Tim Rutten: An Angry Electorate Responds. I Say: YEP!
An angry electorate responds
By Tim Rutten
You can bet that political strategists in both parties will be parsing the meaning of the Massachusetts senatorial struggle for some time to come. If there was a slam dunk left in American politics, it should've been the Democrats' ability to easily retain a Senate seat they'd held for 57 years in what has become essentially a sea-blue state. Instead, they lost.
Given its importance in the issue of the moment, the Massachusetts vote is going to be analyzed as a referendum on President Obama's health care reforms.
Increasingly, it does seem as if this first-year president made a profound strategic mistake by pressing forward on health care while simultaneously trying to deal with the worst global economic crisis since the Depression, exit one war in Iraq and gear up to fight another in Afghanistan.
Truth to tell, the President and his surrogates have done a lousy job selling the electorate on reform. Social Security and Medicare are our most popular social programs because they have two crucial attributes: they cover everybody, and their benefit to the individual can be explained in one declarative sentence.
But if the lessons gleaned from Massachusetts stop with health care, something far more profound and potentially disruptive will have been missed. There is a deep and increasingly restive anger stirring in the nation. Its focal points at the moment may seem to be health care and “big government,” but if there were a Republican in the White House, they might just as well be tax cuts and “limited government.”
Much of the disaffection in Massachusetts came from self-described independents. That's significant because independents are concentrated in middle-class suburbs where physical and economic security are overriding preoccupations. Today, those anxieties are both real and justified, though not as critiques of Obama's first year.
The truth of the matter is that, if you adjust for inflation, the average income of American males has not grown in real terms since the 1970s. Most families have compensated for that by sending mom to work outside the home.
The mass unemployment that followed Wall Street's meltdown upset even that precarious balance, and the situation is even worse than the unemployment figures suggest.
According to work done by Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren, who leads the congressional panel that oversees the bank bailout, 20 percent of all Americans are either jobless, underemployed or have just given up looking for work. One out of every eight Americans is on food stamps, and one out of every eight U.S. mortgages is in default or foreclosure.
The wholesale flight of U.S. employers from the responsibility of maintaining traditional pensions forced tens of millions of 401(k) participants into the equity markets. The crash erased $5 trillion from their accounts. Scolds would have you believe middle-class Americans were complicit in the financial collapse because of their profligacy. Warren points out that the numbers state a different case. “By the early 2000s, families were spending twice as much (adjusted for inflation) on mortgages than they did a generation ago,” she wrote recently, “for a house that was, on average, only 10 percent bigger and 25 years older. They also had to pay twice as much to hang on to their health insurance. … ”
As employers have come to regard workers as little more than another fixed expense, layoffs have become a routine tool for manicuring quarterly profits.
So, even those lucky enough to have full-time jobs have little security in those jobs — in which, as current productivity numbers show, they're forced to work ever harder for less — and none about their future, including retirement. This shift of economic risk onto the backs of the middle class has let the top 5 percent of income earners to amass a share of U.S. wealth unseen for 100 years. That's the real source of the nation's anger.
Tim Rutten is a Los Angeles Times columnist. Reach him at: timothy.rutten@latimes.com.
By Tim Rutten
You can bet that political strategists in both parties will be parsing the meaning of the Massachusetts senatorial struggle for some time to come. If there was a slam dunk left in American politics, it should've been the Democrats' ability to easily retain a Senate seat they'd held for 57 years in what has become essentially a sea-blue state. Instead, they lost.
Given its importance in the issue of the moment, the Massachusetts vote is going to be analyzed as a referendum on President Obama's health care reforms.
Increasingly, it does seem as if this first-year president made a profound strategic mistake by pressing forward on health care while simultaneously trying to deal with the worst global economic crisis since the Depression, exit one war in Iraq and gear up to fight another in Afghanistan.
Truth to tell, the President and his surrogates have done a lousy job selling the electorate on reform. Social Security and Medicare are our most popular social programs because they have two crucial attributes: they cover everybody, and their benefit to the individual can be explained in one declarative sentence.
But if the lessons gleaned from Massachusetts stop with health care, something far more profound and potentially disruptive will have been missed. There is a deep and increasingly restive anger stirring in the nation. Its focal points at the moment may seem to be health care and “big government,” but if there were a Republican in the White House, they might just as well be tax cuts and “limited government.”
Much of the disaffection in Massachusetts came from self-described independents. That's significant because independents are concentrated in middle-class suburbs where physical and economic security are overriding preoccupations. Today, those anxieties are both real and justified, though not as critiques of Obama's first year.
The truth of the matter is that, if you adjust for inflation, the average income of American males has not grown in real terms since the 1970s. Most families have compensated for that by sending mom to work outside the home.
The mass unemployment that followed Wall Street's meltdown upset even that precarious balance, and the situation is even worse than the unemployment figures suggest.
According to work done by Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren, who leads the congressional panel that oversees the bank bailout, 20 percent of all Americans are either jobless, underemployed or have just given up looking for work. One out of every eight Americans is on food stamps, and one out of every eight U.S. mortgages is in default or foreclosure.
The wholesale flight of U.S. employers from the responsibility of maintaining traditional pensions forced tens of millions of 401(k) participants into the equity markets. The crash erased $5 trillion from their accounts. Scolds would have you believe middle-class Americans were complicit in the financial collapse because of their profligacy. Warren points out that the numbers state a different case. “By the early 2000s, families were spending twice as much (adjusted for inflation) on mortgages than they did a generation ago,” she wrote recently, “for a house that was, on average, only 10 percent bigger and 25 years older. They also had to pay twice as much to hang on to their health insurance. … ”
As employers have come to regard workers as little more than another fixed expense, layoffs have become a routine tool for manicuring quarterly profits.
So, even those lucky enough to have full-time jobs have little security in those jobs — in which, as current productivity numbers show, they're forced to work ever harder for less — and none about their future, including retirement. This shift of economic risk onto the backs of the middle class has let the top 5 percent of income earners to amass a share of U.S. wealth unseen for 100 years. That's the real source of the nation's anger.
Tim Rutten is a Los Angeles Times columnist. Reach him at: timothy.rutten@latimes.com.
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