"Scholarships" have dignity. "Welfare" does not.

Democrats have a problem with Obamacare.  They need to change their message.  It isn't enough that it is way better than that awful, disgusting Trumpcare.

Democrats need to decide.  Are they giving a boost to the prudent and striving poor and working people, or are they putting millions of people onto welfare?

Are they the party of uplift, or the party of making poverty tolerable?

In the Guest Post below, Thad Guyer warns that Democrats defending Obamacare are in effect championing an "out-of-control welfare program called 'Medicaid'."   He urges Democrats to change focus and work to improve Obamacare so that its primary focus is access to affordable insurance for the middle class.

My own belief is that the issue can be ignored by Democrats for the purpose of a political win.  But the fact that they can delay getting clear on their own message hurts them in the long run because in fact they have a decision to make.  Are they the party of uplift or the party of making poverty tolerable.

Criticize Trumpcare, quoting Republicans.

 In the short run for hurting Trump they can simply mimic the highly effective Republican behavior: call it Trumpcare, call it a messy disaster, cite problems, say it made things worse in order to give tax cuts to billionaires, say it cruelly and wantonly kicked hard working people off getting healthcare.   There is only so much mental space in voters' minds and Trump will be alone promoting this as a win, while GOP legislators hide out.   

It will be controversial, then it will get worse.  Governing is hard.

The best thing that can happen to Democrats politicallyis for it to pass.  The second best thing is for Republicans to fail and look stupid, assuming Democrats can then blame Obamacare problems on the feckless GOP.  Neither side will be able to argue the real merits or demerits of Obamacare or Trumpcare because Obamacare got defined by Republicans as a disaster and Democrats made the number of people kicked off healthcare the issue on Trumpcare.  Once the frame was "how big a disaster?" Obamacare was a loser.  Once the frame was "how many people will lose healthcare?" then Trumpcare was a loser.

But still there is the crossroads for Democrats:  are they a party that emphasizes upward mobility or a party that implies that the era of upward mobility is over?  They are at risk of appearing to be defending Obamacare as a great expansion of a welfare program, Medicaid.   In fact a great many of the working poor do not get health insurance thanks to the overt, public, intentional actions of their employers, both small businesses (hospitality) and large ones (Walmart.)  They keep them to less than 30 hours a week.  People therefore work 25 hours a week at employer #1, then get extra work extra hours or days elsewhere at employers #2 or #3.  Medicaid expansion brought them healthcare benefits, with the cost shifted from the employer to the taxpayer.

25 Hours a week.  No benefits.

Welfare has a stigma.  Newt Gingrich sneered that Obama was the "food stamp" president.  Even though the example of a person working 25 hours at Walmart and 25 hours as a server at a restaurant is hardly an example of sloth nor imprudence, the person is getting a needs-based benefit at taxpayer expense, and taxpayers resent it, even while they simultaneously shop at Walmart and eat at the restaurant.   They shame the worker not the employer.  

Guyer makes a subtle point that Democrats need to integrate into their messaging that they are primarily interested in expanding middle class benefits, not lower class benefits.  I summarize it this way:    Democrats need to offer scholarships, not welfare.

Scholarships have honor.  Parents are proud to announce that their child got a scholarship.  Scholarships allow students to carry the same status in college as people paying full cost.  Everyone at the school sits in the same classes, the same dormitory.  By contrast, Medicaid is a form of welfare, and they are handled in a different track at the provider's office and it is considered different by both recipient and taxpayer.  

Scholarships: a point of honor

Yesterday I heard a Fox News opinion host make a caricature of Democrats: a wealthy woman driving a Tesla, plus her housekeeper.  Republicans, he said, were the people in the middle. The characterization is unfair but, like any political cartoon, it exaggerates a point.  Obamacare is a broad expansion of Medicaid, which is a medical version of Food Stamps.  Democrats defend that at their peril because it ratifies the notion of the housekeeper as poor as an ongoing status.  It is demeaning to the housekeeper, it offends the notion of upward opportunity and mobility, and it is political suicide.

Democrats need to emphasize the portion of Obamacare even though it is the part that works least well and is the most complicated: insurance.   Subsidies to buy insurance is a scholarship.  An insurance scholarship is a boost to a middle class behavior, attendance at college or private health insurance.  It has dignity.  

Taxpayers will resent it less.  It sends a message of uplift.

Democrats need to get their heads straight on their message.  Democrats should not want to be the party of welfare expansion.  Instead they should be the party of rewarding good behavior (working two jobs but which lack benefits) with a scholarship.   Medicaid should return to a program for the nonworking poor and disabled.  Democrats are better off with Medicaid reduction and insurance expansion, not the other way around.

Scholarships are not the same thing as welfare, even though in both cases it means that resources go to help someone get a middle class benefit.   Scholarships have a notion of being an "earned" benefit, which changes the morality of it.  And scholarships imply self reliance and upward mobility as a result.  A insurance scholarship brings a person into a middle class healthcare situation, while a welfare benefit rewards a person for neediness, which implies poverty is acceptable and permanent.

Politically, it is all the difference in the world.

Here are Thad Guyer's thoughts.

Guest Post by Thad Guyer:  

Guyer

“Trumpcare Is Tricky Messaging for Democrats”

Yes indeed, Trumpcare could wreak political devastation on Trump and Republicans, especially if voters adopt the liberal media end-of-the-world version of the law— if it passes. But I don’t see that damage to Republicans happening whether it passes or not. Because the overwhelming thrust of the proposed law is paring back an out-of-control welfare program called “Medicaid”, Democrats have a tricky messaging task before us if we are to win voting majorities. If Democrats get tagged as being the defenders of a massive “welfare expansion for the poor and working-poor”, we will lose. Only if Democrats can get labeled “defenders of middle class healthcare insurance”, can we win.

The unfortunate electoral fact is that the Congressional fight is primarily over Medicaid. Democrats are highlighting horrors such as 49% of all American mothers will be hurt, because Medicaid pays for the maternal delivery costs of almost 5,000 of the 10,000 births in the USA each month. This argument hurts us, because it emphasizes that Medicaid is not “insurance” at all, it is welfare. The dog whistle is: Democrats cheer on poor women (minorities and legal green card immigrants) with high birth rates who can’t afford their children, so the middle class is morally obligated to pay. Worse for Democrats are opinion pieces like “Senate Republicans Ready Themselves for a Massive Theft from the Poor” (Washington Post, https://goo.gl/A6t2uU, June 22, 2017). The accusation that voters trying to control Medicaid costs are guilty of “theft” from welfare recipients is offensive, and it's another "deplorables" self-inflicted wound. Again, the dog whistle: “The poor are legally entitled to your money”. Bill Clinton once taught Democrats the winning rhetoric is “welfare” to “workfare”. He slashed billions in public assistance, and gave the states more budgetary discretion, exactly what Trumpcare proposes. Apparently Clinton's winning teachings have faded.

The Congressional Budget Office assessment of the House Bill highlighted that most of the millions who will be hurt are Medicaid recipients, not the middle class. In our liberal media bubble, we’re mostly hearing the Medicaid horror stories. In conservative media, it’s the dog whistles. But in the centrist media, there’s a more cool-headed debate over (1) the threat that uncontrolled Medicaid costs will bring down the whole private healthcare system; (2) we must have the working poor paying (with subsidies) into the private insurance markets rather than becoming “the new Medicaid class”; and (3) affordable lesser coverage is better than coverage you can’t afford to buy at all. This podcast from Wall Street Journal argues that without the essential fixes Trumpcare proposes, affordable middle class private health insurance will increasingly disappear. Listen “Senate Health Bill Sets Up Showdown Among Republicans”, (June 23, 2017 https://goo.gl/1caLzy). Listen also to “The Democrats' Post-Georgia Civil War”, Wall Street Journal, June 23, 2017, https://goo.gl/Ut8dif), reminding us that Trumpcare vs. Obamacare was very vigorously debated in the Georgia special election, and Republicans won by 4+ points.

I’m not seeing evidence that the current hyperbolic Democratic trashing of Trumpcare as a Medicaid killer is a winning argument for us. We can’t win if our message is heard as “we demand a trillion dollars in Medicaid for the poor and working poor”. It has to be “yes, Obamacare is broken, so let Democrats who have a heart reform middle class healthcare insurance markets”. We’re not going to win elections if our candidates just mimic the media focus on Medicaid. Our focus must be affordable private insurance for the middle class.

Trumpcare is Obamacare-worse

Republicans are bound and determined to injure themselves.   They needed a Win, so they will probably get it.

More Obamacare.

They will be able to say they have fulfilled the promise to "repeal and replace" Obamacare.   Then they will have to live with the political fallout.

Healthcare reform destroyed the Democratic majority in 1994 when Hillarycare took a crack at it.   It destroyed the Democratic majority in 2010 when Obamacare passed.   Now it is the Republican's turn.

No one will much like the law.   It is too complicated to understand on its actual merits, so it will be understood by the talking points.   Democrats will oppose it because it reverses the slow trend toward healthcare being a right of citizenship.  (Emergency care is already a right.)  There will be one big Democratic message:  fewer people will be covered and they will be covered less generously.  Most of the people hurt will barely understand whether they are hurt by the leftover effects of Obamacare or the new effects of Trumpcare but some of the working poor will get less, but some will get more, but generally Trumpcare will be experienced as Obamacare, only worse.

Hospitals will know they are being hurt.   Healthcare in America is delivered in a haphazard way, most people covered, some not.  The safety net is that everyone is covered in the emergency room and while a person is in crisis.   The hospital will deal with your heart attack and collapse in the ER and cardiac care unit, but it won't help you manage your cancer treatment or diabetes.  It provides enormously expensive critical care, then it will try to collect.   If you have savings, it will take it all. If you do not, it will attempt to collect, ruin your credit, keep you poor, but eventually write off most of the cost.   

The risk of this kept people in jobs they hated, if they had medical insurance they might lose if they lost that employment.  Uninsured medical costs worried the prudent.  For the working poor, living without insurance, it was a risk mitigated by their being judgement proof.  The hospital could take it all, but there was little to take.   The situation was a financial disaster for hospitals, and Obamacare helped stop their financial bleeding. More of the working poor were covered.   Trumpcare will mean fewer people covered and more uncollectible debts for service.    Hospitals will know they are hurt and will complain.

Who wins?   Some prosperous people will notice they are getting a tax cut through elimination of some new Obama surcharges--3.8% of dividends and capital gains and 0.9% on regular income.   Do not expect a groundswell of positive accolades by business and professional people earning top 1% incomes.   A businessman earning $500,000 a year, with $200,000 coming from dividends and $300,000 coming from profits, would see a tax reduction of some $11,000, but the payments would be mixed into an already devilishly complicated tax return with various deductions for depreciations, itemized deductions, Alternative Minimum Taxes, etc., and the income from dividends was already subject to a lower tax rate than was regular income.   Bottom line:  Trumpcare will eliminate a couple of calculations in an already complicated situation.  Prosperous people will not become a cheering squad for tax relief.

Who will praise the law?   Trump will, at first.  He will say it solves the disastrous problems of Obamacare and the new law is great.  The primary talking point is that it is "better than Obamacare", and the conservative media will echo this message, but in actual operation the law is a continuation of insurance exchanges, with multiple complications.  The chief talking point is that it is not Obamacare.  

The problem is that Trumpcare will preserve all the bad things about Obamacare as experienced by regular Americans, the complications, the high insurance bills, the paperwork, the struggle to compare comparative policies if the person has choices.  Trumpcare is Obamacare, but less generous, and therefore it will be experienced as Obamacare-lite, or more precisely,, Obamacare-worse.  I do not expect rallies of supporters thanking Trump for lowering the Medicaid expansion income eligibility level.

Republicans are trapped by the success of their previous messaging.   They had said that Obamacare is terrible and that they would repeal and replace it.   The one idea that might have political appeal would be a much broader, single payer system, but that is opposite the direction favored by the establishment Ryan small government GOP, though not necessarily by Trump himself.  Trump wants something great, but he tied himself to Republicans and they want something less.

Trumpcare as it will probably get passed is shaped by the path Trump needed to take to become president.   He needed to assure Republicans he was one of them, and it worked.  Republican voters supported Trump.  This precluded Trump from being a "new Republican", one who boldly created big programs made with Democratic votes.  Briefly, in the summer of 2016, when Trump was criticizing trickle down economics and Paul Ryan, it seemed possible that Trump would be a Big Government Republican and would govern in opposition to the Freedom Caucus and small government libertarianism and trickle down.  Trump-style populism was at a crossroads.  Democrats were not broadly available to Trump but Republicans were, so long as he bashed Obama, Hillary, and Obamacare.  The path to the White House required GOP solidarity.  The result is a program that no one will like, but it is a Republican plan.  Obamacare-lite.  Obamacare-less.  Obamacare-worse.

Trump is too good a salesman to persist selling a bad product.   I expect Trump to walk away from Trumpcare once it is in place and blame it on the Congress.   It will be their law, not his.   Trump will say that what he really wanted was something much different, something really, really great.   Trumpcare will be an orphan.

How to avoid getting shot by a police officer

This blog looks closely at political messaging.   

The most important message you can give to police during a traffic stop is that you are not a threat.   

Today's blog gives instructions on how not to get shot.   

Most of the readers of this blog are not in much danger.  Officers will have profiled most of us as older, light skinned, more or less prosperous: solid citizen types.   We don't get stopped as often in traffic stops as do younger dark skinned males.   

Comedy Central star Trevor Noah, a mixed race TV host, says he has been stopped 8 to 10 times during his time in the US, including once when he was driving a Tesla (a $95,000 car.)  He recently aired a segment on the shooting death of Philander Castile, a black man driving in a car with his wife and young daughter.   The policeman said he was in fear for his life and shot him as he sat in his car and was reaching for his wallet.  The officer was tried and acquitted.  The situation was ambiguous enough, the jury concluded, that the officer's actions were reasonable.

Click here to watch the short segment

Castile had a firearm and a concealed carry permit.  Trevor Noah noted that the NRA, which fights vigorously for the right of people to carry firearms, was silent on this case.  The segment is a mix of humor and rage.

My son, Dillon, is 26 and is a mix of white (from me) and Asian (from Debra).  He is big, he has a crew cut, and outside the context of his parents he is likely to be assumed to be Hispanic because of his darkish skin and black hair.   Dillon gets stopped frequently by police, he tells me, six or 8 times in the past three years.  He has never been cited for a violation.

I am easy to profile: an old white guy, and I drive nice, well maintained cars.  I have been stopped exactly three times in 40 years, twice when radar in fact showed I was going ten miles above the speed limit in speed zones, one on the freeway and another on a main artery street in Ashland.   Therefore, my own observation and experience is that police are no trouble.   The experience of my son, Dillon, is that police are looking for excuses to check him out.  

National Review article

The officer in the Castile shooting was evidently nervous and panicky.  It is possible that readers, if stopped, will encounter such an officer.   Here is how to be as safe as possible.  Some things you cannot change: your age, race, gender.   But you can change your body language.  The goal: show you are not a danger to them.  Traffic stops are a source of danger to police officers.  They are in an indefensible position, standing beside a car and they are alert for surprises.

1. If you see lights flashing behind you, turn on your hazard lights.   Drive slowly to a safe place to pull over, and ideally a well lighted one.   (You are trying to show that you are compliant.)

2. If at night, turn on your car's interior lights.  (To reduce the likelihood that the officer will misconstrue what he or she sees you doing.)

3. Roll down the windows so the officer can see into the car  Take the keys out of the car and put them on the dashboard or the roof of your car where they can be instantly seen by the officer.  (Make clear you aren't trying to elude them.)

4. Put your hands on the steering wheel.  Some people, especially people who profile as scary, i.e. large dark skinned males, suggest the dashboard.  Trevor Noah says he puts his bare hands outside the window.  (You want to demonstrate that you have no weapon and that you are conscious of your need to show your harmlessness.)

5.  Make no sudden moves.   Comply with whatever the officer says.  Repeat back to the officer exactly what he or she says to do.  In the Castile case the officer apparently told the person to show his license and registration and Castile moved to do so, a move the officer thought constituted reaching for the permitted gun that Castile reported he was carrying. Repeat back the officer's instructions and ask for permission to do it, then narrate what you are being asked to do.

Example:  

Officer:  "Show me our license and registration."

You:  "My license is in my right rear pants pocket.   You want me to reach back there an pull out my license?   (Wait for the officer to say "yes.")

If the officer says yes, then you request:

"May I reach back there to pull it out?"  (Wait for the officer to say "yes.")

Then narrate:  "Officer, I am reaching back to pull out my black wallet where I carry my drivers license", which you do slowly as you remove your wallet.  

Same thing with your car registration and insurance card, which is probably in your glove box.  Clarify with the officer that he or she is asking you to do things:

Don't show "attitude".  Don''t joke.  Don't be sarcastic.

You:  "Officer, you are ready for me to show my registration and insurance, right?, and you want me to remove it from my glove box now.  Correct?"

When the officer says, yes, do it very slowly, and narrate what you are doing:  "I'm clicking open the glove box and am going to pull out some papers now.  The registration is one of them."

Here is a how-to article:

how-deal-police-during-traffic-stop-so-you-dont-get-shot-tilford

Regular readers of this blog understand there is a recurring premise about communication, that much of it is non-verbal, communicated through body language and tone.   Some people, by their very body size and gender and race, communicate menace or at least suspicion.  Trump, by his height and heft, appeared strong.   Had Hillary Clinton attempted the very same words and manner she would have been interpreted as "feisty."    Large, dark skinned men are understood to be dangerous, per se.

Washington Post article: The policeman's perspective

No one is completely safe.  Every reader may encounter a nervous, inexperienced, jumpy, or suspicious officer.   Even those of us unlikely to be profiled as dangerous have no way of knowing if that officer recently received a radio call saying to be on the lookout for a dangerous person who in some way matches your description or the description of your car.  

Your first goal is to survive the encounter and you do it with body language, tone, and making sure that your verbal communications are understood and you are doing nothing surprising or frightening.   You know you are reaching for your registration.  It is essential that the officer know you are not reaching for a secreted gun

My white, prosperous, older readers do have one form of vulnerability.  They likely lack the habit of servility and helplessness, and may want to push back.  Don't. This is a poor place for humor or exaggeration or sarcasm done in an effort to preserve your dignity.   Overt  obedience to another person's power is a familiar part of the life of the poor or disadvantaged, but men and women accustomed to be treated respectfully by waiters, co-workers, clients, and government employees may resent an encounter when they present themselves as weak, permission-asking supplicants.  You may consider it humiliating.  It conflicts with your notion of self respect, personal freedom, your rights as an American, and your expectation of being treated like a citizen, not a suspect.   

You aren't a slave.  You are a citizen.  Citizens have legal rights. 

If the issue gets to court and you are well represented by counsel,  then you are once again in that most powerful and respectable of positions, a citizen of the United States of America.  But during the encounter with a policeman, the courts (and repeated juries) conclude that the officer is nearly always right, even when he is foolish and mistaken.   He can shoot you if, in the moment,  he should, or must.   His defense can be that he suspected you--utterly incorrectly, as it may turn out--of being a danger.   The officer's fears, or suspicions, or misperceptions are sufficient to allow him to shoot you, be put on paid administrative leave, and then found to have acted within his legal rights to make that judgement call based on his perceptions of what was happening.  He is alive.  You are dead.

Accept the humiliation.  Accept the reality of officer immunity and discretion.  If the encounter happens, and you survive it without incident, having demonstrated correctly the right attitude and behavior, then reflect on its deeper psychological impact on people who have encounters like this frequently.  Does it create buy-in to the mainstream culture, or does it create resentment against authority?

Modern policing is sending a message to young dark skinned people about how they fit into the social order.  It has consequences.   Perhaps the inherent danger of a police stop requires exactly the sort of rules that are in place regarding police discretion.  Multiple juries of our fellow Americans conclude, time after time, that the policeman is nearly always right regardless of what he does.   

It is something that dark skinned men integrate into their understanding of the world. Political and social observers need to observe and integrate into their thinking as well.  Many Democrats and progressives reflexively identify with Castile, but juries nearly always identify with the officer.  Jurors are voters.

The Alarm Signal Sounded. Will Democrats Notice?

Democrats and progressives need to re-think what it means to be a good Democrat and a good progressive.

John Ossoff lost in Georgia.

Gloating Email blast by Trump this morning

He spent some $25 million dollars doing so.   I received and deleted some ten emails a day soliciting money for Ossoff, getting urgent pleas from Nancy Pelosi, Ron Wyden, Jeff Merkley, Tom Perez, the DNC generally, Hollywood actors, and Ossoff himself.  The began with headlines like "I am absolutely begging you."  Never, in 40 years of getting campaign solicitations have I ever experienced greater intensity of campaign urgency.  This wasn't a failure of lack of trying.  No one can console him or her self thinking, "Well, if Hillary had only campaigned in Wisconsin. . . ."   

Ossoff did everything he could do in a campaign sense.  Ossoff lost anyway.   

Therefore, this campaign is useful for Democrats if they will listen.  The problem wasn't the campaign.  It was the message that Democrats carry.

For over a year this blog has attempted to warn Democrats that the current thinking of "approved, reasonable, progressive, liberal, Democratic thinking" was a false and dangerous direction, one that betrayed even our own actual values.   But Democrats and progressives walked themselves into their own tar pit of group-think it is unacceptable to dissent from, and therefore they find themselves trapped into saying and thinking what they don't really believe, and, worse, saying and thinking what most Americans don't believe, which is why so many of them voted for Trump, not Hillary.  Even in a now-swing district like the Georgia 6th, they rejected Ossoff in the proxy war referendum on Trump, they voted for the unpopular president rather than vote Democratic.

Democrats lost their blue wall base

Democrats need to wake up and smell the coffee--or see which way the wind blows--or read the tea leaves--or notice the obvious.

This blog has said Democrats and progressives lost their way when they:

   ---abandoned insisting that immigration be legal and controlled.

  ---were reluctant to criticize "team members", i.e. blacks, Muslims, students when they were lawless.

  ---were reluctant to criticize students for hyper squeamishness that abridged free speech.

  ---were reluctant to recognize that praise for diversity needed to be balanced with open expression of pride and the value of American-ness.

  ---accepted the right-wing premise that support for police and the military and the other symbols of order were Republican ideas and not Democratic ones.

  ---failed to to accept that needs-based benefits needed to be conditioned on some sort of work or other buy-in, lest they be considered to be enabling sloth.

  ---failed to recognize that open support for empowerment of minorities would create backlash from whites if it were not balanced by acknowledgement that whites, too, had grievances.

  ---failed to communicate that they would marshall government power to check the power of banks and Wall Street and Big Pharma.

  

Martin Luther King's great message was non-discriminaiton, not black separation, and Obama's most popular and unifying message was that there were no red states and blue states but rather a single great nation that unified all people.

Democrats did not simply slip away from that notion.  They began opposing that notion, saying that Black Lives Matter, Period--implying to many white Americans that Democrats were playing to special interests and not a greater patriotic unifying interest.   Democrats were implying that their team was a majority of special interests and it was their turn to power against the interests of the whole.  Trump--with all of his divisiveness--was the one with the more unifying message, make America great again.

This blog normally gets some 300 to 500 readers a day, and sometimes a great deal more, but mostly in that range.  I have hoped there would be a credible, persuasive version of my message expressed in the national press.  Happily, it has just happened, in The Atlantic Monthly, yesterday:

Article by Peter Beinart

Click Here: Atlantic Monthly

The article here, and my message in this blog will get resistance from Democrats and progressives because it advocates ideas which have become forbidden to say.   Trump made expression of concerns over the frictions caused by  immigration to be considered a sign of racism and xenophobia rather than a sign of open concern for black and white Americans who compete with low skilled jobs in agriculture, construction, and hospitality. Trump made it shameful for a Democrat to express concern over terror attacks, lest the Democrat be considered a religious bigot.    I assert that Democrats will not re-gain popular majorities until they openly return to positions advocated comfortably by Bill Clinton in the 1990s on immigration (that it needed to be legal and that American workers had genuine concerns and interests to protect), on respect for patriotic symbols, on the value of work, on control of needs-based benefits, and so on.

Thad Guyer makes the same point, here in the midst of Trump gloating over yet another big win.  Democrats need to make a choice.  Either suffer through 4 or 8 years of Trump stories like the one here, or have the courage to re-think what it really means to be a progressive Democrat.

Guest Post by Thad Guyer:

“The Gloomy Message of Ossoff Special Election”

Guyer

In the special election in Georgia, John Ossoff was ridiculed for having fudged that he actually resides at his girlfriend’s house outside the district.  He demurred “but only by three blocks.”  Hence, this quip when he lost last night: 

Ossoff grimly to his girlfriend: “Oh my God, they went for the Republican!” His girlfriend comfortingly: “The hell with ‘em, we don’t live in their stupid district anyway”. 

Neither did 80% of the donors who gave him over $20 million, the bulk of it from California and New York.  As Peter emphasized in his blog a month ago, the Ossoff Democratic cause célèbre had been chosen by both parties as the big showdown over Trump’s staying power vs. progressive momentum going into the 2018 midyear Congressional elections.   Peter wrote:

It is all about sending a message.  Two votes in the House of Representatives will not change the balance on anything, but election of Democrats in either seat will demonstrate that Trump is weak and Democrats are energized.   More important, it would imply that the Republican agenda is toxic and that it is career ending for GOP officeholders to pursue it.

See, UpClose, “Proxy Wars: Congressional races in Georgia and Montana”, May 25, 2017, http://peterwsage.blogspot.sk/search?q=ossoff.  Georgia and Montana were two of the 25 “swing districts” Democrats must win to regain the House.  The FiveThirtyEight poll index that Ossoff was up by 2 points was thus off +6.5%, the “Trump polling error”—again. It looks bleak.

            But that we lost by about 5 points is not the bleakest part.  It’s that we would have been crushed had Ossoff run like, well, like Hillary Clinton, on a platform of Trump is deplorable, near-open borders and few deportations, and more redistribution of wealth. Instead, Ossoff ran as a centrist denounced by progressives, and given only a “it could be worse” Sanders endorsement.  As described in an UpClose comment on April 9, 2017 entitled “Quiz: Whose campaign website says this?” (https://goo.gl/28gsds):

John Ossoff, the great Democratic hope says Rachel Maddow, ... may be teaching us three lessons. First, democrats can't win light blue and light red states by ideological attacks on popular Trump policies. Second, progressive funders, at least, are thinking its better to win with less principled positions than to lose altogether. And third, to win, progressive policies must be stated in watered-down generalizations.

Ossoff’s campaign avoided almost any trashing of Trump, Russiagate, obstruction of justice, immigration or the Muslim ban. He certainly endorsed none of Sanders’ progressivism like free college tuition, evil corporations, and “dark money” in politics. 

Post Election Remorse

So here’s the question:  If a soft on Trump non-progressive centrist like Ossoff, armed with all the money in the world, can’t win a swing district, who are our Democrats that can take back the House in 2018, or win Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin etc. in the 2020 presidential race?  The answer is only centrists like Bill Clinton who effectively adopt Trump’s positions on not letting the white working class sink, vigorous border control, preventing Obamacare from becoming just another Medicaid entitlement program, and America-first rather than globalism.

For candidates like that to win, they will first have to win the coming civil war within the Democratic Party. It’s going to be bloody.

  

Help Wanted

"We are trying to hire people, but cannot!"

An anecdotal look at the labor markets in southern Oregon and Beijing, China.  Two snapshots.

Two subjective observations are not the same thing as real data, but still, an observation and measurement is more credible than an opinion voiced at a campaign rally and we have had many of those from all sides.   What is the employment situation?  Are there jobs available?

Southern Oregon.  The answer from people who employ people in my community in southern Oregon is that there is ample work for people willing to work for $10 an hour, but one cannot find them.  A college scholarship recipient told me that she worked in retail at a chain drug store, Rite Aid, paid just over minimum wage and getting 25 hours a week, but never more.   "They keep my hours below thirty," she said.  She said there are lots of jobs available, but only up to 25 hours a week.  She has other part time jobs to fill out her work day, but it is complicated by the fact that her employer keeps shifting her schedule.  She was frustrated with them and is looking for something better, and she said Rite Aid is always looking to find employees.  Rite Aid is an example of a business model that still works, but is being stressed: low wage, high turnover, constant training of new staff.   The 25-hour work week is their attempt to avoid payment of health insurance benefits The net result is that the cost of health care for this person is shifted from the employer to the taxpayer.  The model will work if they can find employees.

This pattern in entry level jobs is widespread.  The result is " help wanted" signs in multiple places: retail, agricultural, hospitality.   A phrase I hear from employers is that young people "don't want to work hard"  but it may actually mask the sentiment that young people do not want to work hard for the wages and situation being offered traditionally by employers in low wage industries.   

There is a labor shortage and there is wage pressure upward because of the marijuana industry is pushing wages upward   Growing marijuana has periods when it just like any other agricultural work: stooping over in the hot sun, digging, carrying, lifting, trudging and some of it needs to be done at exactly the right time.  Employers need to pay up to get people to show up. 

Marijuana margins make it possible--and necessary--to find employees with technical know how and dexterity for jobs like trimming the stems and leaves off marijuana buds so that the resulting product meets the salability requirements of the marketplace.   (Baby boomer readers who remember marijuana as a mix of chopped up stems and leaves have out of date memories.   Today the marketplace requires trimmed buds.)

Automated trimmer $30,000.  Lower quality than hand work.

Marijuana trimming work has skewed the labor market because good, experienced trimmers want 20-25% of the weight of what they trim, which works out to $50-$100 per hour.  The work is seasonal but the result is that these workers have middle class incomes, and a much higher wage expectation.  Working for $12/hour doing agricultural work in the hot summer sun does not have appeal who find other seasonal work paying four to eight times that.  Many people have mentally re-set their work value.  They have become comfortable with middle class incomes derived from marijuana trimming work and they live middle class economic lives.  They pay market rents for their housing; they buy cars; they buy clothing.  Some employers consider this an inconvenience and generally bad for them and the labor markets but it is having two effects: scarcity of labor for traditional entry level work and more money circulating in the economy, which from a community and Chamber of Commerce point of view is a good thing.

Meanwhile, international labor and housing markets.  I spoke at some length with a web designer currently working for an on-line academic publishing company.  Her company requires English speaking editors with college degrees or higher to coordinate with academic writers world wide.  The company publishes academic research papers via their on-line service.  (Career advancement in academia requires respected peer-reviewed research publication and this is one of several services that expose research papers to the marketplace of ideas.  It is invisible to people outside academia, but it is a big, viable industry.)   

The organization has traditionally had key employees in Switzerland and the United States, with big satellite facilities in low-wage Chinese cities.  China has adequate numbers of highly educated English speakers, capable of communicating in a sophisticated way--generally by email-- especially in its big cities like Beijing, and traditionally wages were low by international standards.  It was a high-end version of the call-center work that takes place in low wage countries.

Far, far less affordable than Portland, Oregon

The company needed to shut down the Beijing service center.  Employees there required too high a wage.  They could not survive in Beijing.

I show here the housing affordability of Beijing compared to Portland, Oregon, a city that now considers itself in a housing crisis due to the high cost of housing.  Beijing is not simply worse, it is much, much worse, on an entirely different scale, with Portland being nine times more affordable than Beijing.   Washington, DC prices are higher but incomes are also higher, but again, the traditional American notion that the US was a high cost location and that China had a low wage/low cost comparative advantage is out of date and badly mistaken.

The publishing company is reducing Beijing as a service center and instead expanding in Barcelona, Spain, a top tier international city.  

What was going on?  Housing prices in Beijing have risen so high that employees paid their previous wage of 6,000 yuen a month (approximately 800 US dollars) were spending some 4,000 yuen/month of their wages for housing alone.  

The 2016 campaign is remembered now partly as Trump saying that he would bring jobs back to America, a message that resonated everywhere but especially in the upper midwest where Trump carried states that he was not expected to win.  Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton's campaign is remembered partly as her failure to address jobs in a persuasive way, thinking she forgot her husband's guidance: "it's the economy, stupid."   Labor is location-specific.  People don't move easily and cheaply.  There is a mis-match between labor supply, demand, and housing costs.  

Each participant in southern Oregon labor market has reason to be frustrated:  the employer who wants to hire reliable people for $10/hour, the employee who wants 40 hours a week and benefits, the taxpayer who resents having costs shifted to himself by employers hiring for fewer than 30 hours, the agricultural employer who cannot find employees at any price, the government which notes that forbidding banking by marijuana growers requires that employees be paid in untaxed cash.  

Meanwhile, certain locations, including especially the San Francisco Bay Area, have such a concentration of IT talent and resources that there is comparative advantage to squeezing into a too-crowded and too-expensive a location in order to access the synergies of the location, thus exacerbating the housing cost problem.  Beijing has a similar attraction as a node of privilege within China, complicated and diminished by the fact that the air is hazardous to breathe.   The government needs to require that the families of high government officials live in Beijing; otherwise they would move their families out of the city.

"Pushing out even the highest earners."

The China situation reflects a housing crisis as much as a labor one.  In first tier cities like Beijing and Shanghai housing prices are comparable to San Francisco.  Second and third tier inland cities like Hufai (a city of 3,000,000 people--the 37th largest city in China) housing prices are lower: $300/square foot, or about 300,000 US dollars for a 1,000 sq. foot apartment, a price comparable with many top tier cities in the US, and well above new construction costs in southern Oregon.

Trump did not offer a credible solution to the actual problems, but he did offer a diagnosis (immigrants and cheap Chinese labor competition) and a solution (tighten immigration and better trade deals.)  Any plan is better than no plan, and Trump communicated what Hillary did not, that he understood people's frustrations.   The frustrations were real.

Trump said he would shake things up.  Hillary did not.

Former Oregon Governor Kitzhaber: Welcome Back.

The US Attorney office ended the investigation of John Kitzhaber and Cylvia Hayes.  No charges filed.  

Two years of searching, under pressure to find something so everyone could save face for all the turmoil, and they came up with nothing illegal.    

It was a five alarm event, but there was no fire.  

But there is a lasting consequence: smoke damage.
This is the problem with a big false alarm.  Even when no fire is found there is still the odor of smoke.  

Article, then comments. Politics is a tough arena.

Kitzhaber and Hayes were investigated and found guilty in the media and therefore in public opinion, and therefore in politics, the arena in which John Kitzhaber worked.   People are presumed innocent, supposedly, in the justice system, but in politics people make fast judgements based on what they hear or think they hear.  Smoke.

What should John Kitzhaber do?

First, Cylvia Hayes should do what she has just done.  Apologize.  In fact, her sham marriage years ago, before she met Kitzhaber, to assist an Ethiopian immigrant get citizenship, was a crime and it was dishonest and it was provable and therefore it created a factual basis for the public to consider her to be sneaky.  It was real and it was a symbol.  She needed to acknowledge it and apologize for it.   

She did so.

It was a good apology, by the standards of local apology expert, linguist Ed Battistella, author of Sorry About That, published by Oxford University Press.   She fully accepted that she was wrong and that she violated behavior standards that she acknowledged as legitimate.  She recognized and named the people she injured.  She expressed remorse.  She said she would attempt through future behavior to remedy the damage.   Good apologies do not necessarily solve things.  She has harsh critics.   (c.f. the comments section of the media report on her long Facebook apology.

And what about John Kitzhaber himself?

My sense is that John Kitzhaber should internalize and project that he was vindicated.  Full stop.   

But what about the smoke, what about the fact that he resigned from the Governor's office.  Isn't that an admission of something?

No.

It is an acknowledgement that he was in the middle of a media firestorm which did, in fact, so complicate his ability to govern that he stepped down from the Governor's office he had just been elected to.   I recognize that some of my many Republican oriented readers will resist thinking he was vindicated, so I will cite the same comment that Jeff Sessons made, and which I urge my Democratic progressive readers to acknowledge.  Jeff Sessions did not recuse himself from the investigation into the Trump campaign because he was guilty of conspiring with Russians to do treason.   Democrats may want to think that and accuse him of it, and some do, but Sessions reacted strongly and correctly to that accusation.  It was s despicable lie, he said.   Jeff Sessions recused himself because in fact he had had some contact with Russians--not criminal nor nefarious, but contact--and therefore he wanted the investigation to take place without that taint of conflict of interest.

Democrats who think the worst of Sessions will consider it "smoke" and evidence of something bad.  In fact, it was Sessions being conscientious, on this matter.   John Kitzhaber resigned the governor's office for good reasons, in the public interest, so the business of government could proceed.  It was not an admission of guilt any more than Sessions' recusal was an admission of guilt.

I cite the Jeff Sessions examples so that readers from various political perspectives can experience the cognitive dissidence.  Recusal and resignation is a sign of integrity, not guilt.   Democrats need to accept the fact that they may dislike Sessions for whatever reasons, but his recusal was not an admission of guilt.  Republicans inclined to think the worst of Kitzhaber need to recognize that he was investigated very, very thoroughly and not charged after all, and that is resignation was not an admission of guilt.

I have asked myself the question:  what about the smoke regarding Cylvia Hayes' consulting contracts?  Were those legitimate?  Apparently entirely so.  There has been no complaints from the nonprofit advocacy groups that she somehow failed to do good, honest, fair, time consuming work in return for their payments to her for her work.

I am of a generation where I am comfortable with professional women working hard in the profit and nonprofit world.  My own wife is such a woman.  She is an attorney and she is the Executive Director of a a nonprofit Legal Services program.  She gets paid.  She also, simultaneously, cares deeply about the mission of her program, which includes direct legal services plus advocacy for the interests of her clients and others like them.   This is not weird, surprising, criminal, nor a conflict of interest.   It is the most natural thing in the world.   She does work in the field she loves.  She is personally passionate about it.  She works tirelessly.  She is paid--substantially underpaid, actually.  Getting paid to do advocacy services is not criminal nor suspicious or wrong in any way.   It is how professional advocacy work gets done.

Cylvia Hayes got paid a fair market rate to do good work that she loves and cares about.   As I sit and reflect on this I have difficulty finding what she or John Kitzhaber should apologize for.

Bottom line:  I urge John Kitzhaber to stand tall, get re-involved in politics, say that he took himself out of the game until the smoke cleared, to say that, at long last the smoke has in fact cleared, and then to carry on, doing whatever work he wants to do.  He was vindicated.

I expect some readers will think that there must--there simply must--be something he did wrong.  If so, I urge them immediately to contact the US Attorney's office and provide whatever evidence they have.  Perhaps those readers have evidence that escaped the US Attorney, the IRS, and the various other bodies that investigated this.  They spent two years looking for, and at, evidence, and dropped the investigation, not finding a basis for filing charges.

It is unfair but a fact of political life.   People cannot forget the smoke, even when fire cannot be found.  John Kitzhaber won election as governor four separate times.  He has some things to offer Oregonians in the future.   Apparently, he is not ready to retire and disappear.  He was vindicated.  I hope he goes ahead and continues what he was doing two years ago, before the smoke damage.

Welcome back, John.