Sweet Jesus! How long do we have to hear former Governor Phil Bredesen go on about fucking Walmart? I googled it and the earliest I could find is 2008. So, since at least 2008, Phil Bredesen has been trotting out this "I talked to a person at Walmart and now I understand things" bullshit.
Esquire, 2008: "I remember talking to a sixty-year-old woman at a Wal-Mart who was trying to put together the money to have an operation on her eyes. Her name was Mary, I remember her well. That one meeting with an honest, real person who was not being paraded out to tell me about her health-care problems, but just in the course of conversation talked about it, gave me more of a sense of reality than all the polls and conferences in the world. If it's easy to hurt someone when they're anonymous, it's an awful lot harder to hurt her."
Pith in the Wind, 2010: "I think has got to get reestablished as the party of people who shop in Wal-Marts and go to Waffle House. People have got to start listening to these people and not the advocacy groups and the unions and everybody else that we’ve had as these constituencies. I think if we can do that and really try to understand what the people I’m just describing, who have been over the years the heart and soul of the Democratic Party, what they’re really looking for and try to provide that, I think we’ll do fine."
Bredesen said Democrats who are thinking about running for office need to adopt what he calls “the Walmart test.” “When you think about what your platform is going to be, go to the nearest Walmart and stop someone in the aisle and tell them what you’re going to run on,” he said. “If that engages them and they’re interested, then you have a plan.”
Years! Almost a decade we've been having to hear about Bredesen's great love of Walmart and the people who shop there.
It's obvious, especially in the Politico story, that what Bredesen means when he talks about people who go to Walmart (or Waffle House) is that he means rural working class white Southerners, the people who, by and large, don't vote Democratic anymore. But the problem with his advice is that that's not the only demographic that shops at Walmart. It's certainly not the demographic that shops at the Walmart closest to Bredesen's house. Which he would know if he really ever went to Walmart.
I go to Walmart pretty fucking regularly. Sadly for me, because man, Walmart sucks — they treat their employees like shit and there's never enough of them to keep things clean or enough checkout lanes open (Hint to Walmart: you're losing business to Dollar General because no one has to stand in line for twenty minutes at Dollar General and Dollar General employees don't all look miserable.). I'm familiar with most, if not all, of the Walmarts in town. I feel confident that, if Bredesen walked into any Nashville Walmart and talked to the people who shopped there, he'd find a lot of people who are pissed at how Democrats in the South have fled from Obama, a lot of people who hope that his immigration reforms will make a difference to their families, and a lot of people who are glad to have some kind of healthcare.
In the Politico story, Bredesen says, “I come out of the business world. If you have a product that’s not working, you don’t say, ‘Our customers are lazy’ or ‘Our customers don’t know what’s best for them.’ The ones that are successful say, ‘I need a better product.’”
Later on in the story, there's this bit:
“The No. 1 thing to be competitive in the South is to have Barack Obama not be president anymore,” said North Carolina pollster Tom Jensen, who runs the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling. “It’s just a simple reality that Southern whites really, really despise him in a way they have not despised any other president.”
Here's my question for Bredesen. If the "product" his "Walmart" (rural, white, working class Southern) voters want more than anything is not a party lead by a black man, do they really need a better product? Do Democrats, who have a large black contingency, really need to fill out Democratic ranks with white people who hate black people?
I'm not a politician. I'm just a gal who shops at Walmart with some opinions (though apparently that counts a lot to Phil Bredesen), but I don't think so. I'd rather lose the South than kiss racists' ass.
But here's the other thing. If I decided I did need to kiss racists' ass, I'd be honest about it, rather than couching it in this "Walmart test" bullshit.
To me, it's that kind of mealy-mouthed pandering that's most offensive.
