Thursday, November 4, 2010
Phillips Tuesday's Gone: It's the Unemployment, Stupid
Posted by Betsy Phillips on Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 8:00 AM
I'll be honest, I wasn't really intending to write much about the election. Everyone knew it was going to be bad for Tennessee Democrats and I thought everyone knew why.
But then I see Mike Turner telling my esteemed colleague that "we’re going to have to figure out what happened."
WTF?!
Democrats, I love you (well, most of you), but please! You want to figure out what happened? Sit down with this (warning: link goes to a PDF full of terrible news) and ask yourself if you're really facing such a mystery.
How did Ty Cobb lose to a woman who seems to think interracial dating is a problem? The unemployment rate in Maury County last month was 14 percent.
What went wrong with Doug Jackson? His district is still sitting at 10 percent.
Ask some of your colleagues in West Tennessee to tell you how many jobs are left over there.
There are lot of people in this state who are really, really hurting. And it's not just that they can't find jobs, though that is bad enough. It's that they've watched their friends leave. They're watching their kids leave. They're having to decide whether they have to leave.
It's not like being unemployed in the city (which is no picnic either). In urban areas, you have reason to believe something else will come along eventually. When one of two plants in your rural area closes, those jobs probably aren't going to be replaced by anything. People have to decide if they can afford to wait for something else to move into the area or if they have to move where the prospects are better. They're watching their way of life pass away and their families and friends get torn apart.
There's real pain there. And most of what the legislature has offered people is just empty symbolism.
I mean, shoot, all the hunting and fishing amendments in the world don't matter if there's no one left to drop a line in the creek with you. I'm not trying to be flip, though I'm afraid that sentence probably came off that way. It's a serious issue. it doesn't matter how well-protected your way of life is if you can't be where you can live it.
And this isn't just a lesson Democrats need to learn. Ol' Ron Ramsey's plan for the state is to limit the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, streamline the business license process and focus on guns and abortion.
Either he doesn't get the severity of the problem or he's planning on putting a lot of people to work holding pregnant women at gunpoint. Eh, it's Ron Ramsey. I joke, but now he'll probably start drafting that jobs program.
If the Republicans can't find a way to put people to work, they're going to find the same level of anger.
I'm a liberal, so I imagine we're facing a disaster. But you know, what we were doing clearly wasn't working to address our unemployment rate. I'm fine with seeing if the Republicans can come up with something that works.
Comments (18)
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You know what will work? Cut taxes and go to church! (A real church, that is. You know, a Christian one. Not one of them dirty Muslim ones.)
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The comment by Good Ole Republican is a prime example of why this Democrat could not vote Republican, and I have before. Wait till all the Tea Party candidates figure they are beholding to Carl Rove for all the pac money ads.
i can only hope and pray (IN MY OWN PERSONAL WAY, of course) that good ole republican is being facetious.....
who can tell??? they think preachers (cross?)dressing like aunt jemima is funny!!
It's not just the unemployment, stupid. There are also unpopular initiatives such as Obamacare, Cap and Trade, Wall Street bailout, government meddling in business, the Chinese holding trillions of dollars of our debt, the insane waste of money by the Democrats on every Mickey Mouse nonsense program, it goes on and on. Pelosi is completely unrepentent, she doesn't care what Americans want. Well, America gave the Democrat agenda a pretty firm thumbs-down. The only question now is, will the Republicans heed this message?
Betsy, I'll disagree a little bit. People are not automatons; they do not vote as a response to simple stimuli.
If your theory was true, one could look at the number of Republicans (or even incumbents reelected) in the state legislature and it would wax and wane with economic conditions. But that's not what we see when we look closer.
No, this was part of a trend that's been going on in TN since the early 90's (if one takes the long view, 1972 or even 1968). Personally, I think it's cultural.
It does no good to use stereotypes from 1936 One who says that the Democratic Party is the party of "the common man" has never looked at the donor lists (or at the class of car sporting Obama stickers). And anyone who says that political conservatism is the philosophy of pointy-head, corporate rich types has never been to a Tea Party rally.
Whether we want to admit it or not, the Democratic party is (culturally) now the party of educated urbanites, and the Republican party is the party of rural folks and what's left of the blue collar working class. The battleground in the last few elections is the suburbs, and in Tennessee, sububanites identify far more with the rural types than the urbanites.
(Some of that goes back to white flight in the 70's, some of it to the fact that many liberals are openly hostile to the very idea of suburbia. Why align with someone who hates your way of life?)
The "popular, common man's" party has always been dominant in TN (save reconstruction). Always.
There's a little too much snark and condescension coming from the left toward their less educated neighbors for those same neighbors to believe the Democratic party is "their" party.
Al Gore said he needed to come back to TN to "mend fences" he never did that, did he? He hangs with a different crowd now. This is symptomatic of the problems dems have in TN.
I've gone on too long - but I think TN's red turn has been a long time coming, only accelerated by the economic conditions you mentioned.
Oh, I think you're right, Slarti, if we just focus on white people as being the "common man." This was a long time coming and for the reasons you mention. But people will go along with a lot when the good times are rolling that they can't tolerate when they're suffering.
But the economic pressure are real and if Republicans can't find a way to bring jobs back into the rural areas, it won't matter if they have the rural areas, Democrats' power will return because of the growth of the cities and the fact that, until Republicans get a handle on the racist elements in their party, Democrats still have the non-white blue collar working class.
I get into this a little in my piece for the City Paper, whenever that comes out, but I think it's also going to be interesting to watch what happens over the next little bit because this recession is much tougher on men than on women. It's going to be hard to overestimate the changes that will come in this state as more women become the primary breadwinners in our families.
I imagine we may see the growing cultural and commercial power of women changing the state in ways neither party is prepared for (though, in all fairness, I think the Republicans are more prepared since they already have women in powerful political positions).
I'll agree with you on that.
And I'll add this: if I were a Democrat, I would be ashamed that the national party employed a "sluts and nuts" strategy against all those Republican women candidates. Yes, it worked, but I wouldn't want to hang my hat on that.
It is a tragedy that this election season featured the words "whore", "bitch" and "slut", and peopel were actually discussing a senate candidate's private grooming habits.
I'll say this, also - working class folks (not Republicans, but run-of-the-mill conservatives) are far more ready than the elites of either party to accept women leaders, not as a theory, but on a practical level. Why? Normal working dudes have been working alongside, and FOR, women for generations. It's not a stretch for us.
Those who are elites in either party? Not so much.
(And I think this is where the shameful "sluts and nuts" stuff comes from).
Slarti,
"Whether we want to admit it or not, the Democratic party is (culturally) now the party of educated urbanites, and the Republican party is the party of rural folks and what's left of the blue collar working class. The battleground in the last few elections is the suburbs, and in Tennessee, sububanites identify far more with the rural types than the urbanites."
In reality the Republican coalition in Tennessee is a mix of traditional Republicans (think East TN Baker/Alexander/Frist/Corker), rural social conservatives (the party switchers of the 60s) and well-educated, middle class, mostly who moved here for work. These last voters were responsible for Republican gains from the late 80s. Just look at the changing voting patters in the collar counties and Nashville.
Pull up a list of registered voters by the date they registered to vote. Then look at their voting behavior. Anyone who registered to vote before 1970 is almost certain to be a Democrat. Anyone registered from 1990 through today is increasingly likely to vote Republican. Such a difference is hardly attributable to 'culture.'
Republicans have been winning because their message appeals to the people who are moving into Tennessee for work and who are glad to find Williamson County rather than Carter Country and Brentwood rather than Hooterville.
Republican successes in 2008 and 2010 in traditionally 'yellow dog' Democratic areas are more understandable in terms of national issues including 'culture' than state issues. A Democratic party that embraces some of the agenda of the hard left finally seems to have broken the power of the memories of FDR.
Mark - Yes, the air is different over there in East TN. I actually forgot about them. It's like a whole other state. :)
Also, west TN is kind of a different animal, too. I think all Tennesseans tend to look at things through the prism of their own Grand Division, so I take a middle Tn slant. :)
Duly noted.
Clarify
You left out a trillion(s) dollar war against a country that didn't attack us, military occupation of several countries who are not our enemy, warrantless wiretaps, extensive govt instrusion into the private lives of citizens---but wait! Of course that was the Republicans, so why should you complain?
So the Democrats shellacking at the polls was all due to a bad economy, eh?
That's just another one of the excuses that liberal Democrats have invented for themselves to avoid having the confront the fact that the public has rejected their attempts to push the country sharply to the left.
Some other lame excuses are that it's all due to undislosed "foreign money" and the EVIL corporate influence because of the "Citizens United" Supreme Court decision and/or that the Obama administration just didn't do a good enough job explaining how terrific their legislative "achievements" were. Or the public just wasn't giving Obama proper credit for "saving us from another Great Depression"
The left has to convince itself of these things because they can't deal with the feat that this is still a center-right country and it has rejected overt liberalism.
The public also is not fooled by the economic nonsense peddled by the Democrats. Obama did not "save the country for another Great Depression" His so-called stimulus plan was based on bogus Keynesean economic theory that has never worked anywhere and was in reality nothing but handouts for traditional Democratic party constituent groups - government employee labor unions, propping up failed state Medicaid programs,etc. The supposedly "shovel ready" infrastructure projects were all held up because the Dems insisted all of them be subject to the Davis-Bacon Act - another giveaway to labor unions. Obama later admitted there are no shovel ready projects.
And all the premises that Obama and the Dems predicated their socialized medicine scheme on were flat out lies. It will not reduce the deficit, it will not bend the healthcare cost curve down and people who like the health care plan they already had will not be able to keep them. And that's just scratching the surface of all the issues related to it.
The financial reform bill that was advertised as ending "too big to fail" does exactly the opposite and did nothing about Fannie and Freddie - the GSE's that were central players in the bad mortgage loan mess. Standard & Poors estimates the taxpayers bill for bailing out Fannie and Freddie could be $650 billion. It also is loaded with liberal nonsense such as mandating racial and gender employment quotas for financial institutions. The so-called "consumer protections" in it are already resulting in banks ending free checking accounts for millions of people.
The Democrats are going to have to get even more creating at excuse making going forward. Because a big part of election story is how may gains the Republicans made in state legislatures and governorship. That gives them the redistricting power that is going to make things hard for Democrats for years to come.
Mark,
It's interesting that you left out the birthers, frothers and Muslim-haters from your list of who constitutes the Republican Party these days. Given how many unqualified teabaggers just won election in this state, you would be remiss if you failed to dance with who brung you -- whether you want to admit it or not.
That is, of course, if the voting machines accurately ideitified the winners -- something we can never know, thanks to you. One thing I will agree on -- our voting machines have definitely been trending red in this state. Just a shame we can't hold them to account (or ever know if they give us an honest count.) Again, thanks to you.
RAMSEY: The Department of Commerce and Insurance – "..there’ve been times when people try to get their business license it lays on somebody’s desk for a month or six weeks, and I want to keep that from happening.”
Check with your County Clerk Office - the state pertaining to the renewal of business licenses (county as I have learned anyway) has just recently changed - read here as during the time when Ramsey was the President of the Tennessee Senate and he probably had his hands in it - to where your county business can no longer be renewed at the county level, but you must now renew it through the Tennessee Department of Revenue!
Betsy Blooper says the Repugnicans need to "get a handle on the racist elements in their party". Number one, that's how YOU choose to label people who ARE free to make their own decisions regarding themselves, their families, and their communities, so it's YOUR problem, not theirs. Number two, what about the racist element of the Democrapnik party? Your condecension toward blacks has trapped millions in poverty, and harmed them far more than someone who would insist on high standards and personal responsibility from ALL citizens. Black nationalists think separatism is a good idea, why don't you?
from a middle ground person that has fought to keep a job and worked various "contract" positions just to keep my roof and living in Montgomery Alabama to pay for my house in good ole middle tennessee....i think that its all our own darn faults that we let the extreme fringe elements of both parties dictate what the agenda is left or right....from the bible thumpers that want to bash a mosque in Murfreesboro that has been here for 30yrs to "any" twisting of language to fit ones agenda....the only ones getting rich off of those things are the fear mongurers themselves and the county attnys that we have to pay to represent ourselves.
Because of communication made possible by computers and the world's ability to expedite freight shipments, everything that can be outsourced will be outsourced until wages worldwide are approximately the same. It's inevitable. The only jobs exempt will be those that must be performed locally: mechanics, chefs, and etc. Not even government clerical jobs will be safe. This scenario will reduce the good ol' USA to third world status and it probably will happen within fifty years. One other thing: it won't matter which political party is in power, although each will blame the other. Our country reached it's peak in the early 1960's and has been sliding slowly downhill ever since. Two things of note happened in the early '60s: JFK was assassinated and Madelyn Murray O'Hair won a lawsuit.
Your elitest slam on Ty Cobb's opponent is one reason the state is
turning so red. Ty is a kid elected by the Maury County Union work
2 yrs ago which has deminished greatly since. As a Firefighter Union
Local President that along with being a lacky for Rep "Landslide" Turner
the voters decide to elect a very competent woman with real life
family and business experience. How do all these Democratic Legislators
that are Firemen handle scheluding of their regular jobs and still be
able to spend so much time serving in Nashville? Lingering question!
