"Peter, I thought your blog was a mile off center."

Case study in anger and frustration. 

Sometimes Ralph Bowman is pissed off. Other times he sees the immensity of the problem and just wants to stop the drama.

Bi-polar Democrats

Ralph Bowman at the coast

I consider Ralph an example of many older Democratic voters, people who have been politically active their whole lives, and who are now taking the long view.  

They are disappointed. They had their shot at making the world better and not enough changed. The optimism they felt at the beginning of the JFK years now seems naive. 

There are people Ralph's age on the political right who contact me. They, too, are angry. Transgender! Abortion! Caravans of immigrants! Happy Holidays! Political correctness! OAC! Trump, they tell me, is preserving the real America for real Americans. 

Ralph Bowman comes from the disappointed left. Americans fell for a celebrity huckster who dog-whistled xenophobia and rode it to the White House. They realize Hillary was right about one thing: there was a lot of endemic misogyny and racial resentment just under the surface. They hoped between the MLK holiday and Obama's election that America was past that. No, indeed.

Ralph is a retired teacher living in Southern Oregon. He writes this blog impassioned responses to the news of the day. Because his comments--rants--are spontaneous and unfiltered, I consider them to be a form of special truth-telling, Freudian slips offering insights into the emotions within the Democratic electorate.

Two days ago Ralph wrote me discouraged. He had been talking with people in rural Oregon, on the Oregon coast, deep Trump company.

     "Peter,

     Looking at the breakfast crowd down here in Gold Beach. Fishermen...with the rural Oregon look...enjoying their Union retirement checks. Biden is the only one who can make it.  I take it all back, everything I've written in the past. 

     Never Warren, never Bernie, never Harris. We are not ready yet to hear the progressive message. Not until the entire forest is burning and the salmon have stopped running. 

     Nothing's going to change. It's too late for the salvation of the planet. Television ads have won, the religious right will capture us and brain wash every last child into submission, and the Chinese boats will keep bring in the tinker toy crap to keep us distracted. Wow, what a mess we have created, and for now Americans are too damned self satisfied to care.

     Go Biden."

Then, Sunday, he read my blog post about Haley, the hardworking young woman working her way through college, pay-as-you-go, getting no sleep but avoiding college debt. 

     "Peter, I  thought your blog was a mile off center. 

     Who paid for my grandson to go to Oregon State on the GI Bill? Who paid? I did, as a tax payer.

     Who pays for these endless wars? I do.

     My point is we all pay eventually for each other. That is called society. The rich have made sure over the years not to pay their taxes for higher public education--they are at a 14% tax rate I read somewhere. 

     A kid at RCC winds up with a student debt of $15,000 for a so-so education. Kids 'skin in the game' is the mind which has been opened and the contribution that person will make as an enlightened citizen and, yes, maybe he or she will get a good paying job.

     The kid who didn’t go the college should be happy to pay his taxes, if they go to support someone’s bomb, someone’s PTSD, someone’s loop hole who hid money off shore, or his local farmer’s or oil companies subsidy.

     'Skin in the game' you say? My foreskin! It’s not about who struggles to work off their debt, who works three jobs to go to school so they won’t have a debt, but why the debt in the first place? We have destroyed education in this country for the poor. Just look at the public schools. And then look at the scam they call higher education these days. Get’m in,  get the money, and don’t give a shit if they are qualified to actually attend. They drop out--but the school got their money. Adios, kid.

     That is why Bernie and Warren have my attention."

What is going on here?

Ralph reflects the division within the Democratic electorate. 

Some people want to address points of special visible hurt. People cannot pay for absurdly high medical costs, so we provide everyone insurance. Students are saddled with student debt, so we lower the interest rate. This is essentially the Biden message. Recognize the reality of the American electorate. Fix problem spots if we can, recognizing getting anything good through the Senate will be hard, as we saw with the ACA. Do what you can. Remember, we are in a country where almost half the people voted for Trump. 

The political appeal is to people who are tired of Trump and crazy drama. Win the middle, because they are persumed the marginal voters.


Then there is the angrier approach that goes to root causes the Sanders/Warren message. The whole medical/pharmaceutical system is flawed. Don't just put a band aid on by helping people pay bloated costs, change the system. And the real problem with student debt goes back to the college business model: minimal taxpayer support for public higher education, easy enrollment, high costs paid for with borrowed money. Deal with that.

The political appeal is that the voters know in their hearts that the system is rigged against the 90% to 99%, and they want a Democrat who will say so. Win the people who could have voted Democratic in 2016, but did not, because they are presumed the marginal voters.

Democrats are of two minds.