significant number of people feel locked out. They rebel. Democracies turn into dictatorships.

As this blog noted repeatedly in the campaign of 2016, the Democratic prescription for young people to enter the secure middle class was to graduate from college, or better yet professional school. Program computers, practice law, do surgery.  For many people it is an impossible task. In Donald Trump's campaign he said he loved uneducated people and that he would bring back manufacturing jobs from China, that the rust belt would thrive, and coal country would be prosperous again thanks to "clean coal."

That gave working class voters two bad choices between two unpopular candidates. Hillary insulted half the population by giving them a thoroughly implausible task based on their skills and life situations. Trump insulted half the population by trying to sell them an implausible lie. By election day most undecided voters went with Trump, choosing to believe in a miracle. 

The American economy has a structural problem that the jobs that are being created don't fit the skillset of our actual workforce. Everyone is not in the top quartile. A global economy puts a great many American workers in direct competition with manufacturing workers from any low wage country that can put goods onto a container ship.

We have a political problem in that income redistribution, which would go a long way toward implementation with a higher minimum wage, more progressive taxation, and by making the two major expenses of health care and higher education universal, would be costly to the the people with the capacity to pay for it and they have the political clout to stop it. Americans lack the social cohesion to want to socialize the costs of health care. People who have what they have don't want theirs trickled down.

The net result is a large body of people who are frustrated and open to populist appeals. American just doesn't work for them. That is the subject of today's Guest Post. 

Herb Rothschild disagreed with this blog's assertion that Biden represented a good and necessary period of quiet after the Trump storm. 

Herb Rothschild is a retired professor of English Literature and longtime activist for racial justice and world peace.

Guest Post by Herb Rothschild

In Wednesday's column you wrote of Joe Biden, “Biden is time out, a time for the country to sit quietly, and just what the county might want.” Most of us, I think, want an end to constant chaos in and from the White House, but I think you are wrong about our wanting quiet. Both Left and Right at the grassroots need assurance that the country is moving on a path toward significant change, especially change in an economic system that has excluded the majority of people from the last 40 years of prosperity.

Herbert Rothschild

If Biden delivers no more than Clinton and Obama did, we will almost certainly see repeated the electoral results that followed their first two years in office.

When Bill Clinton entered the White House, the Congress seated with him had 267 Democrats (Ds) and 167 Republicans (Rs) in the House, 58 Ds and 42 Rs in the Senate. Six years later, in the last Congress seated during the Clinton years, the House had 207 Ds and 226 Rs; the Senate had 45 Ds and 55 Rs. During Obama’s presidency that pattern repeated itself. At its start, the House make-up was 256 Ds and 178 Rs; the Senate was 59 Ds, 41 Rs. Six years later, the House was 188 Ds and 247 Rs; the Senate was 44 Ds + 2 Independents (Is) who caucused with the Ds, and 54 Rs.

During those periods, the party turnarounds in statehouses were even more pronounced. In 1992, the governorships were 30 Ds, 18 Rs and 2 Is. In 2000 there were 19 Ds, 29 Rs, and 2 Is. In 1992, Ds controlled 25 state legislatures, Rs controlled 8, and 16 were split (one chamber was D, one was R). In 2000, Ds controlled 16 state legislatures, Rs controlled 18, and 15 were split. So, too, for the Obama years. In 2008, there were 29 D and 21 R governors; there were 27 D, 15 R, and 8 split state legislatures. In 2016, there were 18 D, 31 R and 1 I governors; there were 11 D, 31 R, and 8 split state legislatures.

In sum, Clinton and Obama seriously damaged the party they headlined. Both men were highly intelligent, charming and managerially competent, but they had no vision for our country, and their pragmatism, an approach to policy-making much lauded by the anti-Sanders camp, produced marginal results even when they had large Congressional majorities.

Let’s hope Biden meant it when he said recently that the country needs not only to be rebuilt, but transformed.