Barbara Ehrenreich - Round Three

Barbara Ehrenreich
Round Three: Concluding Remarks - November 6, 2000

While the Democrats perfect their "stab in the back" theory of Gore's difficulties, millions of ordinarily Democratic voters are defecting -- not to Nader, alas, but to Bush. In fact, as the scapegoating mounts, I can't help wondering whether Gore's prospects wouldn't be looking a little brighter if the Democratic loyalists had spent less time excoriating Nader and more time defending against Bush, who, at this moment, is reveling in his post-DUI bounce. (Is this a great country or what?)

Why the drainage from Gore to Bush, which may end up amounting to 15 percent of normally Democratic voters? Since the defectors appear to be mostly white working-class guys, the relevant text must be Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers's recent book, America's Forgotten Majority. Writing in L.A. Weekly, Harold has cited this book as one of the veritable bibles of the Gore campaign, but its message clearly was: The Democratic Party won't be able to hold onto the white working-class majority unless it has something to offer them. Put another way: People who see government largely as a busybody bent on taking away their guns and confiscating their earnings will naturally vote for the guy who promises the smallest government.

From Post & Riposte:

"A conservative Supreme Court will not only overturn Roe v. Wade, it will also overturn major portions of the Clean Air Act and other environmental laws, limit your right to sue your HMO for malpractice, overturn affirmative action, labor, and employment laws, and generally limit the power of Congress to pass and enforce laws and tip the balance of legislative power towards the States. Look at the number of 5-4 Supreme Court decisions that have been made in the last four years. Think about what two more conservative votes means on the Supreme Court, and think again as to whether President Gore vs. President Bush matters or not." --Robert Lanza - 10:39pm EST, Nov 2, 2000

What do you think? Join the conversation.

I read Teixeira/Rogers as an argument for reviving the universal health-insurance crusade: apologize for Hillary's unappealing HMO-centered mess and try again. Even the effort to save the Social Security program from (partial) privatization might have taken on enough populist heft to save Gore. Might have, that is, if the Democrats had devoted some of their last eight years in office to laying out a principled case against the program's privatization -- and preferably privatization in general (see my Round Two mention of welfare privatization). In the case of Social Security: if its public and collectivist nature was such an unshakeable Democratic principle (as Harold claimed here at one point), why was Lieberman a privatizer until he was tapped for the Veep slot? At the very least, Gore might have used the currently febrile condition of the stock market to hammer away at the dangers of privatization -- or would that have undercut his picture of perfect, Democratic-engendered prosperity? (Actually, I just saw Gore admit on CNN that the picture is not perfect because -- I waited here, excitedly, for some mention of the poor -- because of all the "babies born addicted to crack." Are we all in the same decade here?) Yes, unions will take a major hit under the Bush Administration, though not necessarily in the way Harold forecasts. Union-busting, for example, couldn't get much easier than it already is unless employers were able to accomplish it with a feather duster. And incidentally, what Harold hails as Gore's "impressive" record of supporting organizing drives has managed to escape my attention. When I was in L.A. in August, I attended a rally in support of the organizing drive at the Loews Hotel in Santa Monica, which happens to be owned by a man who is both a prominent Gore donor and a vicious union-buster. Or has Gore returned that donation?

What may turn out to be one of the unions' biggest post-election headaches is backlash from Bush-voting union members. A friend of mine, a closet Naderite who directs the get-out-the-Gore-vote campaign for his local, tells me he's inundated by calls from union members who resent seeing their dues money going to Gore. I would too, and not out of a preference for Bush. Why not redirect the huge sums of union money that go to Democratic campaigns into organizing drives? Or put some of it into a revived union-business coalition for national health insurance, like the one Victor Reuther launched in the eighties?

Now, having tackled my long-term ideological allies -- Harold and E. J. -- I must turn to the person who has, weirdly enough, turned out to be my ally in this debate: the lone conservative, Chris. You end by saying that the "best hope for the proletariat is to reduce the size of ... the federal government." Once I might have responded, "Yeah, right -- and leave us to the tender mercies of the market!" Now I can only sigh queasily, and wonder: "Has it come to that?" Because the long-term tendency, from Reagan through Clinton, has been the diminution of the positive, helping functions of government and the expansion of the intrusive and repressive functions. A war on drugs replaces a war on poverty; the prison population surges while the welfare population sinks. If this goes on, I will eventually have to agree with Chris -- and my young anarchist friends -- that our best bet is to smash the state.

But I keep hoping for a candidate who truly believes and prophetically proclaims that government can be put to better uses. This time around, only one candidate came close to doing so, and he of course never had a chance.

What do you think? Join the debate in a special conference of Post & Riposte.

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of several books, including Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (1989) and Nickel and Dimed, which explores low-wage work in America, to be published in the spring. She writes a column for The Progressive and is a contributor to The Nation and many other publications.